Train Travel At The Turn Of The Century
Travel back in the early 1900's was an exciting thing for most people. In the late 1800's and early 1900's, people relied on steam ships and trains as their mode to "see the world". Then in the early 1900's came the advent of the automobile and that set a new course for the American vacation experience. This little blog will take a look at some of the better travel ads of the time period.
Train Travel - It is interesting to read what was thought of train travel in the late 1800's and what they thought of the future of train travel. The following was an article in the Virginian Pilot in 1899 on train travel -
Mr. F. Li Whitney, general passenger
agent of the Great Northern Railroad, in speaking of the future
development of railroad travel, said: "The development of
railroad travel fifty years hence will undoubtedly be along the line
of urban and suburban rapid transit.
Long distance steam railroads,
as we know them today, carrying both freight and passengers, are in
some respects at the apex or their achievement. Speed is for all
practical purposes limited to the maximum of sixty miles an hour, or
a little more. The Item of comfort has reached a point where there is
little to be desired. Accidents affecting life and limb on a modern
passenger railway have been reduced to to percentage so low that It
is actually safer to travel on a railway train than to walk along a
city street.
"It Is possible that for some time to come
long-distance travel will continue to follow the same general lines
as now exist. Steam locomotives may give place to machinery operated
by electricity or compressed air; the two mile may in process of time
become one. Cars, both passenger and freight, may lie still further
improved, but In the main the railway system of 1950 will be simply
an improvement on what exists to-day, with an ever-present speed
limit of less than 100 miles an hour.
"It requires no effort of
the imagination to see an extension of the pneumatic tube system, in
now in use in the largest cities. A view of New York. London, Paris,
or any other large city in 1950 may show something after this
fashion: Dustless, asphalted streets with no sound of clanging gong
or steel shod hoofs; clean, unbroken pavements across which pass with
noiseless rush rubber tired, horseless carriages; no deathly tracery
of electric lines or network of smoke-begrimed elevated trestle work.
Instead, at convenient Intervals, the small, round stations of the
Pneumatic Underground Transportation Company. The passenger will step
into an automatic elevator which gently lowers him to the track, if
such a name can be applied to a system that has no track.
Incandescent lamps light the underground station and the air is pure
and sweet. Accompanied by other suburban residents the passenger
enters a luxuriously appointed car whose arched sides and ceilings
disclose its tubular construction. The conductor touches an electric
button which closes the door softly and gently; there is a distinct
but hardly perceptible forward motion as the car starts and in almost
an instant, so rapid has been the motion, the trip has been from
the Battery to Forty-second street, and the silent elevator lifts
the passenger into the sunshine before the Grand Central Station.
Harlem is reached two minutes later, and from here the system
branches out to distant suburbs. In connection with the pneumatic
underground railway, automobile carriages and long. slim,
single-rail air cars distribute passengers to their homes in an
incredibly short time.
"The pneumatic transit system may be extended to include neighboring cities, and the effect will be practically to annihilate all distances of less than one hundred miles, which is about the maximum at which it will he necessary or desirable to use pneuntie transit for suburban trains. The use of this distance-destroying system will add several hours a day to the leisure time of busy men and bring residence districts located thirty to eighty miles away within ten or twenty minutes run of business districts.
The difficulties in the way of a practical application of the pneumatic tube system are not greater than confronted the inventor of the steam railroad of today. The principle is now in active service on a similar scale, and the workings of it excites no comment whatever. "There is a department of railway travel, however, that demands and will experience radical changes, and that is urban and suburban rapid transit of both passengers and freight - it is the crying need of the day.
Municipalities and corporations are moving heaven and earth to provide better means for transporting of millions of people from their homes to their offices and work shops. Conditions, instead of improving, grow steadily worse. In all the large centers excelling half a million population the congestion of street-car lines, horse cars, electric cars or cable ears and elevated roads -is a constant menace to health, life and property. "Extension along the lines of existing methods is almost at a standstill.
New York, the largest city in the world, seems helpless before the ever-growing problem. Twice every day a struggling mass of humanity wastes precious hours in a slow, tedious journey between work and home. There is no more room for surface lines of railway. Tho extension of the elevated system means the ruination of valuable streets. What is wanted is some method that will practically annihilate distance and not the same time remove from the city streets the dangers and defects of the present systems, one possible solution occurs to me."
.jpg "union pacific 1901")
