Ohio History Journal

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DOUGLAS V

DOUGLAS V. SHAW

Interurbans in the Automobile Age:

The Case of the Toledo, Port Clinton

and Lakeside

 

 

 

From the first decade of the twentieth century until the early 1930s electric

interurban railways connected almost all Ohio towns and villages of more

than 5000 population. With its numerous cities and market towns within

reasonable proximity of one another, prosperous agriculture, and generally fa-

vorable topography everywhere but in the southeast, Ohio provided ideal terri-

tory for interurban development. Promoted vigorously from 1890 until 1910,

interurbans quickly became important components of regional transport sys-

tems; at the industry's height between 1914 and 1918 the Ohio system

reached its maximum of roughly 2800 miles.1

Built and operated in many respects like urban street railways, interurbans

offered greater frequency of passenger service and more rapid delivery of local

freight than did steam railroads. Most offered service at no less than two-hour

intervals, headways far shorter than those maintained on typical local railroad

lines. Increased convenience and flexibility formed the core of interurban suc-

cess, and electric lines tended to replace steam roads as the transport mode of

choice between points where the two competed directly for traffic.2 Yet in the

long run the industry was not a success. Most interurbans never developed

 

 

Douglas V. Shaw is Associate Professor of Urban Studies in the Department of Urban

Studies, The University of Akron.

 

1. George W. Hilton and John F. Due, The Electric Interurban Railways in America, second

printing (Stanford, 1964), 4-25; Report of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio for the Year

1917 (Springfield, Ohio, 1918), 645 (hereafter abbreviated as PUCO Report, [year]); George

S. Davis, "The Interurban Electric Railways of Ohio," Street Railway Journal, 18 (August 3,

1901), 145-56. See also "The Latest Ohio Interurban Map," Street Railway Review, 12 (March

20, 1904), 190-91.

2. Hilton and Due, 14-15; Guy Morrison Walker, "The Why and How of Interurban

Railways," Street Railway Review, 14 (June 20, 1904), 365-68; Ernest L. Bogart, "Economic

and Social Effects of the Interurban Electric Railway in Ohio," Journal of Political Economy,

14 (December, 1906), 588-92. Within four years of the opening of the Interurban Railway and

Terminal Company between Cincinnati and Lebanon in 1902, for example, passenger traffic

on the Cincinnati, Lebanon and Northern steam railroad fell 59 percent. John W. Hauck,

Narrow Gauge in Ohio: The Cincinnati, Lebanon and Northern Railway (Boulder, 1986), 226-

27. On the development of freight traffic, see Charles S. Pease, Freight Transportation on

Trolley Lines (New York, 1909).