History of Trams - Horses To Electric Power

Horses To Electric Power

As many city streets were not paved at that time, normal carriages pulled by horses were often hindered by wet, muddy, or snowy conditions. One of the advantages of the horsecar tram over earlier forms of transit was the low rolling resistance of metal wheels on steel rails, allowing animals to haul a greater load for a given effort even in poor weather conditions. Problems included the fact that each animal could only work so many hours per day, had to be housed, groomed, fed and cared for day in and day out, and produced prodigious amounts of manure, which the streetcar company had to dispose of. Since a typical horse pulled a car for perhaps a dozen miles a day and worked for four or five hours, many systems needed ten or more horses for each horsecar. Electric trams largely replaced animal power in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. New York City closed its last horsecar line in 1917. The last regular mule-drawn streetcar in the U.S., in Sulphur Rock, Arkansas, closed in 1926. During World War II some old horse cars were temporarily returned to service to help conserve fuel. A mule-powered line in Celaya, Mexico, operated until 1956. Horse-drawn trams still operate as a tourist attraction along the promenade in Douglas, Isle of Man. There is also a small line on Main Street at Disney World, outside Orlando, Florida. A horse-drawn service 1300m long operates every 40 minutes at Victor Harbor, South Australia daily, with 20-minute services during tourist seasons, between the mainland and Granite Island across a 630m causeway. It uses double deck trams, and Clydesdale horses, and runs year round.

Trams subsequently developed in numerous cities, including London, Southampton, Berlin, Paris, Seoul, Kyoto, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Melbourne. Faster and more comfortable than the omnibus, trams had a high cost of operation because they were pulled by horses. That is why mechanical drives were rapidly developed, with steam power in 1873, and electricity after 1881, when Siemens presented the electric drive at the International Electricity Exhibition in Paris.

The convenience and economy of electricity resulted in its rapid adoption once the technical problems of production and transmission of electricity were solved. As early as 1834, Thomas Davenport, a Vermont blacksmith, had invented a battery-powered electric motor which he later patented. The following year he used it to operate a small model electric car on a short section of track four feet in diameter. The first prototype of the electric tram was developed by Russian engineer Fyodor Pirotsky, who modified a horse tram to be powered by electricity. The invention was tested in 1880 in Saint Petersburg, Russia. In 1881, Werner von Siemens opened the world's first electric tram line in Lichterfelde near Berlin, Germany. For some time the German word for tram was simply "die Elektrische".

Parallel developments were occurring during the same period in the United States, where Frank J. Sprague and others contributed to inventions, including a system for collecting electricity from overhead wires. A spring-loaded trolley pole, invented in the US in 1885 by Charles Van Depoele, used a wheel to travel along the wire. Frank Sprague improved the designs, and in late 1887 and early 1888, using this trolley system, Sprague installed the first successful large electric street railway system, the Richmond Union Passenger Railway in Richmond, Virginia. By 1889, over a hundred electric railways incorporating Sprague's equipment had been begun or planned on several continents.

In Japan, the Kyoto Electric railroad was the first tram system, starting operation in 1895. By 1932, the network had grown to 82 railway companies in 65 cities, with a total network length of 1,479 km (919 mi). By the 1960s the tram had generally died out in Japan.

As for Ireland, from 1898 a tram service was in operation in Cork City but was discontinued in 1931 owing to the increased popularity of buses. There have been campaigns for the introduction of a service similar to the Luas in Dublin. but so far there has been little support for the idea, as the Dublin Bus service is extremely popular.