The thriving railway traffic of Chicago had grown so thick and constant that many in the city were worried for the safety of visitors to the coming year’s Columbian Exposition. A Harper’s Weekly reporter visiting the town in September observed that “the slaughter and mangling and maiming of the citizens by the railroads go on, and is unparalleled elsewhere in the world. The people of Chicago may be said to know that each rising of the sun ushers in a day in which a human life will be taken by some train of cars, so nearly do the murders in each year approach the sum of one a day. And that is saying nothing of the daily mangling.” The hopes of the city lay in moving the depots back from the center and connecting them with a circular railroad—”an elevated road, most persons predict.”