America’s First High-Speed Rail Project

Despite continued evidence that high-speed rail is a waste of money, reporters still write articles lamenting that high-speed trains in America are “elusive.” It’s elusive for a simple reason: it makes no sense, being slower than flying, less convenient than driving, and far more expensive than both.

Due to the high costs, high-speed rail projects proposed more than 100 years ago were similarly flawed. In 1893, someone proposed to build a 100-mph line straight from Chicago to St. Louis for $5.5 million–around $135 million today when using GNP deflators but more than $6.5 billion when measured as a share of the economy at the time. The proposal went nowhere.

Then, in 1906, someone proposed a similar, 100-mph line from Chicago to New York called the Chicago-New York Electric Air Line (several railroads at that time were named “air line” probably because they wanted to indicate they offered the shortest route between two points). The line would have either no curves or none that trains couldn’t negotiate at 90 mph. It would have no grade crossings so wouldn’t have to stop for other trains or risk hitting cars crossing its tracks.

The proposal came from Alexander Miller, a railroader who had worked for the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy’s operating department for two decades. He promised that trains could traverse the 742 miles between the two cities in ten hours or less. This compared with 18 hours for the fastest trains at the time, which wove circuitous routes over or around the Appalachian Mountains. Like high-speed rail promoters today, Miller also promised low fares: a trip from New York to Chicago would be just $10, about $260 today using the consumer price index.

Miller’s proposal was technically feasible considering that Siemens–the same company that builds light-rail cars today–had run an experimental electric train at 120 mph in 1903. Economically, however, the plan was ridiculously expensive.

Unlike the Chicago-St. Louis proposal, that didn’t prevent construction from actually beginning on the Chicago-New York Air Line and by 1911 15 miles were built in Indiana. To keep grades low, when the line crossed the tracks of other railroads, Miller built a mile-long earthwork approach. To cross a minor creek 15 miles from Gary, Indiana, Miller built a two-mile long fill that was 180 feet wide at the base. That exhausted Miller’s resources and the line went no further, although he did continue to operate electric streetcars in Gary for a time.

George Hilton’s and John Due’s book, The Electric Interurban Railways in America, describes the line as “utterly uneconomic” and attributes the fact that anything was built at all to the “irrationality of its stockholders.” Being “unbearably expensive” in the relatively flat country of Northern Indiana, they say, “one can barely conceive of the expense of bridges, cuts, fills, and tunnels necessary to drive a straight line through the mountains of Pennsylvania.”

What’s changed between 1906 and today? Today we have trains that can go roughly twice as fast as the train Miller proposed, but we also have planes that go at least five times as fast. We also have automobiles that can take you anywhere you want in an urban area, while the trains can only serve a few points because every stop reduces the average speed and makes the train less viable.

What hasn’t changed is the cost. After adjusting for inflation, building high-speed rail lines across mountains, such as the coastal mountains between San Francisco and Los Angeles and California’s Central Valley, is still extremely expensive. Even in the relatively flat area between Tokyo and Osaka, proposals for a high-speed maglev project call for 80 percent of the route to be in tunnels. Why spend all that money when we have planes that can fly over the hills at twice the speed of the trains?

Hilton and Due openly question whether the Air Line “was a fraudulent scheme or an honest promotion.” The same can be asked about high-speed rail projects today, whose main beneficiaries will be the rail contractors and those few travelers making downtown-to-downtown journeys that might take only a few minutes longer than flying (and they’ll only benefit if someone else subsidizes most of the cost of their tickets). The difference today is that, instead of bamboozling a few stockholders, high-speed rail proponents only have to persuade Congress to use your tax dollars to build trains you will probably rarely or never ride.