TRAMCAR, STREETCAR OR TROLLEY
A tram, tramcar, trolley, trolleycar, or streetcar is a railborne vehicle, of lighter weight and construction than a conventional train, designed for the transport of passengers (and, very occasionally, freight) within, close to, or between villages, towns and/or cities, on tracks running primarily on streets.
Tramways with tramcars (or street railways with streetcars: US) were common throughout the industrialised world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries but they had disappeared from most British, Canadian, French and U.S. cities by the mid-20th century.
The terms tram and tramway were originally Scots and Northern English words for the type of truck used in coal mines and the tracks on which they ran, probably derived from the North Sea Germanic word trame of unknown origin meaning the beam or shaft of a barrow or sledge, also the barrow itself.
The very first tram was on the Swansea and Mumbles Railway in south Wales, UK; it was horse-drawn at first, and later moved by steam and electric power. The Mumbles Railway Act was passed by the British Parliament in 1804, and the first passenger railway (similar to streetcars in the US some 30 years later) started operating in 1807. The first streetcars, also known as horsecars in North America, were built in the United States and developed from city stagecoach lines and omnibus lines that picked up and dropped off passengers on a regular route without the need to be pre-hired. These trams were an animal railway, usually using horses and sometimes mules to haul the cars, usually two as a team. Occasionally other animals were put to use, or humans in emergencies. The first streetcar line, developed by Irish-American John Stephenson, was the New York and Harlem Railroad's Fourth Avenue Line which ran along the Bowery and Fourth Avenue in New York City. Service began in 1832. It was followed in 1835 by New Orleans, Louisiana, which has the oldest continuously operating street railway system in the world, according to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
In 1883, Magnus Volk constructed his 2-foot gauge Volk's Electric Railway along the eastern seafront at Brighton, England. This 2-km line, re-gauged to 2ft 9ins in 1884, remains in service to this day, and is the oldest operating electric tramway in the world.
Steam
The first mechanical trams were powered by steam. Generally, there were two types of steam tram. The first and most common had a small steam locomotive (called a tram engine in the UK) at the head of a line of one or more carriages, similar to a small train. Systems with such steam trams included Christchurch, New Zealand; Sydney, Australia; and other city systems in New South Wales.
The other style of steam tram had the steam engine in the body of the tram, referred to as a tram engine or steam dummy. The most notable system to adopt such trams was in Paris. French-designed steam trams also operated in Rockhampton, in the Australian state of Queensland between 1909 and 1939. Stockholm, Sweden, had a steam tram line at the island of Södermalm between 1887 and 1901. A major drawback of this style of tram was the limited space for the engine, so that these trams were usually underpowered.
The use of steam tramways in Britain was effectively prohibited by the draconian rules contained in the so-called Red Flag Act or more correctly the Locomotive Acts of 1861 and 1865. The introduction of new regulations, The Highways & Locomotives (Amendments) Act 1879 set out a more workable arrangement as follows:
- Engine to be governed to prevent speeds in excess of 10 miles per hour
- No steam or smoke to be emitted
- Be free from noise produced by blast or clatter
- The machinery to be concealed from view at all points above 4 inch from rail level
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