Broadway Underground Railroad Company

Crowds bustle above and below Broadway in this illustration, originally published in 1869, showing a hypothetical below-ground railway system in New York City. The Broadway Underground Railway Company, renamed in 1881 from the Beach Pneumatic Transit Company, proposed multiple plans for the construction of a subway system in New York City. In 1870 inventor Alfred Ely Beach used his private wealth to dig about 300 feet of pneumatic tunnel under Broadway to show that the company’s scheme was possible. Public interest and funding lagged after the initial flurry of excitement over the demonstration tunnel, and the re-branded company published a modified version of its original proposal in 1884. This illustration appears in the 1884 report New York Arcade Railway as Projected, Compared with the Underground Railways of London; Report to the Broadway Underground Railroad Co. by engineer William Jarvis McAlpine. The Broadway Underground Railroad Company’s proposed plan never came to fruition. The Interborough Rapid Transit Company constructed the first New York subway system twenty years later.