Excerpt from Philadelphia's Rapid Transit: Being an Account of the Construction and Equipment of the Market Street Subway-Elevated and Its Place in the Great System and Service of the Philadelphia Rapid Transit Company The topography of Philadelphia was such that its surface travel has been taken care of by a perfect network of tracks, aggregating over 600 miles in length, so that throughout the central part of the city every 400 feet finds a street occupied by a street railway track. The streets are narrow, and with a grade crossing every 400 feet, the rate at which cars could be safely moved was necessarily slower than prevailed in other cities. Many L lines had been established in order to take the public directly from their homes to their places of business without change of cars, and the result was a congestion of travel in the central portion of the city, which cried for remedy. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.