Before commuters and straphangers came along, it was freight that first went underground in Manhattan. Alfred Beach’s pneumatic railway was meant to blow the dust off Victorian logistics. While it never made it past a single block, Matthew Algeo’s new book reminds us once again. With the railways, as ever: freight came first.
Imagine boarding a subterranean tube. Airless, windowless and bristling with cutting-edge technology. Vacuum-packed in a sealed, futuristic, super speedy railway. A novel way to swiftly convey between urban centres in an experience that’s almost science fiction. You’re thinking hyperloop, you know you are. Yet, this is no pipe dream of space-faring billionaires. This happened, and it happened in the nineteenth century, under the congested streets of New York. Welcome to the Beach Pneumatic Railway.
Commerce, not commuters
Decades before New York City had its subway, it had the Beach Pneumatic Railway – an improbable Victorian hyperloop and the world’s first air-powered freight line. Long before mass transit and MetroCards, it was parcels, not passengers, that justified the digging. Beach’s concept was elegant: use compressed air to propel cylindrical containers full of goods beneath the city’s clogged streets. Freight straight to your basement — what could possibly go wrong?
Only later, as an attention-grabbing flourish, did Beach install a single luxury passenger car. It was as much a showpiece as a prototype. His token nod to human comfort was made in a world designed for packages. His real ambition was to shift commerce, not commuters. As Matthew Algeo makes clear in New York’s Secret Subway: The Underground Genius of Alfred Beach and the Origins of Mass Transit, the pneumatic dream was about moving stuff more efficiently, not giving people a joyride.
Statistics are a load of…
Anyone seeing parallels with London’s main train system is not hallucinating. London in the nineteenth century faced the same issues as its American counterpart. In the 1860s, Manhattan’s streets were a seething mass of horses, carts, and chaos. Freight movement above ground was slow, filthy, and — if you believed the statistics — knee-deep in the by-products of ten thousand horses. “A horse can produce more than 30 pounds [14kg] of faeces and four gallons [15 litres] of urine every day,” Algeo notes, speaking to an online forum about his research. Beach saw salvation in subterranean air pressure. The Victorian equivalent of next-day delivery — minus the smell. Although with all that fluid being produced at street level, one questions the wisdom of travelling underneath.
The book also tells the story of Beach versus Boss Tweed, a morality play of clean innovation crushed by dirty politics. Tweed’s Tammany Hall machine (town council in British terms), backed by the streetcar magnates, made sure no rival mode of freight or passenger transport could flourish without tribute. Beach dug in secret, built in miniature, and briefly ran his tube between Warren and Murray Streets — a hundred yards of polished brass, velvet seats, and the hiss of compressed ambition.
Hyped out by hyperactive politics
Despite his name, Beach had no intention of heading seaside — not even as far as Coney Island. His tunnel wasn’t about leisure; it was logistics. When visitors marvelled at the ornate station and the whirring machinery, they were witnessing the birth of what could have been the first modern freight distribution system, hidden beneath their feet. Today, freight railways in New York are on a far grander scale – and very much more above ground. The famed “High Line” on the East Side of Manhattan is now a celebrated urban park. However, lines like the equally grandly named New York & Atlantic Railroad are very much extant today, albeit not penetrating into Manhattan.
“People think of it as a curiosity,” says Algeo, author of six titles, including this cornucopia of the curio that is New York’s first subway. “But Beach proved that underground transport worked — for freight as much as for people.” In the end, politics suffocated the project as effectively as the lack of air in its tunnels. The dream collapsed, but not before proving the concept: freight was, and remains, the beating heart of any railway — no matter how it’s powered, packaged, or pressurised.
Algeo’s New York’s Secret Subway is a story of invention, obstruction, and hot air — quite literally. It’s also a timely reminder that before the commuters came the cargo, and that every rail network, from the steam age to the hyperloop, begins with one simple, unglamorous question: how do we move the goods? The book is far from underground. It’s available now, from all good bookstores – even those on the platform at subway stations.