Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/771

Rh out-of-town patron who had begun to turn his back upon comfortable sittings and smokers, sumptuous saloons, luxurious upholstery, facilities for his traveling whist or chess, heat, water, and conveniences galore. They had without a murmur seen all these pale in attraction to the man of business, who needed not to await time tables or succumb to belated or missed trains, when the buzzing little trolley hummed along its inexpensive wires every five minutes, so long as it afforded him a board bench or a strap to hang on by. But when this unexpected trolley began to go farther and stretch its transportation powers to longer distances, the poor handicapped railways were led to look at their books and—if metaphors may be mixed—to button up their pockets and hint of receivers instead of dividends. And just at present they may be praying for time to turn around before a transcontinental trolley is upon them!

The trolley indeed has, in less space of time than that required to launch any other known improvement, practically captured the cheap transportation field. This newcomer, indeed, seems equipped with every opportunity that the railways have been coveting for fifty years, and to be getting for the asking everything for which the railways have to pay the heaviest. Its economies began at its very birth. In its construction it has no use for high-salaried engineering and locating parties; for woodsmen, excavators, dumpers, agents of rights of way, and for the long catalogue of machinery for surveying and making a railway line. All these become as superfluous and as clumsy as the Old Man of the Sea on Sindbad's back; for, while your principal assistants are putting on their rubber boots, your trolley built in a night, like Aladdin's palace—is earning dividends, oblivious of summits or watersheds or grades, loops or bridges, trusses or cantilevers. It is only an item of the situation that, as fast as charters can be mobilized or capital adjusted or plants converted, the dummies are side-tracked, horses led to auction, while every species of tramway spins its overhead wires and becomes trolleyized into remunerative investments. We sometimes smile at the non-perspiring Philadelphian pace; but here are in evidence, from the calm City of Brotherly Love, figures of a month's operation of a single line where the trolley has just replaced the horse, to wit: Four hundred and fifty horses that were formerly used on the road consumed in a month ninety-two and a half tons of cut hay, about eight thousand pounds of feed, and two tons of straw. This, with shoeing, cost the company about four thousand five hundred dollars. Offsetting this, the coal consumed in one month's working cost five hundred and eighty-five dollars, a clear saving by the trolley of three thousand nine hundred and fifteen dollars. On an average, eighty men were employed