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:
“You want to get Capone? Here’s how you get him: he pulls a knife, you pull a gun, he sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. It’s the Chicago way and that’s how you get Capone.”
—David Mamet, U.S. screenwriter, and Brian DePalma. Jimmy Malone (Sean Connery)
“Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.”
—Philip Guedalla (1889–1944)
“Rock of ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in thee!
Let the water and the blood,
From thy riven side which flowed,
Be of sin the double cure;
Cleanse me from its guilt and pow’r.”
—Augustus Montague Toplady (1740–1778)
““Five o’clock tea” is a phrase our “rude forefathers,” even of the last generation, would scarcely have understood, so completely is it a thing of to-day; and yet, so rapid is the March of the Mind, it has already risen into a national institution, and rivals, in its universal application to all ranks and ages, and as a specific for “all the ills that flesh is heir to,” the glorious Magna Charta.”
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)
“We only seem to learn from Life that Life doesn’t matter so much as it seemed to do—it’s not so burningly important, after all, what happens. We crawl, like blinking sea-creatures, out of the Ocean onto a spur of rock, we creep over the promontory bewildered and dazzled and hurting ourselves, then we drop in the ocean on the other side: and the little transit doesn’t matter so much.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“This I saw when waking late,
Going by at a railroad rate,
Looking through wreaths of engine smoke
Far into the lives of other folk.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)