Chicago Freight Tunnel System

“A Service That Promotes Distribution and Diminishes Street Congestion.”

This ephemeral pamphlet was issued, probably in the early 1940s, by the Chicago Tunnel Company to advertise its services to local businesses and railways. Over 60 miles of subterranean tunnels had been dug ‘Under Every Street in the Loop and a Little Beyond’ to haul a variety of goods, post, garbage, coal, and more on narrow gauge tracks. The back two panels show a map of the various tunnels in operation, noting individual connections with dozens of prominent companies. According to an Atlas Obscura article’;

“Work began on the tunnels in 1899 under the auspices the Illinois Telephone and Telegraph Company, reorganized in later years as the Chicago Tunnel Company. An enormous quantity of blue clay soil was excavated by hand and used as landfill to build up low lying areas on the waterfront. The Chicago Tunnel Company had an aggressive (perhaps brash) business strategy, building 60 miles of tunnels before securing a single client.

Once the network was complete they approached downtown buildings and offered an array of services, including telephone and telegraph connections, and coal, mail and merchandise deliveries. And the clients did come; tunnel connections were built to the Board of Trade, City Hall, Merchandise Mart, the Federal Reserve Bank, the Chicago Tribune, the Civic Opera House, the Field Museum, and dozens of others. One of the Chicago Tunnel Company’s more inventive products was “tunnel air” (55˚F year round), which they piped into theaters and hotels as natural air conditioning.

For decades, little electric trains used the tunnels to make their deliveries free from the congestion of surface traffic. Operators navigated using street names painted onto the walls, and avoided collisions using nothing more than a “sight and sound system,” in the generous words of Electric Railway Journal. The tunnels saw their peak usage in the 1940s and 1950s but struggled financially because of tremendous capital investments and increased competition from the trucking industry. In 1959 the Chicago Tunnel Company went out of business and sold their fleet of little trains for $64,000 in scrap.”

Source: Atlas Obscura;