Chicago and South Side Rapid Transit Railroad
The Chicago and South Side Rapid Transit Railroad Company was incorporated on January 4, 1888, and secured a franchise from the City of Chicago on March 26 of that year to construct an elevated railroad between Van Buren Street and 39th Street (Pershing Road). The franchise required the company to build along a right of way immediately adjacent and parallel to one of the alleys from Van Buren Street to 37th Street, rapidly earning the line the nickname of the "alley L". On April 2, 1892 the city authorized the extension of the line as far south as 71st street, and a further extension along 63rd Street was passed on April 7, 1893, the total cost of construction was estimated at $6,750,000.
A 6-car train carrying 300 guests made the inaugural run along first section of the line—running between a station at 39th Street and the Congress Terminal downtown—on May 27, 1892, and the line opened to the public ten days later. Initially the 3.6-mile (5.8 km) journey from 39th street to downtown took 14 minutes and cost 5¢. The line was gradually extended over the following months, with the route reaching Jackson Park on May 12, 1893 to provide service to the World's Columbian Exposition. Rolling stock on the line included 46 Forney-type (0-4-4) steam locomotives that were built at the Baldwin Locomotive Works in Philadelphia, and 180 46-foot (14.02 m)-long wooden passenger cars. The first 20 locomotives were delivered coupled into a single train in April 1892.
Read more about this topic: South Side Elevated Railroad
Famous quotes containing the words chicago, south, side, rapid, transit and/or railroad:
“Ethnic life in the United States has become a sort of contest like baseball in which the blacks are always the Chicago Cubs.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“I need not tell you of the inadequacy of the American shipping marine on the Pacific Coast.... For this reason it seems to me that there is no subject to which Congress can better devote its attention in the coming session than the passage of a bill which shall encourage our merchant marine in such a way as to establish American lines directly between New York and the eastern ports and South American ports, and both our Pacific Coast ports and the Orient and the Philippines.”
—William Howard Taft (18571930)
“We are on the side of religion as opposed to religions, and we are among those who believe in the wretched inadequacy of sermons and the sublimity of prayer.”
—Victor Hugo (18021885)
“In clear weather the laziest may look across the Bay as far as Plymouth at a glance, or over the Atlantic as far as human vision reaches, merely raising his eyelids; or if he is too lazy to look after all, he can hardly help hearing the ceaseless dash and roar of the breakers. The restless ocean may at any moment cast up a whale or a wrecked vessel at your feet. All the reporters in the world, the most rapid stenographers, could not report the news it brings.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“Theres that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“People that make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children but their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (18091894)