THE SUCCESSOR OF THE RAILWAY. 



75' 



out-of-town patron who had begun to turn his back upon com- 

 fortable sittings and smokers, sumptuous saloons, luxuricnis up- 

 holstery, facilities for his traveling whist or chess, heat, water, 

 and conveniences galore. They had without a murmur seen all 

 these pale in attraction to the man of business, who needed not to 

 await time tables or succumb to belated or missed trains, when 

 the buzzing little trolley liummed along its inexpensive wires 

 every five minutes, so long as it afforded him a board bench or a 

 strap to hang on by. But when this unexpected trolley began to 

 go farther and stretch its transportation powers to longer dis- 

 tances, the poor handicapped railways were led to look at their 

 books and if metaphors may be mixed to button up their 

 pockets and hint of receivers instead of dividends. And just 

 at present they may be praying for time to turn around before a 

 transcontinental trolley is upon them ! 



The trolley indeed has, in less space of time than that required 

 to launch any other known improvement, practically captured 

 the cheap transportation field. This newcomer, indeed, seems 

 equipped with every opportunity that the railways have been 

 coveting for fifty years, and to be getting for the asking every- 

 thing for which the railways have to pay the heaviest. Its 

 economies began at its very birth. In its construction it has no 

 use for high-salaried engineering and locating parties ; for woods- 

 men, excavators, dumpers, agents of rights of way, and for the 

 long catalogue of machinery for surveying and making a railway 

 line. All these become as superfluous and as clumsy as the Old 

 Man of the Sea on Sindbad's back ; for, while your principal as- 

 sistants are putting on their rubber boots, your trolley built in 

 a night, like Aladdin's palace is earning dividends, oblivious of 

 summits or watersheds or grades, loops or bridges, trusses or 

 cantilevers. It is only an item of the situation that, as fast as 

 charters can be mobilized or capital adjusted or plants converted, 

 the dummies are side-tracked, horses led to auction, while every 

 species of tramway spins its overhead wires and becomes trolley- 

 ized into remunerative investments. We sometimes smile at the 

 non-perspiring Philadelphiau pace ; but here are in evidence, from 

 the calm City of Brotherly Love, figures of a month's operation of 

 a single line where the trolley has just replaced the horse, to wit : 

 Four hundred and fifty horses that were formerly used on the 

 road consumed in a month ninety-two and a half tons of cut hay, 

 about eight thousand pounds of feed, and two tons of straw. 

 This, with shoeing, cost the company about four thousand five 

 hundred dollars. Offsetting this, the coal consumed in one 

 month's working cost five hundred and eighty-five dollars, a 

 clear saving by the trolley of three thousand nine hundred and 

 fifteen dollars. On an average, eighty men were employed 



