An unusual and widely unknown transit experiment took place right here in Cambridge, known as the Meigs Elevated Railway. Born in Tennessee in 1840, Josiah Vincent Meigs was an inventor; spending most of his life inventing and patenting devices from furniture to guns. Throughout his life, he was interested in making public transportation better and more efficient and wanted to remove the “clutter” of elevated railways in cities. From this, he came up with his proposal, the Meigs Elevated Railway.
With an emphasis on safety, comfort and convenience, the track structure consisted of two rails, one mounted above the other on a line of supports. The single post system would remove roughly four fifths of the structure that darkened streets under other elevated systems of the time. One pair of wheels were angled at 45 degrees and carried the weight of the train; while the other pair, mounted horizontally inside the locomotive, gripped the upper rail and provided driving power. The cars were designed cylindrical to diminish wind resistance and the interiors lined with fireproof material.
In 1881, to encourage capital investment and fulfill terms of an earlier charter (which had over 64,000 signatures), Meigs and his friends headquartered at 225 Bridge Street (now Monsignor O’Brien Hwy) and raised $200,000 to build an experimental track. A 227’ line of elevated track was built parallel to Bridge Street with varied elevation changes and curves to test the new system. In 1886, engineers deemed the elevated system “practical and safe”.
Sadly, it was neither capital nor legislation which finally sank the Meigs Elevated, it was the coming of electricity. While the Meigs system could be fitted to run on electrical power, Josiah believed that electric-powered trains were too expensive and could not provide the speed the system needed. Further setbacks occurred when vandalism and the West End Elevated Railway became direct competition and the Meigs took its final run in 1894. Meigs later sold his charter rights in 1896 and his dreams for were disbanded. In failing health from his Civil War injuries, Josiah Vincent Meigs died from a stroke on November 14, 1907 in Charlestown, Massachusetts.
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