Trolley Mail in Vermont
- Page 1
John C. Wriston, Jr.
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The
horse-drawn trolley was the main method of public transportation in the
cities
in the mid and late 19th century, but its deficiencies were widely
recognized
by 1880 or so. Not the least of these
was the cost of horses and their upkeep, and the vulnerability of the
industry
to disease: the "Great Epizootic" (an equine respiratory disease)
killed 2200 horses in Philadelphia in three weeks in 1872, for example,
and the
need for a better system was apparent.
Vermont ingenuity played a part
in the
development of the electric street railway.
In 1835, Thomas Davenport, a Forest Dale blacksmith, exhibited
his
electrically propelled miniature train in Boston and Springfield. Many individuals contributed to the
developing technology, however, and there were several trial systems in
the
early 1880s, but the first really successful electric trolley system
was
installed in Richmond, Virginia in 1887 by Frank J. Sprague, and the
rush was
underway. "Few industries have
arisen so rapidly or declined so quickly, and no industry of its size
has had a
worse financial record" (George W. Hilton and John F. Due, The Electric
Interurban Railways in America, 1960).
Growing numbers were built in the 1890s, and a few were opened
as late
as the 1920s, but most were built between 1901 and 1912.
It is
hard to realize now what an important role trolleys played
during those
brief years. In fact, there are probably
few Vermont philatelists who can say they ever rode on a nickel trolley
from
St. Albans to Swanton, Sextons River to Bellows Falls, or Montpelier to
Barre. Not only were there trolley
systems in most cities, there also sprang up a network of interurban
lines
competing with the railroads, connecting one city to another via small
towns
across considerable distances. It was
never possible to go from New York City to Chicago by the electric
interurban
system, for example, because of certain gaps, but one could go over a
thousand
miles from Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin to Oneonta, New York (apparently the
longest
continuous route in the system)--or from Bennington to North Adams and
on.
In the
industry as a whole, passengers
were by far
the biggest source
of revenue; freight
accounted for only 10% or less of
total revenues for most lines, and mail revenues for much less than
that--but
it is the mail-carrying aspect of the system that is of principal
interest
here.
Trolley mail took several forms. In the simplest version, cars were used
simply to transfer closed pouch mail from one point to another. Then there were true trolley car RPOs,
analogous in every way to the railway RPOs; but within this category,
purists
draw distinctions between streetcar lines and interurban electric
railways, and
a still further distinction is drawn between interurbans with their own
rights-of-way and those that shared tracks with main-line through
trains.