Published bi-monthly by the Canadian Railroad Historical Association Publie tous les deux mois par l'Association Canadienml1e d'Histoire Ferroviaire 166 ISSN 0008-4875 CANADIAN RAIL Postal Pennlt No. 40066621 PUBLISHED BI-MONTHLY BY THE CANADIAN RAILROAD HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION TABLE OF CONTENTS THE SESQUICENTENNIAL OF THE HORSE CAR ERA ...................... FRED F. ANGUS ............... 167 FRONT CO VER: The corner ofPortage and Main in Winnipeg during the 1880s, with two horsecars of the Winnipeg Street Railway. Winnipeg was the westernmost Canadian city to have horsecars, and the first routes were inaugurated in 1882. About this time, the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway set off a land boom, and it was logical that a street railway would be started in the rapidly-developing city. Compare this view with the two photographs on page 203 that show the same location. For a time in the early 1890s there were four tracks on Main street, as the new electric line coexisted with the older horsecar route for a f ew years. This painting hung in one of the offices of the Winnipeg Electric Railway, and was later acquired by the uncle of the author and presented to him in 1964. BELOW A drawing ofan open horse car on St. Denis street in Montreal in 1887. This drawing is based on the photograph that appears on page 197. Cars like this were very popular in the summer, and were used as trailers behind electric cars f or a few years after the electrification of the Montreal system. For your membership in the CRHA, which Canadian Rail is continual/yin need of news, stories,. EDITOR: Fred F. Angus includes a. subscription to Canadian Rail, historic;31 data, photos,maps and other.material. Please· CO-EDITOR: Douglas N.W. Smith write to: send all contributions to the editor: Fred F. Angus, 3021 ASSOCIATE EDITOR (Motive Power): CRHA, 120 Rue St-Pierre, St. Constant, Trafalgar Avenue, Montreal, P.Q. H3Y 1 H3, e-mail Hugues W. Bonin Que. J5A2G9 [email protected] . No payment can be made for LAYOUT: Fred F. Angus Membership Dues for 2003: contributions, but the contributer will be given credit for In Canada: $40.00 (including all taxes) material submitted. Material will be retumed to the contributer PRINTING: Procel Printing United States: $35.00 in U.S. funds. if requested. Remember "Knowledge is of little value unless DISTRIBUTION: Joncas Postexperts Other Countries: $68.00 Canadian funds. it is shared with others". Inc. The CRHA may be reached at its web site: www.exporail.org or by telephone at (450) 638-1522 RAIL CANADIEN -496 168 SEPTEMBRE-OCTOBRE 2003 construction. By that time horse street railways had been in existence for more than two years, and showed much promise for the future . This first Stephenson street car was a strange vehicle, obsolescent before it was built; it was, essentially, an omnibus on a railway truck, and arranged so the body would swivel through 180 degrees at the end of the line. Amazingly, one of these cars has survived, and is probably the oldest surviving street car in the world. It IS preserved by the A typical omnibus, photographed at the John Stephenson factory about 1875. This one ran in Museum of the City of Montreal during the horsecar era. Note the seats on the roof, and the rather precarious ladder New York. leading to them. National Archives of Canada, Merrilees Collection, photo No. PA-166484. Before going any further, we should try to JOHN STEPHENSON CO., Ltd. answer the question "what is a horsecar?" We cannot simply say that it is a railway car pulled by horses, for then we would NEW YORK. V. S. JS... have to include hors.e-drawn operation op mam line railways. In this article we · will consider that a horsecar is an urban transit vehicle, running on rails and hauled by horses or other draft animals (mule cars were quite common in the South). It is not necessary that it run entirely on city streets, but the Eslabllshed 1831. Incorporaled 1876. line must be urban in character and offer a local service. Vehicles that do not run on rails, such as omnibuses or sleighs, are not horsecars; however we will touch on them briefly as many horsecar companies did operate them in addition to the Built by John Stephenson In 1831. cars on rails. By 1850, cities had grown to the point where distances The so-called "first street car" built by John Stephenson in were quite long, and something better than an omnibus was 1831 and placed in service in 1832. required. Why not a railway? Steam was obviously out of the From A John Stephenson advertisement of 1891. question, but how about building a smaller, four-wheel, version of a conventional railway car and haul it by horses along a light track through the city streets? This was quite different than the New York line of 1832; it was a strictly local line, for city use, offering much the same service as the omnibus, but using larger vehicles which were smoother, roomier and much more comfortable. So it was that about 1852 or 1853 the first true horsecar lines appeared. Both New York and Boston have a good claim for being the frrst, but it was not long before Philadelphia, Baltimore and other American cities had street cars. At this time street railways were strictly a North American innovation, not spreading across the Atlantic until the 1860s. Canada built its frrst street railway (in Toronto) in 1861, and eventually twenty Canadian John Stephenson's actual first street car was like this, and cities had horsecars. Certainly by 1859 anyone could realize was built in 1855. that the horsecar had come to stay, and urban passenger From A John Stephenson advertisement of 1891. transportation would never be the same. SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2003 167 CANADIAN RAIL - 496 The Sesquicentennial of the Horsecar Era by Fred Angus This engraving, showing a typical horsecar of the late 1860s or early 1870s, was used on numerous stock certificates. A century and a half ago a new means of transportation, one that would change the face of cities forever,. appeared on the scene - the horse-operated street railway. It is true that railway cars had been ha~led by horses through City streets at least as early as 1832, but it was not until the early 1850s that the true urban street railway was born. To commemorate this important sesquicentennial, we are devoting this entire issue of Canadian Rail to the era of the horse-drawn street car, with special emphasis on the lines that ran in Canada. 1. ' INTRODUCTION TO THE HORSECAR there was almost a continuous procession of omnibuses running up and down Broadway, and there was seldom a time Today, many people think of a horsecar as something when at least a dozen could not be seen at one time. For quaint and old fashioned, a mere footnote in the history of various legal and corporate reasons the Broadway omnibus rail transportation. While they are old fashioned by today's line had a very long life, lasting until 1884, long after 11}0st , standards, they deserve much more than a footnote. The other major routes had adopted street railways, but eventually horsecar era in Canada lasted for almost 40 years, more than even Broadway was converted to horsecars. Many were the a third of the entire period of traditional street railways. During tales, good and bad, told of omnibus rides. these forty years, cities grew, and took on the basic layout that they sti II have today. Much of this growth was influenced The date on which the first horse-drawn streetcar by the routes of the horsecar lines, a trend that continued as running on rails began operation is not definitely known. electric lines spread during the late 19th and early 20th The answer depends on the reader's interpretation of history, centuries. Many Canadian cities would be much different and also how one defines a horsecar. The date of 1832 in New today if the horsecar had never existed. York City is often cited as the time of the commencement of street railway service, but there are objections to this date. To tell the story of the street railway, we must start The line in question was simply a southem extension of a with its predecessor and cousin, the omnibus. These were conventional railway, the New York and Harlem. It was horse­ large four-wheeled vehicles with a door at the rear and two drawn because the city fathers would not allow steam longitudinal seats facing each other. It is not known precisely locomotives to be used in the streets in that part of the city. when the first omnibus went into service, but it was very Other railways had used horse power well before 1832, in fact likely in Paris in the I 820s. Before that, mass urban transit did all early railways were horse (or man) powered before the first not exist; if one wanted to go somewhere in a city, one walked, steam locomotives were built in the early 19th century. In rode a horse or hired a carriage. For inter-city travel, stage England, the Stockton and Darlington had run a horse-drawn coaches had existed for more than two centuries, and the first passenger car as early as 1825, and in America several lines omnibuses were modifications of stagecoaches; larger, with (notably the Baltimore and Ohio) used horses to haul different seating arrangement, and decidedly more passenger cars through city streets. Why then is the 1832 uncomfortable! Since the distances were relatively short, the date so often quoted? Most likely it was because the first car comfort factor was not as important, yet a ride in an omnibus on this line was built by John Stephenson (no relation to was not an overly pleasant experience as the often­ George Stephenson, the famous pioneer in railway overcrowded vehicle jolted its way over the rough engineering).