Happy Anniversary to the EL

I love the el. I take it from home to work, and end up going through all but 4 of its stops. Always interesting. Once in a great while it screws up, but all in all better than being in the car where you can't read or use your computer.

clipped from www.wired.com 1883: The world's first elevated electric railway in the world makes a trial run. It's in Chicago, of course. It's indoors, and it won't last, but the idea will. New York City began elevated railway service in the early 1870s, running in Manhattan on Ninth Avenue and Greenwich Street. It was America's first elevated railroad, but it was steam-powered. Steam locomotives put out prodigious amounts of smoke and soot -- hardly what you'd want to be adding to the already-dirty air of a teeming metropolis. And they were plenty noisy, too.