Horsecars -- Predecessor of Modern

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.