Countless historic American streetcar and interurban lines have disappeared since their heyday, but I found a place where you can still experience a commute like it’s 1920. This is the East Troy Electric Railroad, Wisconsin’s last running interurban railroad, and it’s one of the most tranquil rides you’ll ever take that doesn’t even surpass 15 mph.We've called attention to the East Troy Electric Railroad numerous times. It's unusual among preservation railways in that its busiest season is fall, for apple picking and leaf peeping.
The East Troy Electric Railroad is one of my favorite kinds of museums. Nestled in the town of East Troy in southeastern Wisconsin, this museum doesn’t really have the marketing of the Illinois Railway Museum or the federally recognized status of the National Railroad Museum. Instead, it’s a museum that you hear about through word of mouth or stumble upon on social media, and it has the same kind of lovely charm as a mom-and-pop shop. The museum is small enough that, if you’re not paying attention, you could drive right by it and not notice it was there.
Ms Streeter's essay is neither the usual ferroequinologist fare nor part of an "unusual day trip" series, that despite Autopian being all about the fun of motoring. It is instructive, though, to encounter a car enthusiast coming to grips with how we got around before the so-called Good Roads and traffic lights and road rage. I mean, coming up with Bill Middleton's long-ago "Goodbye to the Interurban" in American Heritage, and quoting the passage about interurban mania and the Chicago-New York Electric Air Line, which at last review, built and operated seventeen more miles of track than California's high speed rail project has managed.
“Profits almost beyond calculation” prospective stockholders were promised in a series of fullpage ads in Chicago newspapers one Sunday in July of 1906. Thus was launched the Chicago-New York Air Line Railroad, an interurban electric railway that would follow a straight line as nearly as was possible, said its promoters, and woidd whisk passengers between the two cities aboard ioo-niile-per-hour trains in just ten hours, cutting eight hours off the fastest steam-train time. The Air Line was the most ambitious interurban project of them all in what, in retrospect, has been described as an era of “reckless promotion.”Well, yes, one wag described the interurbans as an early twentieth century version of the dot.com bubble.
The story noted that the East Troy preservation railway might be the only continuously operated electric interurban trackage remaining in the United States. The short version of the story: when The Milwaukee Electric sought to abandon its line west of Hales Corners, the village of East Troy bought the track between town industries and an interchange with the Soo Line, and that trackage was electrically operated using a box motor and dump car that cascaded from the interurban. The electric wire remained in place for an earlier preservation railroad on that line even after the village purchase a diesel to switch the Trent Tube works on a new spur on East Troy's southeast side; that spur was subsequently electrified by the current preservation railway. None of the village industries receive rail cars any more.
In the State Line, though, the other two preservation railways operating electric cars also make use of interurban trackage.
That "continuously operated electric" distinguishes the East Troy operation from that of the Fox River Trolley Museum, which have the original trackage of the Aurora Elgin and Fox River electric railway and a car, lightweight interurban 304, that once ran on those rails back on home rails; however, that stretch of railroad remained to connect the Illinois Central to the State Hospital at South Elgin for delivery of coal to the heating plant, and those hopper cars were moved by a small diesel locomotive, which is in the museum collection and sometimes it pulls a caboose train.
The nearby Illinois Railway Museum, and some of the illustrations in Ms Streeter's essay feature cars from their collection, also operate on a former interurban right of way, that of the former Elgin and Belvidere. The right of way was devoid of tracks for a quarter century, though, between scrapping that might have been motivated by the war effort, and the laying of tracks to accommodate the first cars of the museum's collection; this after the museum acquired the right of way for back taxes. No, I'm not going to get into the legal weeds about farmers granting easements as opposed to selling land, perhaps there were incentives for interurbans building as close to steam railroad lines as many of them, including Elgin and Belvidere, did. There's even a car-on-home-rails story of sorts, in that North Shore steel car 160, a workhorse in the museum collection, once led a Masonic special train from Milwaukee to Rockford by way of Chicago, Elgin, and Belvidere. Yes, that took some time.
Ms Streeter concludes, "Places like East Troy keep that part of American history alive."
Indeed. Find yourself a preservation railway and ride it.
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