webenda wrote:Speaking of trolleys, why did electric power replace animal power for trolleys?
Here are more answers:
The use of animals as motive power had many significant drawbacks. Horses could only work four-hour or less per day, and in hot weather (which is not unknown in Tucson) they had to be replaced after every trip (although of course they could be reused some hours later when rested). The result was that, in1903, the Tucson Street Railway had to have 34 head of stock to keep three or four streetcars a day on the road. This amounts to about six changes of the team per day, or over a 12-hour day each team would work about 2 hours. The sheer number of animals needing to be maintained and the impact on the economy is reflected in a news article in the Arizona Weekly Citizen of May 23, 1896:
Electric railways have displaced in the United States no less than 275,000 horses, says the Pittsburg (sic)Dispatch. So many horses would require about 125,000 bushels of grain a day to feed them, amounting to 45,000,000 bushels a year. The loss of the commercial demand for this grain has been an enormous loss of transportation tonnage (sic) for the railways.
Of course, what goes in one end as grain comes out the other end as manure, requiring constant streetcleaning and disposal. There was also the problem of service interruptions due to the stubbornness of the mule or horse-witness the classic Tucson photo with the mule on the ground at Stone and Congress. More seriously, illness and death could bring the whole street railway industry to a halt as happened with the "great epizootic" epidemic of 1872-3. This lethal flu-like disease killed thousands of horses across North America. Desperate street car companies tried oxen and even human gangs to pull the cars, but with little success. Finally, there was a need to retire the animals after only a few years of hard work. All this led street railway companies to seek a replacement for the animal-powered system.
University of Arizona Library
Through Our Parent's Eyes
History & Culture of Southern Arizona
Chapter: Horse Sense
)
