Chicago Tunnel Company Railroad Home Page
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"The tunnels that did not revolutionize delivery in Chicago."
The point was to tell a lesson for current startups: it is about tunnels, the tunnels were supposed to revolutionize delivery, and they did not do so. It's a story about a bold vision to change the world--very relevant to a lot of startups that think they will change the world but might end up being abandoned in a few years.
It's totally true, the London Post Office Railway was modeled after Chicago and it was useful.
Marshall Fields contracted them for deliveries for a while, and they experimented with some other things, but that was the core of their business.
They were also devastated by the building of the subway tunnels through the loop, which cut many of the CTC tunnels.
So while they're a cool aspect of Chicago's history, it's not hard to see why they failed. They were an artifact of the coal heating era -- and not a very robust one at that.
As an aside, a tunnel project also was a plot device in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. It's a long time since I read it, but if I recall correctly, the tunnels were being built to break a trolley worker's strike.
Early in 1992, a contractor working for the city, near the Kinzie Street bridge, drove a wooden pile next to the wall of a drift under the river. The pressure from the pile began to cause a leak in the wall. The leak was small at first. A cable television employee spotted the leak and even captured it on video tape. The cable televison company then brought the problem to the attention of the city. Unfortunately, the city allowed the leak to continue for several months without repair. Eventually, the drift wall gave way, and the river poured into the tunnels. The water completely flooded the system, including many basements that were still connected to it. The Loop was shut down for days, and the flood caused millions of dollars in damage. The torrent of flood water, silt, and debris probably destroyed most of the remaining Chicago Tunnel Company freight cars and artifacts. If the city acted quickly and if the water tight doors had been left in place and maintained, the flood may have been prevented.
It is also totally the city's fault that the previous participants in the Chicago Tunnel Company's experiment didn't protect themselves against a flood in that infrastructure.
It is totally the city's fault that despite the tunnels not being a public responsibility, they had started a bidding process to get the leak fixed, though it wasn't completed before the flood.
Yeah... totally the city's fault.
Reader's note: There are elements of sarcasm in my post.
Q: Why were the tunnels under State Street and Dearborn Street demolished to make room for the rapid transit subways? Didn't the Tunnel Company have any say so in the matter?
A: The Chicago Tunnel Company owned only the locomotives, rolling stock, track, and overhead wire. The City of Chicago owned the tunnels. Because of this, the Tunnel Company didn't have much choice but to give up their most profitable trackage when subway construction was started by the city. You can't fight City Hall!
If you leave your building hooked up to an open tunnel line, something could come in through it. And that something could be water (or gas, or rodents...).
Claiming that's "totally" the city's fault strikes me as a dangerous abdication of personal responsibility.
Government is one of the few places where "could have and didn't" becomes the same as "did".
The Katrina debacle is the largest example of this.
But blaming the city for everything still strikes me as absurd. It was a private enterprise that dug tunnels without getting permits from the city, and it created a problem.
Saying it's totally the city government's fault strikes me as nonsense given that reality.
I'll grant them some responsibility, because government does tend to clean up when private industry leaves a mess, but it seems far from total to me.
How illegal were they anyway?
http://video.wttw.com/feature/102/
and
http://www.idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda-weehawken_burri...