Trams, Trolleys and Streetcars

This is a replica, built in 1930, of a late-1800s cable car:

Nowadays we associate the cable car only with San Francisco, but there were cable car installations in thirty different US cities, and Chicago had the largest.

The cable could not cross a bridge that opened, so three tunnels had to be dug under the Chicago River to allow cable cars into downtown. And to avoid having cable lines cross each other, the cable cars had to run left-handed on State St. and on Wabash in the middle of the Loop.

more details here