Beach Pneumatic Transit

The Beach Pneumatic Transit was an experimental transport. These were a 95 m long tunnel under Broadway, in the 1870-1873 one driven by compressed air car wrong, similar to a pneumatic tube. Namesake of the first ( unsuccessful ) attempt to build a subway in New York City, was the inventor and publisher Alfred Ely Beach.

History

To relieve the Broadway by the ever-increasing volume of traffic, hit Beach before the construction of a subway. Unlike others, he preferred pneumatics Drive, not about steam locomotives, as they opened in 1863 Metropolitan Railway in London have been used successfully. Beach was also interested in pneumatic tube systems for the delivery of letters and parcels. After he had received from the State of New York a concession, he began in 1869 with the construction of an underground pneumatic tube line.

During construction, viewed Beach decided summarily, instead set up a Vorführstrecke for passenger transport. He succeeded his construction projects carried out largely in secret. Although individual newspapers reported by the delivery of a large amount of building material for Warren Street, but it was only in January 1870 the public learned in a (probably from Beach itself commissioned ) article in the New York Tribune from the actual events.

A few weeks later, on February 26, 1870, the Beach Pneumatic Transit was opened. At this time, the tunnel 312 feet ( 95 meters) long and was led to Murray Street. The train itself was more a curiosity than a serious transport. A single car shuttled back from one end of the tunnel to the other and back. The station was located on the corner of Warren Street / Broadway in the basement of a clothing store.

Beach was planning to extend the tunnel and develop it into a full-fledged underground, but what a new license was required. Senator William Tweed introduced a corresponding bill, which was not adopted. As the end of 1871, the political maneuvers of the corrupt Tammany Hall lobby organization had fallen into disrepute, claimed Beach, Tweed had been speaking out against his subway to win the support of reformers. The real opposition, however, came from the ranks of the politically organized landowners along the Broadway, led by Alexander Turney Stewart and John Jacob Astor III. They feared the tunnel could damage the building and affect the traffic.

Laws for the construction of Beach's subway were adopted in 1871 and 1872, but failed because of the veto by Governor John Thompson Hoffman, as they left the state and the city too little influence. 1873 Governor John Adams Dix signed a similar law, but Beach could not muster enough money to finance the construction costs for the next six months. A banking crisis, which dried up the financial market, the realization finally made ​​unlikely.

Other investors had built an elevated railway in Greenwich Street and Ninth Avenue, which was successfully operated from 1870 with small steam locomotives. The wealthy land owners had no objection to a train, the wrong off of Broadway. The public won the mid-1870s the impression Beachs compressed air track is technically impractical and too expensive despite the really comfortable locomotion principle. For the next 30 years, elevated railways dominated the action. The tunnel was forgotten until 1912 construction workers of the BMT Broadway Line through a wall of the station broke through and parts of the plant vorfanden intact. The current City Hall Station on the N and R lines contains parts of the original tunnel from Beach. However, a plaque from the 1932 still reported and should remember his performance is no longer existent.

Aftereffect

Decades after its closure was the Beach Pneumatic Transit in various ways way into pop culture. A few examples:

• The song Sub - Rosa Subway on the 1976 released album 3:47 ET the Canadian progressive rock band Klaatu is about Beach's efforts to build a subway.
• In the film Ghostbusters II in 1989, the ghost hunters encounter in their search for supernatural phenomena at the abandoned tunnels of the Beach Pneumatic Transit ( in the film as New York Pneumatic Railroad called ) in which an underground river flowing mucus.
• The image shown above for as many mural branches of the fast food chain Subway.
• The Beach Pneumatic Transit system appears in the episode " Wormquake - Part 1" of the 2012 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series.