New York was then a city of some 200,000 people. Catching the railroad fever, a group of prominent business men headed by John Mason, president of the Chemical Bank, obtained permission from the State legislature to incorporate the "New York and Harlaem Railroad Company" and to construct a single or double track rail road between 23rd street and the Harlem river on any route which the city should approve. Their idea was to connect at the Harlem river with a railroad north to Albany. Scarcely had this permis sion been granted, however, when the incorporators conceived the idea of extending the line further down into the city and furnish ing local transportation. Two cars of stage-coach design were built for the company by the same John Stephenson who built the first omnibus. Each had a seating capacity of 3o passengers. Serv ice began on Nov. 14, 1832, on a mile-and-a-half route from Prince street to 14th street along the Bowery. This New York and Har lem railroad was the first company in the world to provide local passenger transportation on rails. So popular did its service be come that in a year the length of the route was extended to four miles and additional cars were purchased. In the beginning a 15 min. service was given at a fare of 121 cents, the same as on the first omnibuses. By the middle 1840's, the service was oper ating on a 6min. headway from City Hall to 27th street.
The advantages of street railway service, however, were slow to be appreciated by people in other cities. One short line was started in New Orleans in 1835. Then nothing happened until 1853, when a street railway was built in Brooklyn. The first street railway in Massachusetts commenced operation between Boston and Cam bridge in 1856. Two years later the idea spread to Philadelphia. Cincinnati, Baltimore and Chicago tried the experiment in 1859. From that time the progress of the industry was rapid. By 189o, according to the best available figures, there were approximately 105,000 horses and mules engaged in pulling 28,000 street-cars on about 5,7oomi. of track in the United States.
Cable and Early Electric Lines.—Already, however, two competitors of the horse-car had sprung up. The cable-car system had been established in San Francisco in 1873 and the electric railway had demonstrated its practicability in Richmond in 1888. In many respects the development of the cable system represented an engineering achievement as great as any in the history of trans portation. Moving the long heavy cables through the slots beneath the street pavement required massive and intricate machinery. The design of satisfactory apparatus on the cars to grip the con stantly moving cable presented many difficulties. Braking, too, was more of a problem than with the slower and lighter horse-cars.
Because its development was followed closely by that of the electric railway, the cable system never came into wide use. Be sides San Francisco, it was tried in Washington, New York, Chi cago and a few other cities. The expense of installing the system was very high and its operation presented great difficulties. To
keep miles and miles of heavy cable running smoothly required un remitting care. A break in the cable caused long delay and heavy expense. Improved "grips" were devised but the best of them were none too satisfactory. The peak period of the cable railway was about 189o, when a total of 488mi. of track were operated in this way. With the development of the electric car the street railway industry became possessed of a far better means of ren dering its service to the public. Today, cable-cars survive only in San Francisco, where they have been thought to have special ad vantages on account of the unusually steep hills.
The demonstration at Richmond of the practicability of street railway operation with electricity as a motive power followed a long series of experiments (see ELECTRIC TRACTION). Com pressed-air cars, storage-battery cars, and electric systems with contact plates on the surface of the ground had all been tried and found unreliable. Once a practical method of electric operation had been developed, expansion was rapid. By 1890 some 1,300 electric cars were being operated on 1,261mi. of electrified street railway track. This, however, represented less than one-sixth of the total street railway trackage then in operation in the United States. But the following decade witnessed a sweeping transfor mation. The .U.S. Census of Street and Electric Railways for 1902 showed nearly 22,000mi. of electrified track, while the horse-car and cable lines had dwindled to approximately 25omi. each. In New York and Washington an underground current col lection system was used. Cincinnati used a two-wire overhead system. Everywhere else the single overhead wire system was used in substantially the form originally developed at Richmond.
Period of Expansion.—From 1902 to 1917 was the great pe riod of expansion of the electric railways. Many new lines were built not only in the larger cities but also in the smaller cities and in suburban areas. Future developments were to show that much of the expansion of the last mentioned types was unwise, but this was not evident at the time. Electrification of the street railways at first appeared promising from the standpoint of financial re sults. Whereas the cost of operation took about 68 cents of every dollar of revenue collected by the horse-car lines in 189o, operat ing expenses of the electric railways in 1902 took only 57 cents out of every dollar of revenue. This reduction in operating ex penses seemed encouraging, though actually the gain was more than offset by the fact that the fixed charges on the investments in electric railways absorbed 31 cents of every dollar of revenue as compared with only 15 cents with the horse-cars. Nevertheless, it was felt that the greatly improved service rendered by the electric cars would attract enough patronage to enable the operating companies to meet their fixed charges without much difficulty. Hence the expansion of electric railway operations continued steadily. By 1917, the industry had about 8o,000 passenger cars and 45,000mi. of track.