The Mystery of the Creeping Rail
A phantom force is physically shifting the interurban line's tracks toward Tacoma, baffling engineers and causing havoc with the electrical system.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The contact, or third rail, used for transmitting electric power from Tacoma to Seattle for operating the cars of the Puget Sound Electric railway is alive. It is alive in two senses of the word. It is alive in that it carries 600 volts of electrical energy, and it is alive in that it crawls to the south, breaks the insulators which support it, tears up ties from their snug places in the roadbed and breaks the contact of the soldered bonds which join the ends of the rails. Since the company inaugurated this system it has been generally known that the third rail is 'alive' from an electrical point of view, but not until recently did it become known that the steel rails actually had the properties of life. Such is the case, however, and the engineering department of the road is finding it a difficult matter to overcome this activity. Through some cause unknown to the company, the rails are coming toward Tacoma, very slowly it is true, but surely. This constant shifting causes the rails to reach on into the highway at the road crossings, necessitating the cutting off of the rail. Chief Engineer Boswell has been working for some time trying to locate the cause of the phenomenon and to find a remedy for the same, but has been unable to do so. At one time it was thought the movement was due to the contraction of the rail, but why it should always be toward Tacoma is more than anyone connected with the road is able to explain.
“It is alive in two senses of the word. It is alive in that it carries 600 volts of electrical energy, and it is alive in that it crawls to the south.”
While this was likely the result of thermal expansion or gravity-induced creep on sloped trackage, the personification of 'the road moving toward Tacoma' captures the city's 20th-century obsession with growth and infrastructure expansion. Modern Tacoma still grapples with the permanent impacts of these early transit lines on the landscape.
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