History
"with a projected travel time of ten hours" - using 100 year old technology
The Chicago – New York Electric Air Line Railroad proposed in 1905 to build a beeline-straight electric railroad 743 miles long between Chicago and New York.
Once completed, the service would have seen passenger coaches pulled by third rail electric locomotives at a maximum speed of 100 MPH, with a projected travel time of ten hours. (For comparison, the 20th Century Limited when inaugurated in 1902 took twenty hours to make the trip over an 800 mile route, and 15.5 hours in later years; while today the highway trip takes 12.1 hours over a 787 mile route.)
