22. Streetcars
Chicago’s earliest streetcars, pulled by horses or mules, were slow, and the animals added their waste to the debris in the streets, an undesirable situation. By the 1880s, cable drawn streetcars on rails replaced them. By 1887 Chicago boasted the largest cable railway found anywhere in the world. During the same decade, competing cities installed electric-traction-powered streetcars. Chicago began shifting to the more efficient electric trolleys in the 1890s, and completed the conversion of the entire system in 1906. Interurbans – electric railroads with the cars powered for the most part with electric-traction motors, expanded rapidly. By the 1920s it was possible to travel from New York to Chicago entirely on interurbans, using multiple transfers from one company’s lines to another.
The streetcars carried commuters and passengers from intercity and interurban trains to their destinations within the city and its suburbs. They provided connections between the train stations and Midway Airport. By the time of the expansion of O’Hare International, the interurbans were mostly gone, and the streetcars found themselves replaced by buses. The streetcar lines were abandoned one by one, the rails were taken up, and the streets became dominated by the internal combustion engine. Beginning in 1927, when Chicago first began operation of gasoline-powered buses, the street railway system, a decade earlier the largest in the United State, gradually faded away.