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This CRT system map from 1946 shows Chicago’s rail infrastructure immediately prior to CTA’s takeover. CRT eventually could boast 227.49 miles of track that carried an average of 627,157 passengers per weekday on 5,306 scheduled trains to and from 227 stations in the Chicago metropolitan area. 17 Somewhat paradoxically, CRT continued to expand its service and operations. 15 Although the companies merged in 1924 as a single entity, the Chicago Rapid Transit Company (CRT), 16 persistent financial distress caused CRT to spend much of the early 20th century in bankruptcy or receivership, with its operations managed by fiduciaries appointed by the United States District Court. There were at least five attempts to unify the rapid transit lines under common ownership, all of which eventually proved unsuccessful. By 1909, after each of these companies had significantly expanded their operations, they were jointly capable of serving large swaths of the city’s neighborhoods and as well as its then-outlying and undeveloped “prairie” areas.īut at that point the original elevated rail companies were not operating jointly. 14 These purely private concerns built much of the infrastructure for the CTA rail lines we now know as the Red, Blue, Green, Brown and Pink Lines. In the years that followed, several competing, privately-owned rail lines began service in different areas of Chicago: the Lake Street Elevated Railroad Company (1893) 11 the Metropolitan West Side Elevated Railroad Company (1895) 12 the Union Elevated Railroad Company (1895) 13 and the Northwestern Elevated Railroad Company (1899). 8 As one transit writer quipped, “For the first time, the words ‘rapid transit’ took on new meaning.” 9Ĭalled the “Alley L” because its route was completely through city-owned alleys, 10 the South Side Rapid Transit line was Chicago’s first experience with bona fide intracity rail service. 7 The public’s objections to the unsightliness of elevated train lines were quieted by the fact that the 34-block trip took the “L” only 9.5 minutes to complete. 6 On May 28, 1892, the first “L” train – which consisted of six wooden olive green and yellow coaches operated by steam locomotion – took its inaugural trip down the elevated “Alley L” from Congress Street to 39th Street. Chicago’s first actual rail line, the privately-owned Chicago and South Side Rapid Transit Railroad Company, incorporated in 1888. 5Ĭhicagoans had to wait another 33 years for rail service to get off the ground – literally. 4 The genesis of what would become the CTA bus and rail infrastructure had, by April 1859, gotten off to a humble start: one horse-drawn streetcar traveling upon a single track on State Street from Randolph Street to the Southern Hotel on 12th Street. 3 At that time, contractors drove the first spike for Chicago’s first streetcar line at State and Randolph streets.

Public transportation, as we now conceive of it, began in Chicago in 1859, 26 years after the State of Illinois incorporated it as a city. Rail Transit in Chicago: A Very Brief History