Chicago's first "L" runs: steam and four wooden coaches, 39th Street to Congress in fourteen minutes

Chicago in 1892 was a city straining at its own seams — a million people crammed into a street grid served by cable cars that shut down every night for maintenance. On June 6, 1892, a steam locomotive hauling four wooden coaches pulled out of 39th Street station on the Chicago and South Side Rapid Transit Railroad, carried its passengers to the Congress Street Terminal in fourteen minutes, and ran on track that the Green Line still uses today. The "L" had opened. Within a year, trains were running to the grounds of the World's Columbian Exposition at Jackson Park, and the city that built the thing was already starting to grow around it…