CAST Practice Test 3

From Horses to Wires: The Electric Streetcar

¹In the middle of the 1800s, most American cities moved their crowds with horses. Horsecars, which were passenger wagons pulled along iron rails, were faster and smoother than coaches on rough streets, because wheels rolling on rails meet less resistance. Still, horses had serious drawbacks. A company needed a large stable of animals to keep its cars running all day, and every horse had to be fed and its waste cleaned from the streets. Cities wanted a cleaner and cheaper way to move people.

²Inventors tried electric cars in several cities during the 1880s, but the early systems were not reliable enough to replace horses. The turning point came in Richmond, Virginia. There, an engineer named Frank J. Sprague built an electric street railway that began regular service on February 2, 1888. Its route included steep hills and sharp curves, and many people doubted that an electric car could handle them. By June of that year, Sprague's system was running 40 cars over about 12 miles of track.

³Sprague's cars drew power from a wire strung above the street. A spring-loaded pole on the roof of each car pressed a small wheel against the wire, and the current returned through the steel rails. The device became known as a trolley pole, and the cars themselves were soon called trolleys. Officials from Boston inspected the Richmond line in 1888 and soon approved a similar system for their own city. Other cities followed quickly. By 1895, the United States had almost 900 electric street railways with nearly 11,000 miles of track.

⁴The streetcar changed the shape of cities. Because a worker could now ride several miles to a job in a short time, families no longer had to live within walking distance of factories and offices. New neighborhoods grew up along the tracks at the edge of town. These communities came to be called streetcar suburbs, and many of them still exist long after their tracks were removed.

⁵The trolley's success did not last. Automobile ownership grew rapidly in the 1920s, and the Great Depression of the 1930s weakened many streetcar companies. Buses, which need no rails or overhead wires, seemed cheaper and more flexible. Although wartime fuel rationing kept some lines busy during World War II, most North American streetcar lines had closed by the 1960s. In recent decades, however, cities such as Portland, Oregon, which opened a modern streetcar line in 2001, have brought the electric streetcar back.