SHORTER COLD SPRING SHOPS.

There's a category devoted to interurban electric railroads, direct current, alternating current, and past.  Bloomberg City Lab offers a primer.

Any settlements that lacked an interurban badly wanted one, even to the point of faking their existence. In Ohio — a hotspot for the interurban industry — just about every town with a population greater than 5,000 had an interurban connection, except one: Coshocton, an Appalachian town between Canton and Columbus. Roger Grant, a history professor at Clemson University who’s written at length about U.S. railroads, said that postcards from the 1910s show interurbans running through Coshocton anyway. It was that big a deal.

“If you had an interurban, you were modern,” he says. “You were up to date.”

Indeed so, there are ferroequinologists who collect the postcards with interurbans edited in. The fakes are almost as easy to spot as a leaked memo to Dan Ra^ther.  The lesson for fixing problems by throwing public money at them is also clear.

But the interurban’s moment in the sun was all too brief, peaking in 1916, with 15,580 miles of interurban lines throughout the U.S., about a third of which were in Ohio and Indiana. Perhaps not coincidentally, 1916 was also the year President Woodrow Wilson signed into law the Federal Aid Road Act. Wilson ran for re-election that year on a platform that included increased funding toward public roads, and the act allocated $75 million for road improvements throughout the country.

Instead of the wave of the future, the interurban turned out to be a transitional mode of transportation, Grant says, bridging the gap between the large passenger railroads and personal automobiles. But the dream of clean, fast and frequent rail travel between U.S. cities never really died. And now, with railfan Joe Biden in the White House and $66 billion to expand Amtrak’s passenger rail service in the infrastructure bill that still awaits a final vote in Congress, the interurban era could be an instructive model for what a climate-friendlier national transportation network might look like.

It's always about the frequency and connectivity.

Several urban streetcar companies expanded service to towns nearby. (One side effect of the electrified rail boom: amusement parks. Trolley and interurban companies often built a modest park or picnic ground at the end of their lines, to boost weekend ridership.)

At a time when most Americans still lived in rural communities, interurbans were the most convenient way to travel. Small-town residents could ride to the closest city for a day trip. Traveling salesmen used them to hop from town to town. The electrified lines offered a cleaner ride than coal-fired steam engines, and they were fast, too, with many reaching what we now consider “highway speeds” of 60 mph or more as they raced through the countryside. (By comparison, a Ford Model T’s top speed was around 45 mph, if you could find a stretch of straight road to wind it out.)

These days, although your mauve-and-cerise air-conditioned salon on wheels is capable of higher speeds, find yourself an uncongested stretch of stroad free of traffic lights to wind it out.

Ultimately, the convenience of interurban began to be surpassed by autos — which also began to crowd out interurbans on city streets. In some instances, their tracks were swallowed up by the roads they were competing with. Add in a Great Depression, and interurbans started to go under, becoming impediments to the progress they represented decades earlier.

“A lot of interurbans were private and for-profit,” [Houston transportation engineer Christof] Spieler says. “As rural roads got paved, they just couldn’t compete. They were private companies competing with taxpayer-funded infrastructure.”

To stay afloat, some interurbans offered bus service or freight delivery. World War II provided a brief reprieve for rail travel in general, thanks to gasoline rationing and travel restrictions. After the war, Grant says, several interurbans transitioned to diesel locomotives and became short-line railroads. Others found it more lucrative to just sell the electric power generated for trains and they transformed into utility companies.

The same government that subsidized the building of roads required the power companies to divest themselves of those electric railroads.  Why does government action so frequently lead to the longest journey from something that works back to something similar?

But the role that interurbans played in American life has never truly been replaced by succeeding modes. The infrastructure demanded by private automobiles proved to be disastrous for U.S. cities, and their ongoing environmental toll is doing even broader damage. For those who can’t drive, a dwindling and cash-strapped intercity bus network connects rural communities that might have once boasted of interurban service. Meanwhile, pie-in-the-sky projects like hyperloops and maglev lines continue to stir the imaginations of city leaders who dream of getting in on the next big thing.

It may be worth remembering how a similar infatuation with technology led to an overabundance of interurbans a century ago. Indeed, some places built lines less out of need and more just to be modern, as a selling point for their towns, Grant says. “Some investors really lost their shirts.”

“There were a considerable number of interurbans that didn’t make sense,” Spieler says, likening it to the 1990s dot-com bubble. “There were interurbans built because people were excited about the technology.” In contemplating how to make new investments in passenger rail, today’s transportation thinkers would be wise to heed a lesson: “One of the things we do wrong in transit is get excited about technology. We say, ‘This is what we want to use.’ What we should do is say what we want to do: Define the goal, and get technology to help.”

Or, perhaps, bet on emergence, and look for those Milwaukee Electric cars airbrushed into street views in Wisconsin's North Woods.