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Saline County Interurban Line |
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Harrisburg was the center of a bustling interurban trolley line, that ran from downtown Eldorado, into Muddy, Wasson, Beulah Heights, through downtown Harrisburg, Dorrisville, Ledford and into downtown Carrier Mills.citation needed It was an off branch of the Cairo- Vinceness Railway. The line was established and operated by the Southern Illinois Railway and Power Company, which erected the first electrical generating plant in Muddy, IL.
It was sold, before its abandonment, to the Central Illinois Public Service Company. The interurban line lasted from 1913 to 1933 when it was abandoned.7 It lasted only 20 years, but was the main mode of transportation between the three largest towns in the county for many miners and the general public. The automobile quickly replaced the street car as the major mode of transportation in 1910. Soon the construction of hard roads was conducted in the early 1920s. This was death to the Interurban line and eventually the entire Railroad itself. The Cairo-Vinceness Railway system was taken up in the 1980s and replaced by a bike trail in 1996. In central Illinois a vast interurban network went from St. Louis, Missouri to the state capital of Springfield, up to Peoria and eastward to Decatur, Danville and Champaign-Urbana; this system was very similar. Many interurban lines sprawled across the country during that time connecting small towns and major cities with cheap transportation. Ohio and Indiana had the largest amount of tracks of any other state.After the decommission of the Interurban line in 1933, Harrisburg opened the Harrisburg-Dorrisville Bus Co., which was a private predecessor bus company to the current Rides Mass Transit District which was opened in 1980.8
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