Horsecars -- Predecessor of Modern Railroad Technology
Prior to the age of the American Railroads that began to expand throughout the nation after the Civil War, transportation engineers had introduced other forms of public transportation intended to provide improvements over travel by foot and horseback particularly in the larger industrialized cities. At the time, most roads were either entirely unpaved or built from cobblestone, making them very difficult for wheeled wagons to negotiate because of the extremely bumpy ride that severely limited their speed to well below the capabilities of even primitive horse-drawn locomotion (Evans, 2004; Nevins & Commager, 1992).
In the early 19th century, steam power had already been invented but it would still be several decades before it could be widely incorporated into rail technology. In the meantime, in the early 1830s, a New York carriage builder named John Stephenson introduced a wheeled horsecar vehicle intended to be drawn on railroad or cable car-type tracks embedded in the city streets. The vehicle was named the "John Mason" after the president of the New York and Harlem Railroad (Evans, 2004). The principle advantage of the horsecar was that it permitted faster travel over the rough street surfaces that limited the maximum operational speed of ordinary (untracked) horse-drawn wagons.
Throughout much of the 19th century, horsecars operated throughout many American cities in various states across the nation; they continued to operate in many areas even after the wider spread of more advanced steam, coal, and electrically powered vehicles in the later decades of the century. Their main drawbacks included the susceptibility of horses to illness, the massive amounts of waste they produce, and the costs of maintaining and feeding horses (Evans, 2004). Eventually, the last horsecars were replaced in the first decades of the 20th century when the availability and costs of those newer technologies made them more economical than the costs associated with maintaining horsecars.
References
Evans, H. (2004). They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine
Two Centuries of Innovators. New York: Little Brown & Co.
Nevins, J., and Commager, H. (1992). A Pocket History of the United States. New York:
Pocket Books
