Greeting family, friends, neighbors and train buddies. Today's Snippet "Hold Your Horses" is about the unique attempt to ease the transition from horse drawn trolleys to steam locomotives in the early 1900's.........Bill
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HOLD YOUR HORSES
Rail service into Alum Rock Park, California’s oldest municipal park, began in 1896 from the end of the horse car line on Santa Clara street in downtown San Jose through tunnels and over trestles to the bucolic destination. Passengers paid twenty five cents to travel the eight miles in street cars pulled by steam dummies. Buggy’s, coaches, and omnibuses were the primary sources of inner-city transit until the 1830’s when horse drawn streetcars began appearing in American cities. Traveling on rails, the steel wheeled vehicles provided smoothness, comfort, and increased passenger capacity; becoming a dominant mode of transportation for decades and a vital part of urban life. More than four hundred independent horse car lines were operating by the 1880’s on six thousand miles of track and carrying nearly two hundred million passengers annually. Within two decades and the advent of the motorized “horseless carriages”, cable-driven transit systems, the development of reliable electricity and the increased appearance of urban steam locomotives created an uneasy transitional period of co-existence with traditional animal power.
Initially, restrictive laws regarding speed and road etiquette favoring horses over automobiles were established, and many urban railroads began disguising their steam locomotives with box like structures built to resemble railroad passenger cars, assumed to be less likely to frighten horses when operating on city streets. Steam dummies began gaining acceptance and were offered as options by Baldwin Locomotive Works, and by H.K. Porter for their 0-4-0 locomotives and a 2-4-2 double ended dummy that they preferred calling more respectable “noiseless steam street motor”. In addition, manufacturers recommended using anthracite or coke as fuel to avoid smoke, and to purchase optional side flaps to hide drive wheel mechanisms. The era of steam dummies was short lived with the proliferation of electric railroads including the electrification of the San Jose and Santa Clara Railway, and when it was later realized that it was the noise and motion of the steam locomotive operating gear that frightened horses, and not the unfamiliar outline of a steam engine. -Bill 12/25
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