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I was doing some wandering about through Wikipedia, and discovered a couple of very interesting under-city railroads.
The first of these is the London Pneumatic Despatch Company, founded in 1859 and operated from 1863 to 1874 . Steampunk enthusiasts take note. This was an attempt at building a mail-carrying network that was literally a series of tubes. The initial line consisted of a tube a bit over two feet wide and tall, and the cars were large iron boxes on wheels with rubber gaskets to seal with the side of the tube. An attendant would toss mailbags into the cars at one end of the line in Euston Station, close the airtight door, adjust the airgates to duct air from the steam-powered 21-foot centrifugal blower into the tube, and blow the cars (at speeds of up to 40 MPH) through the tube to the North West District Post Office a third of a mile away, with its impending arrival heralded by the ringing of a telegraphically-controlled bell. When it was time for the cars to return, the attendant at the other end would ring a return bell, and the Euston Station attendant would adjust the airgates the other way to suck the cars back through the tunnel.
Additional lines were constructed with somewhat larger cars, and were able to reach up to 60 MPH. The first of these went from Euston to Holborn, and was opened in 1865 with the chairman of the company riding in the first capsule. A further line from Holborn to the General Post Office at St. Martin's le Grand was opened in 1869, and the Post Office tried using it over the next five years and then determined it wasn't really worth the bother -- the time savings wasn't significant enough to matter, and apparently the cars sometimes stuck in the tunnels.
The second of these railroads is the Chicago Tunnel Company, which started in 1899 because Chicago let Illinois Telephone and Telegraph put tunnels under downtown to put in phone lines, but wouldn't let them put in manholes to unspool the cables. So they decided to make the tunnels a little larger than originally planned, and put in a small railway to first cart away the dug-out clay and then to carry in the cable spools. It sounds like they didn't tell the city about this change of plans initially, and dug the first 16 miles (!) of tunnels from the basement of a saloon, carting the dirt away after midnight.
By 1903, they realized that having a small railroad under Chicago might be useful for other things, and got permission to carry freight and mail as well. The system grew, and various things happened -- the employees unionized, and the company fired them all, went bankrupt, was then sold to another company, which then sold the telephone operations to AT&T. Nonetheless, by 1914 they had about 60 miles of track under Chicago, covering pretty much every street in a roughly 12-block-square area and the neighboring railroad yards. On this track they operated 132 electric locomotives and over 2000 freight cars, carrying 275,000 tons of merchandise and 325,000 tons of construction debris, coal, and ashes in 1914.
At that point, they had freight-elevator connections with 26 railroads and a couple of boat lines, and tunnel connections to 36 industries including all of Chicago's big department stores. They delivered coal to 22 buildings, and hauled away the burned ashes and clinker. And, when new buildings were being built downtown, it was generally cheaper to dump the excavated dirt down to tunnel railcars rather than hauling it away through the streets, so they still hauled quite a lot of dirt even though they weren't building more tunnels. The dirt that became Grant Park and the land under the Field Museum and area around it came through the tunnels -- in 1929, they hauled an estimated 75,000 carloads of it.
They also had a fascinating second business during this time -- selling the air from the tunnels, which stayed between 47 and 57 degrees Fahrenheit year-round, to a number of buildings in the area, notably theatres. In the summer, this was used for air conditioning, and in the winter, this saved a substantial amount of coal compared to warming up Chicago winter air from outside.
In the 1940s, they started losing the coal supply business to trucks and to natural-gas heating, though it was still more convenient to send the coal ashes out through the tunnels so they kept a lot of that business. Although the railway was still hauling quite a bit of merchandise and excavation debris and ashes in the 1950s, the holding company went bankrupt in 1956, and the railway was formally abandoned in 1959.
There was one last footnote to the tunnels many years later: the Great Chicago Flood. In 1991, a new piling that was part of a bridge repair across the Chicago River came too close to one of the tunnel walls, and cracked it. The seepage of clay and water into the tunnel was unfortunately not considered an emergency, and the city started a formal bidding process for repairs. Six months later, in the early morning hours of April 13th, 1992, the seepage suddenly became a flood, and by noon dozens of buildings were surprised to have their basements flooded. Over 100 buildings lost utility service, water seeped into the subway systems, and a major expressway flooded, creating the largest disaster in Chicago since the 1871 fire. It took six days to plug the leak and a month to clean up the water, with estimated damages around two billion dollars. Battles with insurance companies over whether this was a "leak" (covered by insurance) or a "flood" (not covered) lasted for years. The eventual conclusion that it was a leak, and so apparently many residents call it the Great Chicago Leak.
The leak itself is apparently quite a story. Per the Wikipedia article, it wasn't immediately clear where the basement-flooding water was coming from; and the city initially shut down water mains on the theory that they were the source. The first clue to the real problem apparently came when a radio news reporter monitoring a police-radio scanner heard security personnel at one building reporting that the water in their basement had fish in it. He drove to the building, and on the way saw water swirling near a nearby bridge piling like it was going down a bathtub drain. The initial attempts to plug the hole reportedly involved truckloads of rocks, cement, and old mattresses (!), and were unsuccessful. The city lowered the level of the Chicago river by opening downstream locks in an attempt to slow the leak. Eventually it was stopped by drilling holes to the tunnels nearby and dumping a specially-designed quick-setting concrete mixture into them -- it was so quick-setting that the concrete mixers got police escorts to get to the site.
The first of these is the London Pneumatic Despatch Company, founded in 1859 and operated from 1863 to 1874 . Steampunk enthusiasts take note. This was an attempt at building a mail-carrying network that was literally a series of tubes. The initial line consisted of a tube a bit over two feet wide and tall, and the cars were large iron boxes on wheels with rubber gaskets to seal with the side of the tube. An attendant would toss mailbags into the cars at one end of the line in Euston Station, close the airtight door, adjust the airgates to duct air from the steam-powered 21-foot centrifugal blower into the tube, and blow the cars (at speeds of up to 40 MPH) through the tube to the North West District Post Office a third of a mile away, with its impending arrival heralded by the ringing of a telegraphically-controlled bell. When it was time for the cars to return, the attendant at the other end would ring a return bell, and the Euston Station attendant would adjust the airgates the other way to suck the cars back through the tunnel.
Additional lines were constructed with somewhat larger cars, and were able to reach up to 60 MPH. The first of these went from Euston to Holborn, and was opened in 1865 with the chairman of the company riding in the first capsule. A further line from Holborn to the General Post Office at St. Martin's le Grand was opened in 1869, and the Post Office tried using it over the next five years and then determined it wasn't really worth the bother -- the time savings wasn't significant enough to matter, and apparently the cars sometimes stuck in the tunnels.
The second of these railroads is the Chicago Tunnel Company, which started in 1899 because Chicago let Illinois Telephone and Telegraph put tunnels under downtown to put in phone lines, but wouldn't let them put in manholes to unspool the cables. So they decided to make the tunnels a little larger than originally planned, and put in a small railway to first cart away the dug-out clay and then to carry in the cable spools. It sounds like they didn't tell the city about this change of plans initially, and dug the first 16 miles (!) of tunnels from the basement of a saloon, carting the dirt away after midnight.
By 1903, they realized that having a small railroad under Chicago might be useful for other things, and got permission to carry freight and mail as well. The system grew, and various things happened -- the employees unionized, and the company fired them all, went bankrupt, was then sold to another company, which then sold the telephone operations to AT&T. Nonetheless, by 1914 they had about 60 miles of track under Chicago, covering pretty much every street in a roughly 12-block-square area and the neighboring railroad yards. On this track they operated 132 electric locomotives and over 2000 freight cars, carrying 275,000 tons of merchandise and 325,000 tons of construction debris, coal, and ashes in 1914.
At that point, they had freight-elevator connections with 26 railroads and a couple of boat lines, and tunnel connections to 36 industries including all of Chicago's big department stores. They delivered coal to 22 buildings, and hauled away the burned ashes and clinker. And, when new buildings were being built downtown, it was generally cheaper to dump the excavated dirt down to tunnel railcars rather than hauling it away through the streets, so they still hauled quite a lot of dirt even though they weren't building more tunnels. The dirt that became Grant Park and the land under the Field Museum and area around it came through the tunnels -- in 1929, they hauled an estimated 75,000 carloads of it.
They also had a fascinating second business during this time -- selling the air from the tunnels, which stayed between 47 and 57 degrees Fahrenheit year-round, to a number of buildings in the area, notably theatres. In the summer, this was used for air conditioning, and in the winter, this saved a substantial amount of coal compared to warming up Chicago winter air from outside.
In the 1940s, they started losing the coal supply business to trucks and to natural-gas heating, though it was still more convenient to send the coal ashes out through the tunnels so they kept a lot of that business. Although the railway was still hauling quite a bit of merchandise and excavation debris and ashes in the 1950s, the holding company went bankrupt in 1956, and the railway was formally abandoned in 1959.
There was one last footnote to the tunnels many years later: the Great Chicago Flood. In 1991, a new piling that was part of a bridge repair across the Chicago River came too close to one of the tunnel walls, and cracked it. The seepage of clay and water into the tunnel was unfortunately not considered an emergency, and the city started a formal bidding process for repairs. Six months later, in the early morning hours of April 13th, 1992, the seepage suddenly became a flood, and by noon dozens of buildings were surprised to have their basements flooded. Over 100 buildings lost utility service, water seeped into the subway systems, and a major expressway flooded, creating the largest disaster in Chicago since the 1871 fire. It took six days to plug the leak and a month to clean up the water, with estimated damages around two billion dollars. Battles with insurance companies over whether this was a "leak" (covered by insurance) or a "flood" (not covered) lasted for years. The eventual conclusion that it was a leak, and so apparently many residents call it the Great Chicago Leak.
The leak itself is apparently quite a story. Per the Wikipedia article, it wasn't immediately clear where the basement-flooding water was coming from; and the city initially shut down water mains on the theory that they were the source. The first clue to the real problem apparently came when a radio news reporter monitoring a police-radio scanner heard security personnel at one building reporting that the water in their basement had fish in it. He drove to the building, and on the way saw water swirling near a nearby bridge piling like it was going down a bathtub drain. The initial attempts to plug the hole reportedly involved truckloads of rocks, cement, and old mattresses (!), and were unsuccessful. The city lowered the level of the Chicago river by opening downstream locks in an attempt to slow the leak. Eventually it was stopped by drilling holes to the tunnels nearby and dumping a specially-designed quick-setting concrete mixture into them -- it was so quick-setting that the concrete mixers got police escorts to get to the site.