The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway

by Most, Doug

  It was an absurd arrangement, but to Sprague it was a challenge. He was being asked to furnish new streetcars with nearly as many electric motors, eighty, as there were being used throughout the rest of the world. And he had only blueprints of a plan and some experimental motors to start with. But Richmond was the break he’d been looking for, and there was no way he could pass it up. He signed the contract, and on May 25, 1887, his crew went to work at the corner of Twelfth Street and Franklin Street in downtown Richmond. The paper was barely dry when a dangerously high typhoid fever lay Sprague out, flat on his back. Weeks passed before he could barely move. And the clock was ticking.

  * * *

  WHEN SPRAGUE FINALLY GAINED ENOUGH strength to return, nine weeks had passed and Richmond was losing patience. His first day back was October 1, 1887. Two of his chief assistants, S. Dana Greene and Oscar T. Crosby, were, like Sprague, young graduates of the military academies, and in Sprague’s absence they made remarkable progress. In Richmond, Greene tackled the tracks, and in New York, Crosby worked on the motors. Sprague employed a team of a dozen bright young engineers, some from Ivy League schools, others from West Point or his own alma mater, the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis. Greene and Crosby were his stars.

  The tracks that awaited Sprague in Richmond were an unexpected problem for the men. Not only were they fastened insecurely to the ground, they were joined together weakly and laid unevenly on a bed of red clay. In wet or humid weather, hardly a rare occurrence in Richmond, the clay became wet goop, the tracks sunk into the ground, and all rail travel ground to a halt. Sprague described the tracks as “laid for profit, not for permanence,” and he was being kind. They were a disaster. He and his men spent weeks filling mud holes and strengthening the ground around the tracks, but that was only the beginning of their struggle. When Sprague returned from his illness, he took the time to walk along the route where his streetcars would run. Franklin Street, in particular, scared him. It was a steep hill that ran underneath a small bridge that connected two of Richmond’s biggest hotels, the Exchange and the Ballard. When he saw that hill, he knew just how powerful a motor he would need. “I was for a moment doubtful of the outcome,” he confessed later.

  The motors that had been invented up to that point were impressive. But they were also useless to Sprague now. They were little more than experiments: unreliable, expensive, and certainly impossible to replicate on a wide scale. They were designed for onetime use only, not for any widespread application. Sprague needed a motor that was cheap to build, easy to manufacture in large quantities, reliable to run, capable of speeds that no electric motor had achieved before over any great distance, and, last, able to power a fully loaded streetcar of several thousand pounds over steep hills without causing panic among passengers that it might begin to roll backward. That motor had never been built. And now Sprague needed eighty of them. Quickly.

  His first attempt failed, and it was such a frustrating experience that he could often be heard telling one of his chief employees to “go to hell” in a burst of anger. So many breakthroughs had been achieved, but the failures seemed sure to doom Sprague’s team. Overhead wires for carrying the electric current were strung along the Richmond tracks with little problem. A rigid line that connected the roof of the car to the overhead wire was designed in such a way that a derailed car could return to its track without assistance. That was critical, since it eliminated the need to equip each car with a ladder, as Sprague had first done. Even finding the right lubrication to keep the motor gears grinding was a challenge that took weeks to resolve.

  Once those details were worked out, two seven-horsepower motors that were mounted on several streetcars didn’t work. As soon as they reached a significant hill, the car would stop cold. It happened so many times that Sprague finally ordered a handful of muscular men to stand at the rear of the car, hop off, and push as soon as the car stalled. At night, when the city slept and to spare Sprague and his men from any embarrassment, mules were sent out to pull the disabled cars home. The workers called it “playing mule.”

  More power was needed, and with his ninety-day deadline looming, it was obvious Sprague would never make it. The railway owners considered canceling his contract and walking away, but he convinced them to remain patient by altering his deal and saving them money. Sprague’s $110,000 payment was cut to $90,000. And instead of getting all of it in cash, as the original agreement said, he would get half in cash, half in bonds of the railway company. A bad deal became worse for Sprague, but he didn’t care. He contacted a machine maker in Providence, Brown and Sharp, and pleaded for them to make him new gears for his motors, capable of climbing steeper grades than he’d first expected. They agreed, and in a few weeks the new motors were mounted beneath the streetcars, and a new test run was arranged.

  * * *

  THE MORE PROGRESS SPRAGUE made with his system in Richmond, the more the word spread and the more Henry Whitney warmed to the idea of electrifying Boston’s system. On October 10, 1887, a cloudy and brisk afternoon, an ordinary-looking streetcar rolled slowly out of a shed in Cambridgeport just across the Charles River from Boston. It was an open wooden car with rows of benches front to back and no windows. It was a curious sight, this streetcar. There was no horse in front of it and no paying passengers inside, but it was crowded nonetheless as it first started moving west down the Cambridge track. It was only an experiment involving a single streetcar, not an entire system of them, but the electric streetcar of the West End Street Railway Company was ready for its first test.

  Along with reporters from Boston and Cambridge newspapers, the seats inside were filled with some of the most important railroad men involved in the project and observers from other cities who came to see if an electric trolley system could work for them. In all, forty-four people started on the trip, and six more would be picked up along the way. There was Calvin Richards, the president of the Metropolitan Railroad Company; Prentiss Cummings, president of the Cambridge Railroad Company; Henry D. Hyde, representing Whitney’s West End company; C. W. Watson, of the Cleveland street railway; and a dozen other men. Manning the controls was Dana Greene, from the Sprague Electric Railway, an electrician who was also the most experienced person in dealing with the electric motor. Frank Sprague was closing in on his design, which would allow a city to convert its entire streetcar operations to electricity, and this experiment was one more effort to convince Henry Whitney how beautifully it could work.

  Whitney was certainly leaning toward electrification, but he was not yet fully convinced. He was so skeptical that even as he was experimenting with electric streetcars, engineers in Boston were tinkering with designs for a cable car system.

  The plan on this day was for the electric streetcar to head west toward Harvard Square and then loop back toward Boston, pass down Charles Street, along Beacon Street, and eventually to Huntington Avenue before turning around and heading back to Cambridgeport. As the car made its way toward Harvard Square, those on board could not help but notice the reaction of the horses that they passed. As the electric streetcar rolled by, horses could be seen flinching and fidgeting, pricking up their ears and tossing their heads high in the air, as if they sensed their pending demise.

  The streetcar picked up speed as it moved toward the square, surpassing ten miles per hour without any hitch. It stopped and started smoothly and took the turns with a grace that no horse-pulled car could ever do. It was nothing like the herky-jerky rides that passengers had grown accustomed to. The longer it traveled, the more people seemed to line up along the road to see the curiosity, and soon it was almost like a parade route. An old woman on the side of the road, apparently unconvinced at what was really powering the vehicle, was heard muttering to her neighbor as the car passed her, “the pesky thing must be pushed along by the men inside.”

  The first glitch came as the car reached Harvard Square. As the streetcar went around a sharp bend at the corner of Main Street and Mount Auburn Street, the forward w
heels caught on a safety rail intended to protect against derailment and came off the track. The streetcar came to an abrupt stop. To the passengers, it was an odd experience. Streetcars pulled by horses almost never fell off the tracks because the horses on sharp turns moved outside the rails and kept the forward wheels closely pressed against the inner edge. And even when a horse-pulled car did derail, the conductor was able to stop the horses instantly so that the car veered only a few feet from the rails and could be easily righted and get back on its way. But an electric streetcar had to rely on its own agility and cornering to stay on the tracks. And there were no horses to stop it quickly and the braking system was hardly perfect. A brisk-moving electric streetcar could go as much as fifty feet off the tracks before finally coming to a stop. Making matters worse, electric streetcars were much heavier than their horse-pulled brethren, so lifting them back onto the rails would only be possible if a large number of men were on hand for the task. Finding a permanent solution to this problem would take engineers more than a year, and it involved attaching a secondary wire from the streetcar to the overhead wire to create a power source that could move the car back onto the rails.

  That solution did not exist on this day, but fortunately the car strayed only a few feet from the tracks, and, with help from the passengers and the viewing crowd, the delay was brief and the streetcar was quickly on its away again, moving toward Boston. A second pause came about twenty minutes later as the car reached Charles Street in Boston. Once again it fell off the tracks, which prompted Cummings, of the Cambridge railroad, to joke aloud that they must be riding on a portion of the Metropolitan railroad track, to which Richards, of the Metropolitan, shot back, “Yes, that bad portion we bought from the Cambridge railroad.” Their jovialness might also have been bolstered by the growing crowds along their journey. Many of the people watching even moved alongside the car, forming almost an escort for the second half of the trip, until the streetcar had made its way back to the shed in Cambridgeport, pulling in easily and without a single accident. The people on board applauded.

  The electric car had covered the distance from Harvard Square to Huntington Avenue, before turning around, in fifty minutes. It was almost the same amount of time a typical horse-pulled car would have taken, but that was partly due to the nine-minute delay caused by the derailment. Everybody on board agreed the ride had been much more pleasant than anything they had experienced before.

  * * *

  A MONTH AFTER WHITNEY’S SUCCESSFUL test of the electric trolley in Boston, a crowd was letting out of the theater in downtown Richmond on a chilly, clear November evening and spilling out into the streets atop Franklin Street. Sprague was ready to find out if any or all the improvements his crew had made in the last month actually worked, and the theatergoers, entirely unaware, were about to get an impromptu show. Sprague took a car out of the shed on Church Hill. On board was a group he had organized that included George Burt, the Richmond streetcar superintendent; Dana Greene; and a reporter from the local paper, The Richmond Dispatch. After months of work, Sprague needed to know if just a single one of his self-propelled streetcars could climb a significant hill in the city, because if the answer was no, then he was a long, long way from fulfilling his end of the contract.

  With Sprague manning the controls, the car lurched around a sharp curve and pulled to the base of a steep hill. Burt turned to Sprague. “If you can get out of such a curve as that we just left,” Burt said, “you can go up the side of a wall.”

  Sprague was skeptical, and he feared that even if they did climb the hill, the motors would work so hard they’d burn out and be destroyed. Yet somehow he did pull the car over several rolling hills, through a sharp turn, and eventually up to the top of Franklin Street, an especially long hill right where the excited theatergoers were milling about, not quite sure what they had just witnessed. He had done it. It was surely one of the hardest roads an electric streetcar had overcome anytime, anywhere, and Sprague might have allowed himself a smile if not for a buckling noise he heard from the overheated motors. He knew it could only mean one thing. The car, after working so hard, had stalled, directly in front of a large and enthusiastic crowd. He had raised the hopes of the city by climbing such a steep hill, and now Sprague was determined to avoid any embarrassment. He raised his voice to Greene just loud enough to be heard by passersby, and he told him there appeared to be a problem with the car’s circuits and that he needed some “instruments” to fix it. As the group on board disbursed, including the Dispatch reporter, Greene understood Sprague’s code perfectly and went off to fetch some mules. Sprague, hoping the crowd would be gone by the time Greene returned, turned off the lights inside the streetcar so it went dark and, like a child playing hide-and-seek, lay down on a seat so it appeared as if no one was there. By the time Greene came back, nobody was around. The mules, Sprague recalled later, were “the most effective aids which could be found in Richmond under the circumstances.” With their help, the car was able to return to the shed.

  The next day’s Dispatch gushed with enthusiasm, unaware of the glitch at the end of the journey.

  “It is a success! It is a revolution! It travels over more than two miles of track in Richmond!”

  But Sprague knew the truth. Getting a single car carrying a handful of passengers to climb one steep hill was not an achievement worth celebrating. His contract demanded he build an entire system that allowed multiple cars, carrying hundreds or thousands of people, to move at the same time up and down those hills. “My own reputation and future career, as well as that of my associates, seemed blasted if failure marked the Richmond road,” he wrote later. The test was nothing but a signal that they were getting close and heading in the right direction.

  The next few weeks were exhausting for Sprague and his team, as they made adjustments to the motors, the wires, the tracks, all to improve on what had been a successful, if flawed, trial run. One innovation that was born during this period was a uniquely designed pole connecting the car and the overhead wire that was easily reversed when the car reached the end of its line. By January 1888, Sprague could not delay opening the line any longer. City officials and the owners of the Richmond Union Passenger Railway, which was on the brink of bankruptcy, were demanding results from him. The telephones in Richmond, only a recent addition to the city, had stopped working with so much electricity directed toward Sprague’s work. Picking up a phone greeted a caller with only a hissing noise and nothing else. Sprague had to convince the city all of the troubles were worth their patience.

  He achieved a greater success on January 7, 1888, when they were able to run nine cars and carry several thousand passengers around the city. And two days after that, a passenger named William A. Boswell stepped onto car number 28, which traveled along Church Hill; handed the five-cent fare to the conductor; and became the system’s first paying passenger, even though it wasn’t officially in operation yet. By this point, Sprague was exhausted, but he knew there could be no resting. He was bleeding cash so badly that he was forced to take out a $45,000 loan just to avoid personal bankruptcy. Worried about creditors, he ordered his bookkeepers to save dollars wherever they could and to put off paying any bills that could be delayed. “Don’t pay a bill that you can help until after April 1st,” he ordered. One day in mid-January, feeling particularly low, he wrote to a friend, “I am completely overwhelmed with work, so much so that I hardly know whether I stand on my head or on my heels at times.”

  Finally, three weeks later, on February 8, in a cold, drizzling rain, Sprague opened the Richmond line for service to the general public. The crowds flocked on board in the early days, but repeated fits and hiccups on the trolleys almost doomed the effort from the start. Cars would creep forward and then stop suddenly in the street, unable to budge. Workers would climb underneath to see if they could determine the problem, and if they could not, to avoid grinding the entire system to a standstill, they would pull the stalled car off the tracks so another could pass by.
At first Sprague was convinced the problem was mechanical, something to do with the gears not being cut correctly. It was his Irish mechanic, Pat O’Shaughnessy, who discovered it was something more simple. The gears needed more oil, and by day’s end the cars were running smoothly.

  But then one winter morning a new problem greeted Sprague. He looked out the window of his rooming house downtown and saw that his overhead wires were coated with ice from the sleeting rain that had fallen overnight. Passengers were waiting as usual for streetcars to carry them, but no streetcars were moving, until, to Sprague’s astonishment, one appeared from around the corner, and then another, and then another. At first Sprague didn’t understand what had changed, until he looked more closely and saw that on the roof of the lead car, O’Shaughnessy, his trusty mechanic, was balanced precariously while swinging a broom at the overhead wires. Each whack of the broom brought down a shower of ice and snow, but it worked. It was clearly not a long-term solution, but for one day, at least, winter would not beat Sprague’s electric trolley.

  The next few months were not much better. A few consecutive days of consistent service would be interrupted by a few days of broken-down trolleys, burned-out motors, and worn-out gears. Passengers got used to the failures. They even assisted when needed. If a car derailed, all the passengers would step off, and the sturdiest ones would lean a shoulder into the car and hoist it back onto the rails. But when it was a problem with a motor, there was little they could do. Old motors were being shipped up to Sprague’s New York factory by train, and repaired ones were returned. It may have been the only large-trolley, big-city electric railway system in the world, but it was hardly a booming success. “Greene,” Sprague said one day to his trusty assistant, “this is hell.” It grew so desperate that Sprague looked to save a dollar wherever he could, cutting workers and holding off making any payments that could wait.