Omaha Daily Bee Newspaper, September 6, 1903, Page 25

. How the Trolley Helps Civilization OSTON, BSept. b5.—(Special Corre- spondence of The Bee.)—~The aver- age traveler on his daily journey to and from the office, or on his holiday outing to the country or, if he be one of the pioneer long-distance trol- ley trippers, on his ride from Chicago to Milwaukee, from New York to Boston or Philadelphia and Baltimore, from Indianap- olis to Columbus, from Seattle to Tacoma, from Dallas to Fort Worth, from Buffalo to Niagara, from Los Angeles to Long Beach, or whatever his route may be, hardly realizes the wonderful development that has put at his disposal the American trolley car. Like many good things, it is not always fully appreciated, perhaps, by those to whom it is most famillar; but as a curfous result of the American invasion which has opened the eyes of Europe to things it never even imagined before, there is a sudden determination abroad to adopt our “people’s automobile,” as It has been called. Electric transportation has become per- haps tho most distinctively American fea- ture of our everyday life—the thing that has been brought to its highest develop- ment in this country and that foreigners are coming here to study for the advantage of other lands. America gave the world the telegraph, the telephone and the clec- tric light as its first great contributions to the age of clectricity, which has been the age of most marked progress in all time. Then came electric motive power, and the American trolley car, which is its ¢common- est development, bids fair to be as useful in its way, and to play almost as import- ant a part in the spread of civilization and the march of progress as the earlier utili- zations of the mysterious “fluid.” A few days ago it was announced in England that a subcommittee of the royal commission of London street trafic would come to this country in the fall to study the street rail- way systems of the principal cities—an ac- tion that may have resulted from the re- port of the speclal correspondent of the London Times who has been Investigating American railways and who wrote, after he got home: “For a variety of reasons which buys them now-a-days 1s t(he investor rather than the venturesome speculator who alone dared to take them up when they were first put on the market. Of course, “straw' roads are still bu It by pro- mote who look for their profits in the construction work, which {s done at ex- orbitant rates by concerns they themselves own, and with no thought of making the transportation side of the business pay; but judiciously located and operated lines have established themselves in real invest ment succe In fact the state of Mas- sachusetts, which has always been re- garded as ultra-conservative in such mat- ters, has admitted the bonds of eleciric roads that meet certain financial require- ments to the list of securities which sav- ings banks may buy with their funds, put- ting them into the ‘gilt edge” class at once. TIE TROLLEY AT ITS BEST. CONSULTING THE DISPATCHER'S OFFICE Up-to-date trolley roads are no longer run haphazard, but have adopted all City, was a fallure financially and was soon discontinued. It was ten years before another attempt at street car transportation was made and then New York was again the field of operation, but this trial was successful and in 1852 the second permanent road was established in Cambridge, just across the Charles river from Doston. Meantime, bowever, an enterprising Yankee had for some time operated a single car over a track between Cambridge and the next town, SBomerville, His car was a discontinued steam road coach that had been in use on the Fitchburg line and was light enough to be drawn by a pair of horses. At first it was drawn from Boston to Somerville on the end of one of the regular Fitchburg trains and then picked up there and carried on by horse power to Cambridge, but later it resigned from the steam road service altogether. There is no A train of passenger coaches and ‘‘combination cars'’ on the Seattle-Tacoma Interurban. I need not stay to discuss, tramways are still more highly developed on the other side of the Atlantic than on our own." The trolley seems to have come to stay, not only here, but in Europe and Asia, Be- sides showing itself a practical and satis- factory means of furnishing rapid transit in great cities it has proved a most im- portant factor in local transportation throughout the countryside. Its chief func- tion is not to supplant steam roads, but rather to extend facilities for travel where the steam roads do not go, penetrating the less populous districts in which the more expensive manner of operation would not be practicable, but which, until the coming of the trolley had no means of getting from place to place better than the one- horse chaise or “Concord coach.” Most of us can remember when the first electric car made its appearance, about sixteen years ago; now the slender wire of the *“broomstick train” stretches<from Boston to Seattle, from the far end of the Michi- gan peninsula to the Mexican border—21,503 miles of it, or enough to reach four-fifths of the way around the earth. A recently published bulletin of the census bureau shows that where there were only 126 electrie roads in 18%0 there are now 747—an increase of nearly 600 per cent; and in the meantime the number of roads using animal traction has fallen off almost 2 per cent; while the cable—devised before the advent of the trolley for large cities when their traffic became too heavy to be moved conveniently and speedily with horses—is employed today only by twenty- six companies and steam has disappeared almost entirely as a motive power for local transportation, The trolley has bean gradually but stead- fly taking its place among the thoroughly established institutions of modern t'mes along with the steam railroads in g n- eral transportation-—-an indication of which appears in the position that is now given ealectrical securities, placing them prac- tically on a par. from tie conservative in- westment point of view, with the older line of transportution stocks, while the man who Electrical transportation systems are conducted now-a-days on the scale that only steam roads aspired to a few years ago; in fact, the steam roads themselves realize the permanence and appreciate the usefulness of the trolley and a number of them are taking it up for operating sub- sidiary divisions of their lines. In at least one case—that of the well known Stone and Webster companies—the spread of the trolley has called into being an en- tirely new business profession, which finances, constructs, equips and operates electric lines, thus bringing all the je- culiar needs of this new tield of transpor- tation enterprise under centralized supervi- sion skilled in all branches of the busi- ness from the selection of locations to the earnings of dividends and supplying the best possible service, The first American railroad train was run fn 1827; the first American horse car—and it was the first horse car in the world—- made its appearance in 1831; the first trolley was operated in 1887, The first horse street street railway, which was in New York history of this interesting enterprise, but it is one that never paid a franchise, and it is cited as the first great street railway monopoly. Before the middle of the last century the only means of local transportation in citles was by omnibus. The old Broadway 'bus driver was, in his time, the autocrat of the highway in New York, but when it was proposed to lay street car tracks in that crowded thoroughfare there was a general protest on the ground that the al- ready congested and frequently blockaded traffic would be stopped altogether by vehi- cles that were unable to dodge trucks and drays and pursue their course wherever the stream might lead them. As it turned out, however, the cars proved of great assist- ance in keeping street traffic in orderly motion, besides providing a more adequata means of transportation; and that settled once for all the value of the street car in a city even under the most adverse con- ditions. It was impossible, though, to make horse cars pay in the smaller places; few towns had, of themselves, sufficlent population ON A PRIVATE RIGHT-OF-WAY. the safety measures of steam raillways. to support a car line, and horses could not make good enough time and neither horses nor passengers had sufficient en- durance for very long runs. 8o the peo- ple of the rural districts had to depend on their own vehicles, or on ramshackle stages that rattled and bounced back and forth at trdin time, to “'get to the village.'" At the first gsound of the trolley gong the farmer ralsed his volce in lamentation; old Dobbin, whose ncrves were proot against every form of human persuasion, would, it was predicted, develop into a menuce to the public safety if ever he sighted the “broomstick train;'" the peace and quiet of the country life, the picture esqueness of the rambling highways, wou!d go forever with the advent of the electric car. But the trolley came, nevertheless, and now the tremendous increase in track- age—from barely 1,200 miles In 1890 to nearly 22,000 miles in 1902—is largely in the country districts, and the farmer, always more progressive than we of the city give him credit for being, Is crying for more, The statistical figures in which the cen- sus takers tell the story of the trolley are almost startling. More than 60,000 cars are in use on the street rallway systems of the country, as distinguished from the steam roads, and last ar they carried nearly 5,000,000,000 ‘“‘fare’ passengers, to say nothing of those who rode on free transfers, That Is an average of sixty- three rides in twelve months for every man, woman and child in the United States —almost double the number of rides per inhabitant in 1890, Somewhere about $1,250,- 000,000 are invested In this great branch of the transportation business, which employs 130,600 men on an annual payroll approach- ing $50,000,000. Yower equivalent to the strength of 1,204,238 horses was used to op- erate the electric cars of the country, which ran a total of 1,099,2566,744 miles— about the distance that would be covered in six round trips from the earth to the sun, Elevated roads and subways have been built to meet the special necessities of large cities, and all manner of freak rallways have been devised, like the single-rall over- head road just completed in Germany, or the submarine trolley, which promises to be one of the curlosities of the next year or two. But the good, plain American trol- ley car, constantly improved as experieince shows means qf fmprovement, expanding fts usefulness from mere local service to long-distance travel, from the half-hour's ride to an all-night trip on a sleeper, from passenger traflic to malil, fteight baggage and express carrying, remains the standard of the world. It Is as useful to the sight- geer of the pyramids of Egypt as to the business man or shopper In any of our cities; It carries the mail, sprinkles the streets, and .even in some parts of the world—in the City of Mexico, for example— painted in somber black, bears the dead to thelr last resting place; if there be water power convenient, it depends on neithes coal nor wood to get along. (Continued on Page Fifteen.) Here, over long stretches of splendid roadbed, the trolley vutspeeds the fastest steam train,