Louisville generally has a plethora of spatial resources that allow you to map out our history. Sanborn fire insurance maps allow you to recreate our old built environment as far back as the late 1800s. Redlining maps from the Home Owners Loan Corporation are utilized to connect early 1900s residential segregation to a litany of social, political, economic, and public health outcomes, and so on.
These resources are incredibly important, but there are still some knowledge gaps. These items may exist only in physical form in archives that everyone may not have access to, or have since been lost on abandoned web pages. One of these gaps exists for spatial information relating to Louisville’s old passenger rail infrastructure. You are able to find a few maps online, but they are often dispersed across many websites and/or lack detail or interactivity. This is especially true if you are trying to find maps with individual rail lines or similar details included, with seemingly only one map existing online.
Rails to the Past is a project that seeks to create a spatial repository that fills this gap in online resources, creating a variety of maps that allow you to explore our city’s passenger rail history. This will be an ongoing project, with new maps and resources added as time goes on. Significant updates may require their own Field Notes articles, and some analysis may be performed in the future that also warrants separate articles. This first batch of information will focus on our streetcar system specifically, with maps showing the network evolve over time, specific years with individual lines displayed, and failed proposals to reintroduce light rail post-1948.
For some brief context: the city’s streetcar system operated in some form from 1838 (via mule-drawn cars) until 1948, with the last service being run to Churchill Downs on May 1st, 1948. Starting as a service to connect Portland to Louisville, our streetcar network would eventually serve most of the city’s pre-merger boundaries. This was also adjoined by interurban and intercity connections linking Louisville to our neighboring towns and far-away cities. In 1913, 62 million passengers got around the city by streetcar. This is when the city had a population of around 225,000. For comparison, we now have a population of around 640,000 and a public transit ridership of around 5.7 million in fiscal year 2023.
Below you can find the Rails to the Past Data Atlas, which contains the maps that have been created so far. These maps come from a variety of sources, such as old city directories, planning reports, archival maps, tourist guides, and the book “Louisville’s Street Railways” by Biemer et al. This book is the definitive resource on our old rail infrastructure, so it is a great book to acquire if you are interested in diving into this further. One of the authors, George H. Yater, is the reason this project is possible since he donated so many of his resources to the University of Louisville Archives and Special Collections. In addition, Jake Berman from Studio53 inspired this project and helped with finding initial resources.
Click here to open the data atlas in its own tab.
Main image source: University of Louisville Photographic Archives
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