The Week

The century of transport. - Locomotion systems of yesterday and tomorrow. - From the "cuckoo" to the flying railway.

A century ago, the railway was barely born. There was still only one railway that transported passengers; and it was not in France: it was in England, between Liverpool and Manchester.

France, at that time, had only 29 kilometers of railway track, for the transport of coal from Saint-Etienne to Andrézieux. Today it has more than 50,000. A lot of work has been done in a century, as you can see.

Until then, we were reduced to animal traction for means of transport. During these last hundred years, the most diverse methods of locomotion have been born, have developed, have triumphed. The railway has conquered humanity. It has penetrated the desert; it has crossed the steppes; mountains have been dug to give way to it. There are hardly any peoples left in the world among whom the locomotive has not entered triumphantly.

A hundred years ago, our fathers still knew, as an instrument of sport and means of individual transport, only the "droisienne". Successively, this primitive "célérifère" was transformed into a velocipede, into a bicycle with unequal wheels, to finally become the precious bicycle, the little queen of the road that no one today could do without.

A hundred years ago, one saw on the roads only heavy stagecoaches that jolted you horribly for four days to take you to Bordeaux, and for five days to take you to Lyon. When these lugs disappeared before the triumph of the rail, the road remained at first dull and silent; but for thirty years, life was given back to it, day by day more active, more devouring, by the incessant progress of automobile. In 1894, during the first road race, Paris-Rouen, organized by the Petit Journal, there were only about twenty motor cars in France. Today, they number in the hundreds of thousands.

Only twenty years ago, Santos-Dumont, in Bagatelle, attempted his first flight in an airplane; and people marveled that he had managed to cover a quarter of a kilometer by rising a few meters above the ground... Today, the great mechanical birds fly freely in the sky, climb to dizzying heights, cover indefinite distances. They will soon complete the loop of the world in less time than it once took to go from Paris to Marseille.

You don't have to be a very old Parisian to remember the era of the omnibus. At the trot of their big Percherons, they wandered lurchingly through the streets, making improbable detours, taking an hour to go from the Montparnasse station to Ménilmontant. And everyone called with all their hearts for the realization of the urban railway. The newspaper columnists, who are in their own way, very often, the prophets of modern progress, announced its reign.
In 1860, Léon Gozlan wrote Our places will become landing stages set in green squares. We will take the railway at the Place de la Concorde to go in three minutes to the Bastille or in five minutes to the Barrière du Trône...
And, while the imagination of the pen-men thus worked, the patient genius of the scientists strove to realize their dreams. This has been done for twenty-five years, Paris will be able to celebrate next year the first quarter of a century of its metro.
In 1900, the first year of its operation, the urban railway had transported 16 million passengers. Today, year in and year out, it transports around 600 million.
But, as new means of transport were created and developed, life in large cities became more ardent, more eventful, more feverish. Railways, buses, trams, taxis, subways are no longer sufficient for the activity of city dwellers, for their frenzy of "fidgeting". Other systems of locomotion must be found that allow residents to move further and further away towards the outskirts and to spread out into the surrounding suburbs.
So, inevitably, one day soon, for urban communications, we will have the moving sidewalk, such as already exists in certain American cities, the track that will walk all by itself. And, for communications between the city and its suburbs, we will have the ideally rapid means of transport, the aerial railway, the flying railway, which will be content for the moment to do 150 kilometers per hour, but will not stop there.

A color page from the Petit Journal illustré tells us more than a long description about this new mode of locomotion. Its creator, the engineer Francis Laur, achieved the union of the railway and the aerostation. His system consists of a sort of propeller-driven locomotive-car, guided by an overhead electric rail supported by pylons placed at intervals.
One of the great advantages of the project is that it will cost much less to build than all other means of transport. The land railway currently costs two million francs per kilometer; the underground metro costs ten million. With about 500,000 francs per kilometer, we will have the flying railway. The overhead cars, built of duraluminum, will weigh barely four tons and will be able to transport up to one hundred people.

Let us note that, since 1903, an aerial league of this kind has been operating in Germany, between Barmen and Elberfeld, and that, although it does not have the improvements that the Parisian flying railway will be able to receive, it gives complete satisfaction from the point of view of speed and safety

Soon then, on the great national road number 1, Paris-Calais, between the barrier and Saint-Denis, the first section of the line, we will see the flying railway gliding under its rail, at a dizzying speed.
Less than a hundred years ago, on this same road, to ensure communications between Paris-Prefecture and Saint-Denis, the district capital, we only knew the "cuckoo". -

Ernest LAUT.