Arkansas Valley Interurban Railway
American railroad from 1910 to 1938
The Arkansas Valley Interurban Railway (AVI) was an interurban railway that operated in Kansas, United States, from 1910 to 1938 for passengers and to 1942 for freight, running between Wichita, Newton, and Hutchinson. It operated a small fleet of electrically powered passenger and freight equipment. Service was suspended during World War II and never resumed, except on a small portion owned by the Hutchinson and Northern Railroad which is still in operation. (2020)
History
Proposal
The AVI, as it emerged, was only a portion of a proposal in 1910 for a large network of interurban lines focusing on Wichita, running passenger and freight services mainly in competition with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway and expecting to feed freight to the St. Louis–San Francisco Railway and the Midland Valley Railroad, also to Wichita's new transcontinental line the Kansas City, Mexico and Orient Railway when that was finished – it never was.
The main line was to have been from Wichita to Salina, which two cities lacked any direct passenger railroad service between them – although the line would have run closely parallel with the Santa Fe to Newton, then the Missouri Pacific Railroad to McPherson and finally the Union Pacific Railroad to Salina.
From this line, another one would have run from Van Arsdale Junction (south-west of Newton) to Hutchinson and Great Bend, again closely paralleling Santa Fe lines. From Hutchinson, a third line would have run direct to Hudson and would have given rail access to a portion of territory that lacked it.
To the south of Wichita, a line would have run to Oxford via Belle Plaine, with a short branch to Wellington from the latter place. At Oxford, it would have joined a circular service running Oxford - Winfield - Arkansas City - Geuda Springs- Oxford which would have subsumed a pre-existing little interurban between Winfield and Arkansas City called the Southwestern Interurban Railway of Kansas.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Arkansas Valley Interurban Railway” is american railroad from 1910 to 1938. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Arkansas, Valley and Interurban, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4791899. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1910, 1938, 1942 and 2020.
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This entry incorporates text from “Arkansas Valley Interurban Railway” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.