. The street railway review . nd built the first electrconstantly occupied with the work of !individual to introduce and popularize r.| in Dublin whichiring Parliamen-; trolley in Great It gives me great pleasure to respond to the editors request thatI should, on the auspicious occasion of the completion of the firstten years of his editorship of the Street Railway Review, fur-nish a resume of the story of Tramways in Great Britain and Ire-land during these ten years. I comply the more readily becausethe end of the century makes a convenient landmark in the story,and even more because we are c
. The street railway review . nd built the first electrconstantly occupied with the work of !individual to introduce and popularize r.| in Dublin whichiring Parliamen-; trolley in Great It gives me great pleasure to respond to the editors request thatI should, on the auspicious occasion of the completion of the firstten years of his editorship of the Street Railway Review, fur-nish a resume of the story of Tramways in Great Britain and Ire-land during these ten years. I comply the more readily becausethe end of the century makes a convenient landmark in the story,and even more because we are certainly at a parting of the ways,when horse haulage on our tramways is virtually abandoned, andwhen, in my opinion, of all substitutes proposed, electric tractionholds the field. The story between i860—when tramways were born in GreatBritain, and I began my active life in helping to make and worktramways—and the year 1890 scarcely needs to be retold. It maysuffice to say that long before 1890 tramways had come to stay in. J. CLIFTON ROBINSON. this country, as elsewhere. Roughly speaking—for I do not pro-pose to do other than use round numbers—there were at the endof 1890 about 160 tramway undertakings in operation in Great Brit-ain and Ireland. The great majority of these were the propertyof companies, but about one-fifth of the total belonged to corpora-tions. The greater part were still using that good old-fashionedmotor, the horse, although a few here and there had steam locomo-tives—wonderful structures, some of them!—as at South Stafford-shire, Birmingham, Leeds, Stockton-on-Tees, Dundee, Hudders-field, etc. There were also two cable tramways in existence in i8go,one at Birmingham, the other at Highgate, the first fairly success-ful, the other struggling along under the disadvantages of isolation,meager traffic and an effete administration. Of tramways in opera-tion, there were 120 miles in the Metropolitan area, about 640 milesin England, 85 miles in Scotland
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Keywords: ., book, bookcentury1800, bookdecade1890, booksubjectstreetrailroads
