Article Name retroelectro
Frank J Sprague and the Richmond Union Passenger Railway By David Ray Cyber City Circuits
Inside the city, business and invention would meet over and over again, trying to solve the issue of mass public transportation. One very early example of a solution is the world’s first subway, the ‘London Underground’ sometimes known as ‘The Tube’. Some cities also had ‘street railroad’ systems where a carriage would ride rails, pulled by horses or donkeys, carrying people and goods where they needed to go. According to the census, by 1880, there were over two thousand miles of horsedrawn ‘street railroads’ in America. [1] Multiple times a day, a team of people had to keep the tracks maintained and clean the animal waste off the rails.
1830s-1880s – The problem with public mass transportation
There was a time before the luxury of quick and easy transportation for the masses existed. Transportation was a problem during the mid-nineteenth century. The Second Industrial Revolution was spinning up and the world was quickly becoming industrialized. New manufacturers were emerging, but they needed human labor to operate them. People started leaving their farms to come to the urban centers. Factories and mills were being built faster than the houses and roads needed to support them.
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