A Sprague Invention: Multiple Unit Train Control [History]

The group of 12 men gathering in the basement of the 1892 construction site didn´t look like anything special. They just seemed like some hard-working types in rough suspendered pants and with a hat or cap on their heads. But they were special since some of them had been part of the team that had completed the world´s first major commercially successful electric street railway system in Richmond, Virginia, four years earlier. Now part of the Sprague Electric Elevator Company, they were facing a new challenge in the brand new Postal Telegraph building rising in New York City at the intersection of Murray Street and Broadway. Their task was to install what would be, at that time, the most advanced bank of electric elevators in the world, two express and four locals rising 14 stories above the city.