Time Traveling on the NYC Ninth Ave El

Charles T. Harvey (1829-1912), was a self-trained civil engineer who had built the Soo Canal uniting Lake Superior and Lake Huron. In 1867 he designed and built an experimental single-track cable-powered elevated railway on Greenwich St, at the South end of Manhattan Island. His company had been chartered the year before under the name of the West Side and Yonkers Patent Railway Company to build a 25 mile elevated railroad from the south end of the city northward through the city and thence to the village of Yonkers. Harvey developed and patented a system something like a funicular cable railway where cars could grip or release a continuously running cable. The 1/2 mile single track line was above the street on a single row of columns. The cable was a loop, driven by a stationary engine, that ran between the rails for propulsion of the cars, then returned under the street. This cable propulsion system was the first of its type in North America. Later developments and improvements of the cable would bring about the conversion of the horse car railways to cable power. Unfortunately, Mr Harvey,s cable system failed and New York City's elevated railways would be steam powered until after the turn of the Twentieth Century.