Once, there was no better selling point for your town than an interurban line.
These small railways connected small towns and large cities throughout the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century, giving residents a chance to go places, literally and metaphorically. The cars were bigger and better-appointed than your standard streetcar, and instead of soot-chuffing steam locomotives, they used the latest clean-energy innovation: electric power provided by the overhead wires known as catenary lines.
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.”
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.