Or, “how equine influenza made your newfangled electric sewing machine run.”
Did you know the United States had a complex and efficient, electric train system that serviced most of the population? Did you know this train system brought electric power to rural communities? Let’s talk about the interurban, and about how transportation affects your worldbuilding. With guest Alena Van Arendonk.
Video (from Twitch and YouTube):
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Transcript:
Laura
Transition. Hey, we’re live. Whee! So Hello, everyone. Good evening. Good morning. Good. Middle of the day. Good midnight, if that’s where you are. Happy time zones. Yeah, I am Laura VanArendonk Baugh. This is To Write And Have Written. And this is the fifth Tuesday in the month, which means it’s a field trip week. So instead of talking about business things or, you know, grown up stuff, we get to go and do something fun this time.
Laura
We’re still technically on topic. This is still going to be a world building theme, but we’re going to — you’ve heard me say multiple times. Your best worldbuilding information is in history, because we’ve had thousands and thousands and thousands of years for people to try things and see how they worked.
Laura
So we’re going to talk about it, period that nobody ever talks about really in US history, but real quickly. Hi, Eerie Hollows, which is, by the way, one of the coolest usernames ever. And hey, Sophia is here, too. Awesome. Okay. Anyway, I have no idea where it was. Yeah. So we’re going to talk. This is Alena. Where did I leave you? You’re over here. Here we go. This is Alena.
Alena
One side of the screen of the other. You got a chance.
Laura
I got to pick here. Alena VanArendonk. We are related with a name like that, absolutely. But she also… Well, actually, do you want to just say your history connection is like, why are you qualified to speak on this?
Alena
I’m a nerd. I have studied history formally. I minored in history at the University level, and I’m also part of a historic preservation organization. I am the Secretary and a bunch of other titles of the Franklin Township Historical Society, which is in Indianapolis based organization Franklin Township being part of Indianapolis. And I’ve been on the board for about 19, 18 years. A lot of years. So I have become very familiar with, yeah, I’m a relic, I think is how that works. So I’ve become very educated through necessity about the last couple hundred years since the the settlement of this part of the country that I am located in and that our Township is located in started around the 1820.
Alena
So pretty much from the 1820 up to present day, because I speak to school groups and people who come into our building. And I give tours and I give presentations and things. I’ve had to become knowledgeable about a lot of things from that period in particular.
Laura
So I asked Alena to come here today to speak about the interurban, which is a word that some people know, but quite honestly, I’m really surprised at how few people are familiar with the interurban and its place in US history. So I’m just going to introduce this with, “this is how Equine influenza meant that your sewing machines got to run.” That’s where we’re going, there’s your hook right there.
Laura
Okay. So what I thought is I’m just going to turn Alena loose to run with this and then I’ll jump in where I have questions or want to expand or just want to nerd on something and then, absolutely, please, of course, throw questions in the chat. And my goal for this. This is very much like, like, all the field trip kind of things because I want to go and explore something that’s a little bit cool. But then please use this for both education and inspiration. And I get so many of my ideas or work things out. Like, “how can this possibly function?” by just filling out my brand with non fiction. That’s it’s a great way to do it. Just put all the pieces in there and let them jumble together.
Laura
So, yeah. So that’s where we’re going with this. I think this is pretty cool. This is something that honestly a lot of people. I just had some friends in from out of town, and we were down in Irvington, where they still have some interurban tracks visible. And I’m like, do you know what this is? They’re like, no, and I’m like, yeah, too bad you’re duct-taped to the wall now and I’m going to tell you. So let’s get in and do this.
Laura
Bridger says, put all the pieces in there and let them jumble is 100% legit world building. Absolutely. This is why when we talked about Ramen or we talked about the murders in the Galapagos Islands or whatever, like, you can just grab so many pieces. But who would have thought that a high profile hostage situation is why Cup Ramen got big? Like, okay, these are the kind of things you can grab and run with. Yeah.
Laura
Oh, thank you for the sub shy red Fox. I appreciate that. Okay, Alena, I’m gonna stop getting in your way and let you, like, start with us.
Alena
It’s your stream, you can talk too.
Laura
Where are we going to start?
Alena
We’re going to start with the pandemic, except it wasn’t actually a pandemic. It was an epizootic because it was in the animal world, and it was isolated to I mean, it started regionally. It actually started in Canada and spread to the US in the early 1870s. There was a severe outbreak of a new strain of Equine influenza that sickened thousands and thousands of horses. And it started most people think somewhere near Toronto and then spread because, you know, transportation was horse based.
Alena
At that time, there was a lot of contact between animals, cities were densely packed. And really your transportation options in the 1870s were horses for local or shorter distance travel or steam engines for longer distance travel, because we did have steam trains. But there were not a lot of local, non equine based options for transit, except for walking, which did not always work in some regions. You didn’t always have the terrain for that.
So horses were used for deliveries. Horses were used for transportation for people and goods. Horses were used for carrying messages. If you didn’t have telegraph to certain areas, everything was based around horses. And when thousands of horses got sick and died in 1871, in 1872, people started realizing, hey, now that we’ve got this establishment of all these cities with lots and lots of people and lots of places we need to be going, maybe it’s time to start thinking about making some means of transporting things that don’t revolve around horses, because the transit industry and the goods delivery industries were crippled for months because all the horses were sick.
Alena
Even the horses who didn’t die were unable to work because influenza is very hard. And it can be very damaging. So that that spurred people to start investigating other options.
Now, steam engines were used for a lot of things, including children’s toys, which that’s another road we can go down. Why you shouldn’t give your toddler a steam engine for Christmas.
Laura
I want to spend just a moment there. She’s not kidding. Like you could get your kid a little locomotive and fire it up with the little boiler that was actually burning and boiling and occasionally blowing up and
Alena
It might burn your house down, but at least your kid will be happy.
Alena
Yeah, there were steam systems that were supposed to power your household appliances, and those went horribly wrong, too. So anyway, that’s a separate topic. But steam was not always practical for most situations. For a lot of the reasons we’re talking about, it was loud. It could be dangerous. It required a lot of fuel. It required having hot steam coming out of things. So while there were certainly steampowered automobiles, in fact, my great grandfather owned one, they were not a really practical way of transporting goods and people en masse.
Alena
So over the next couple of decades, there was a lot of interest in electricity. You had the Edison and Tesla Wars going on during this time, and eventually by the 1890s, electricity had been refined to the degree that it could power things like street cars. So you began seeing electric cable systems in cities. You had street cars that were powered, just like some of the trolleys that still run on electricity today in San Francisco and places. They all started around the turn of the century.
Alena
And you would have a Wheel or a hook with a line that ran to the streetcar, and it would run down a cable system that was suspended over the street. And that’s how it powered the streetcar.
Alena
And around 1890 somebody got the bright idea. Hey, if we’re running electric streetcars in cities, why don’t we make long distance electric rail travel? And that is the birth of the interurban.
Alena
By around 1890, there were still primarily horsedrawn modes of transit in cities. By 1897, horses were the exception to public transit situations. So you had horsedrawn street cars and horse drawn trolleys were almost entirely replaced by the turn of the century in most major cities.
Alena
So this caught on very quickly. Cities were becoming electrified. Major cities, not your small towns, yet, we’ll get to that. But the major cities were putting an electricity to power, not just household things and not just industrial concerns, but also public transit.
Laura
But Alena, every time I read a historical novel or watch a historical movie, it is always horses, horses, horses, horses, horses. Right up until 1921, when suddenly we have the Auburn and the Duesenberg.
Alena
Then you have the really sexy cars. Yeah, right. Yeah. Well, in some areas, if you were in a small town, you might not have electric street cars. But, yeah, the 1890s are when personal automobile started becoming available. I won’t say on a widespread scale, but they certainly were available If you wanted to special order one.
Alena
To give a personal example. I mentioned my great grandfather. He had what is possibly the first personal car in Indianapolis. A crowd gas gathered at the train station to watch it be offloaded from the train that delivered it. And that was in 1895, and it was a steam powered car. He later replaced it with an internal combustion car about 1898 or nine. I think I’m not sure on the dates on that. But this is the 1890s, and people were driving cars. There weren’t a lot of them, but they existed. And by about 1905, there were so many cars in New York that there was actually a lawsuit from automobile owners trying to bar horses from public roadways because the horses were too slow and they were causing traffic jams because there were so many cars in New York City.
Alena
So, yeah, if you’re reading a book and it’s 1910, and there are only horses in a major city, it’s not really accurate.
Laura
People are shocked, shocked to see an automobile in 1917.
Alena
Yeah, I recently watched a production. I’m not going to name it because that would be mean, but it offended me deeply because it’s supposed to take place in, I think, 1910, like, right around there, you know, a little before World War One starts and there’s a crowd of people on Coney Island, and they watch a horseless carriage roll into view. And they are shocked and they say, but how does it move without horses? And I’m staring at this going, I’m sorry. 1910? There were more cars than horses in the city by 1910.
Laura
You know, we have tanks, right? Like, tanks.
Alena
Just do your homework, people.
Laura
Okay. Sorry. Just had to veer off for a moment.
Alena
Just that’s fine. So anyway, by the mid 1890s, electricity was replacing horses for public transit in urban settings. Now, long distance was still primarily steam train. More rural areas didn’t necessarily have electricity because electricity was actually not considered a public utility. At this time in history, electricity was a for profit enterprise. So if a company didn’t think they could get enough profit from your town by running the very expensive infrastructure out to your town, they just wouldn’t bother because if there weren’t enough people in your town to make it worth them putting in the infrastructure, they weren’t going to worry about it.
Alena
And because it was a for profit concern and because we did not yet have the same kind of antitrust legislation that we do now, you had a lot of monopoly situations where the power company would provide power to the businesses, that the homes, anything that they needed. They would also own the traction lines. They would also own the other concerns that use electricity. They would give themselves a cut rate. And then there was a lot of shady stuff going on with the power companies, and there were multiple power companies, and they were in competition with each other.
Laura
So are you suggesting might be corporate profiteering during the Gilded Age. Is that something I heard?
Alena
There might be a reason the term “robber barons” came into use.
Laura
Yeah, we did get a comment from shy Red Fox saying “loving these rants lol”. So I said, Good, because they’re probably not going away anytime soon.
Alena
No, you’re going to have them for another 45 minutes, it’s fine. Yes. Anyway, 1890s, people started looking at long distance options for electric rail travel, and the Interurban should not be confused with electric street cars. They’re very similar, and they run on the exact same system. But the interurban cars are massive. If you see photos of them, they are enormous. They are as big or bigger than a freight car, whereas the street cars were more like the size of the city bus. It was capable of holding a lot more people, and they actually traveled at quite fast speeds.
Alena
The Interurban in the Midwestern area. Now, this is going to depend on your terrain, partly, because they are trains and if you have tracks with a lot of curves in them or a lot of elevation changes, obviously, they’re going to have to go slower. But it was pretty common in the Midwest for interurban travel between 60 and 80 miles an hour. This is an era when 30 miles an hour was considered fast for a car in a standard driving situation. If it wasn’t a race car or something so they could go much faster than personal vehicles could, which is one of the reasons they were so popular.
Alena
And so the traction companies and the traction — traction refers to the type of system it was where you had rails and a rail car that was running off of the power line basically. The traction companies were in fierce competition to see who could lay the fastest track and get the most customers. In the Indianapolis area and again, that’s the area I’m most familiar with, the area I’ve done the most research on. There were actually seven traction companies in competition operating in and around Indianapolis itself.
Alena
So you had the street cars in downtown Indianapolis. But then if you wanted to go out to the towns surrounding Indianapolis, which at that time — now they’ve all been absorbed by suburban sprawl, because that’s what happens with cities in modern times. But there used to be smaller communities sort of circling the city. That was maybe on a horse. It might be half a day’s ride out. But if you had an interurban, you could get there in an hour. So they were starting to lay these tracks out in sort of a spoke pattern from all the major cities.
Alena
And by the early 1900s by around 1908, 1910, it was said that you could get on an interurban train in New York and travel all the way to Wisconsin without ever taking any other mode of transportation. If you didn’t mind making a lot of changes and getting a lot of new tokens along the way, because they were run by different companies. So that’s how vast they were. They were spread out so much and connected so many of the major cities to the smaller towns that it was really a great network. You could pretty much travel anywhere you need to without hopping on a steam train, without finding somebody with a long distance capable vehicle.
Alena
And they were super popular. They were not the safest mode of transit, but this is again the era of steam boilers and nothing was safe and anything could explode in any moment. So there were occasional crashes, there were fatalities, there were derailments just like you have with any other mode of ten. Cars are also not totally safe either. We have car crashes every day. Airplanes are not entirely safe. There is no entirely safe mode of transit.
Alena
But they were fairly reliable because there were so many of them and a lot of the urban departed every hour because there were people commuting now. Commuting wasn’t really an option before because you had you didn’t have a reliable, fast mode of transit to get from a suburban town to the big city. But if you were in a city that was now only half an hour away from the big city by interurban, there was no reason not to pay a token hop on the train, go into the city where you could maybe get a better job. So this is really the birth of commuter rail.
Laura
So on that point, we have a question ShyRedFox asked about the inspiration for the Ticket To Ride board game. So can you speak to that a little bit?
Alena
Ticket To Ride is, as far as I know, and I’ve played the game a few times, but I do not know much about its development. As far as I know, it is mostly just inspired by the idea of the competing rail networks of the steam lines. But it is true that the same pattern happened with the Interurban. Where the steam rail, you had all of the different railroad barons trying to claim as much territory as possible, put down their tracks, and so they had the right of way because they were there first. The same thing happened with the Interurban, where you would have different companies who were trying to get to certain areas. And if they got their infrastructure there first, and they had the right away on those rails, they could run their lines. And again, a lot of times, the tracks were owned or leased to the power company that was providing electricity for them. So it was in their interest for a lot of reasons to make sure that they kept their right away on those tracks because then they’re making more money.
Laura
And where are these tracks or these tracks? Like at a station outside of town? Or where are these tracks?
Alena
It sort of depends on where you are. So if you had a rail system, say, streetcar system in the city, you would probably have to transfer to the inter urban system once you got to the city limits. Except for if you were in a city that had a terminal that serves both. And I’m going to brag on Indianapolis a little bit here. Indianapolis had the first Union station train station in the world. It was built in the 18, started construction in the 1840s, and the first Union station concept came from here because Indianapolis was a major rail hub in this part of the country, served all of the major commercial districts around it.
Laura
Crossroads of America!
Alena
Yeah, there’s a reason we got that nickname. And there were so many different train lines running through the city. But if you got off of one train and you had to catch a train on a different line, you had to get out and walk to the next train station, which was inconvenient. So they built a Union station, which means all the train lines would come in and dump their passenger traffic in the same building.
Alena
So it was extremely easy for people to say, oh, I got off of train line A, I need to be on train line C. I just walk across a couple tracks on the platform and get on the next train.
Alena
The interurban, which were also run by competing rail lines or traction lines, in this case, also took a leaf out of the same book. And in 1904 in Indianapolis, they built the world’s largest traction terminal, which was still standing until the 70s when they blew it up. I’ll get to that. But it cost at the time…. Let me verify my numbers here because I have my notes here.
Laura
While she’s checking that I just want to clarify very quickly, because I’ve had this conversation and seen the confusion, the Union station is not named for a Union railroad line or a Union railroad company, which I frequently have seen people think was the case. It is because that’s where you brought many lines in to unite, so that was the Union station. So yes, as Grace is saying, I’ve always wondered why every US city seems to have a Union station.
Alena
Yeah.
Laura
Because that way you could have all your lines connect and became much more, it’s a hub. Right. You can have
It’s a very efficient system.
You can have all your airlines arrive at the same airport, it’s way better than having 15 different airports.
Alena
Right. And that’s exactly the way it was. Imagine if you were trying to fly from place to place and every leg of your flight, you had to get out, get a taxi drive across town to the next airport. It’s ridiculous. So the Union station makes perfect sense. If you can lay the tracks to all come together.
Laura
You can finish your thing, and then we’ll come back on.
Alena
All I was going to say is the seven light rail service providers in an around Indianapolis joined forces and built the Indianapolis Traction Terminal. It was built in 1903. Open 1904 at a cost of a million dollars at the time, which adjusted for inflation as well over $30 million today. So it was not a small building. It was a very, very large, fancy building. Go ahead question.
Laura
A question was, were other countries trying to incorporate electric rail at this time, or was it pretty specific to the US at this time?
Alena
There were certainly other countries that were utilizing electricity and building building infrastructure for it. I do not know when the rail surge hit, say, Europe. There were definite electric services going in at the same time, but I don’t know if it happened the same decade or if they looked at us and said, oh, that’s actually not a bad idea. Let’s do that too, simply because that’s not my personal area. So I haven’t researched those dates. Electric rail obviously caught on there. I mean, if we’re going to look at mass transit, the US certainly dropped the ball during the mid 20th century.
Laura
We are not cutting edge at this time, right?
Alena
Yeah. We used to have mass transit. We don’t now. But Europe does. Europe has a very excellent train system.
Laura
And east Asia has has some amazing systems.
Alena
Asia is running the world in terms of their mass transit systems. They’re way ahead of everybody, but here we basically gave up our right of way, and there are reasons for this that I will get into if I have time. But in the mid 20th century, right after World War II, the US did a lot of stupid things. And one of the stupid things we did was giving up the right of way for public transit systems.
Alena
So now we can’t install public transit systems because all the sections of where the track had been are now privately owned, and it would be prohibitively expensive to try to acquire those pieces of land back.
Laura
Do you want to see a rant go down, chat? We get started on that one, yeah. Back to back to the history parts and save the rant for a bit.
Alena
So around the beginning of the 20th century, in that 1900 to 1905 is when these Union terminals started cropping up. And in Indianapolis, they wisely made the Union Terminal for the traction station also be the terminal, or connect to the terminal for the street cars. So you could come from Chicago, hop on an Interurban, come down to Indianapolis via interurban network. Get to Indianapolis immediately without leaving the train shed, step onto a streetcar and go to your final destination.
Alena
So you aren’t stuck trying to find a wagon to take you. You aren’t stuck trying to find a cab or something else. It was a very efficient system.
Alena
And interurbans continued in popularity for the next couple of decades, and they reached their peak in the 1920s. So by the 1920s you had a vast, vast interurban network, especially in the Midwestern area, because we have a lot of farmland to cross and Indianapolis, to take for example, Indianapolis is right in the halfway point between Chicago and Cincinnati, which were two of the biggest commercial shipping hubs in the country at the time.
Alena
So we had a ton of traffic coming through, so it made sense for us to have a really expensive train network. And our interurban network in the early around 1915, 1920 was by some reports, the most expansive light rail system in the world, just in this state. So there were a lot of tracks.
Alena
And they did a few things. I mentioned that they provided opportunities for commuters to come in and now be going into the big city or wherever or farmers who wanted to make connections with the downtown markets or something. They could travel easier. They could transport goods more easily.
Alena
But they also provide a lot of opportunities for the towns they were servicing at home as well. So to use the town I live in, I currently live in a small town, in what used to be a small town that is now part of Indianapolis because Indianapolis grew and just absorbed everything around it. And the Interurban came to the town where I live in 1904, and that was the first time electricity had been in this area.
Alena
And since the Interurban, which again had deals with or sometimes were owned by the electric companies, they had electricity that they built, the traction lines out. They put in the power poles, they ran the cables, all of this stuff. And then they made it available to residents to buy electricity from the traction line. So for the first time in 1904, the small town where I live had electricity available. None of those residents had had a power company before who had serviced that area. So it really made a lot of of opportunities become available for people to develop their own homesteads. For people to get electric appliances that weren’t battery powered, because you had things like radios and stuff that were battery powered. But if you didn’t have battery power or you didn’t have a generator working or you couldn’t recharge your battery for some reason, you couldn’t use your radio.
Laura
And just a little side note, batteries at that time were extremely limited, which is actually why we haven’t been driving electric cars for the last century. Because we had electric cars before we had gas cars, that the battery tech wasn’t able to support them. Do you have any idea how much different the world would be? And all the oil wars and everything wouldn’t have happened? Because, yeah, mindblowing. Okay, carry on, batteries.
Alena
Yes. Steam and electric cars both came before internal combustion engines. Internal combustion engines were more plausible for regular use because they didn’t require the same level of maintenance. And Laura said the battery tech just wasn’t there, you couldn’t go a long distance in electric car, but they both predated internal combustion engine. So the next time somebody talks about those new fangled electric cars, you can just smile to yourself.
Alena
Anyway. Back to the power companies. The interesting thing, because power was not considered a utility at that time, the power companies were not under any legal obligation to meet the needs of their customers around the clock.
Alena
So for the power company, their big money maker was the interurban. Yeah, the residents could pay for their home hookups, too. But the inner urban was where most of their power went. And it was not feasible, it was not profitable for them to continue running the power plant 24 hours a day if the trains weren’t running in the middle of the night. So when the last train went out of service at the end of the day, they turned off the power. And the next morning, when the first train started service, they turn the power back on so you could have electricity in your home.
Alena
But at whatever time the last train stopped running be at 09:00 p.m. Or 11:00 p.m. Or whatever. The power just turned off every night at that time. And you didn’t have power until the next morning to utility.
Laura
It was a bonus service you bought from the transportation company.
Alena
Right. And the antitrust legislation that stopped the interurban being run by the power companies or giving them substantial