In 1888 former naval officer Frank Sprague, of Richmond, Virginia, pioneered improvements, such as a non-sparking electric motor mounted on the car’s underside and powered by a spring-laden pole, or trolley, connecting to an overhead wire by means of a rotating wheel. In the early 1880s, Baltimorean Leo Daft introduced a more reliable and effective system powered by overhead wire. As early as the 1830s, inventors were using batteries to power railcars, but those systems were slow and ran only short distances. The wires propelled one- or two-car trains.Įlectric traction-transport systems, tracked and not, that run on electricity-made possible both the interurban and the streetcar, which replaced railcars drawn by horses and sometimes by cable. Like a streetcar, an interurban usually got power supplied by overhead electric wires fed by a coal- or oil-fired power plant. Streetcars mostly stayed within a city’s limits, but interurbans lived up literally to their Latinate name, connecting municipalities and bringing mass transit to small-town and rural America. Interurbans were hybrids of the city streetcar line and the suburban commuter railroad as those transportation modes existed before the automobile.

“Interurban” means “between cities,” but as a means of transit the definition is looser. The site of the interurban terminal, demolished in 1972, now is the location of the Hilton Indianapolis. The building became a bus terminal, was shuttered in 1968, and in 1972 was torn down-a capsule history of American interurban electric rail. Indianapolis Traction was the nation’s largest interurban terminal. At the adjoining train shed, 500 trains, operated by 12 interurban railway lines, came and went daily, carrying some seven million passengers a year.

Trolleys' Time: When Streetcars Were Desired Closeīefore commuter rail lines, interurban lines electrically connected cities, small towns, and even amusement parks ON WEEKDAYS IN THE 1910s, the waiting room at the Indianapolis Traction Terminal welcomed hundreds of travelers-men wearing straw boaters or derbies, women in wide-brimmed hats and ankle-length skirts-debarking from or waiting to board trains to and from South Bend and Terre Haute, Indiana, Columbus, Ohio, and elsewhere.

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