Street Railway Research Articles

The Transformation of Work, the Disappearance of 'Workers', and the Future of Workplace Regulation

If you have read my curriculum vitae you will not have seen the publication that inspires my remarks this evening. As I was waiting to go off to Harvard to do my master‟s degree, I was offered work revising a publication known as the Canadian Encyclopaedic Digest. In particular I was asked to update the chapter on “street railways” - what you would likely call “trams”. Sections of the chapter covered such illuminating topics as “sounding the gong” and “using the cowcatcher”. It was boring, stupid work, but I had to do It for money. What added injury to insult, however, was the fact that no one had traveled on or spoken of, much less sued, a “street railway” since the original chapter was written in the 1920s. In preparing my remarks for this evening, the thought occured to me that fifty years hence, someone may give a lecture at St. John‟s reminiscing about a youthful assignment to update a chapter on “workers” or “labour law” or “industrial relations”, terms that in the interval had ceased to refer to any extant subject of academic interest or human endeavour. A little excursion into history will set the stage for this glimpse into a possible future without labour market regulation. From 1945 or 1950 to, say 1970 or 1975, workers in most advanced economies enjoyed rising wages; more secure job tenure within the internal labour market of the enterprise; greater protection of their health, safety and dignity; and improved access to social benefits, such as pensions and health insurance, whether provided by the state or by their employers. These improvements didn‟t just fall from the sky. They were secured through the efforts of unions and of social democratic and social market parties, in the context of favourable labour market conditions associated with an expanding economy and productivity gains and against the backdrop of a general desire to avoid the social conflict of the interwar and wartime years. In the 1970s, however, labour markets conditions began to change in response to larger developments in the global political economy. These changes, in turn, came to be reflected in the nature of work and character of workplaces and in the social, cultural and political significance of “work” and “workers”. The result, I will argue, is that the forms of workplace regulation that seemed to serve us well during the earlier period no longer do.

Introduction of Chief Justice Roberts, at the Robert H. Jackson Center, May 17, 2013

These remarks introduced Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., speaking at the Robert H. Jackson Center in Jamestown, New York, on May 17, 2013. This introduction covers Robert H. Jackson’s life path and legal career, including his first big legal case, which grew out of the 1913 strike against Jamestown’s Street Railway Company. This introduction also describes some Jackson-like and Jackson-connected aspects of Chief Justice Roberts’s life and career; including his birth and early boyhood in western New York State, his service as a law clerk to former Jackson law clerk Justice William H. Rehnquist, and his private law practice with former Jackson law clerk E. Barrett Prettyman, Jr.

Control strategies for high-power electric vehicles powered by hydrogen fuel cell, battery and supercapacitor

Problems relating to oil supply, pollution, and green house effects justify the need for developing of new technologies for transportation as a replacement for the actual technology based on internal combustion engines (ICE). Fuel cells (FCs) are seen as the best future replacement for ICE in transportation applications because they operate more efficiently and with lower emissions. This paper presents a comparative study performed in order to select the most suitable control strategy for high-power electric vehicles powered by FC, battery and supercapacitor (SC), in which each energy source uses a DC/DC converter to control the source power and adapt the output voltage to the common DC bus voltage, from where the vehicle loads are supplied.Five different controls are described for this kind of hybrid vehicles: a basic control based on three operation modes of the hybrid vehicle depending on the state of charge (SOC) of the battery (operation mode control); a control strategy based on control loops connected in cascade, whose aim is to control the battery and SC SOC (cascade control); a control based on the technique of equivalent fuel consumption, called equivalent consumption minimization strategy (ECMS); and two based on control techniques very used nowadays, the first one of them is a fuzzy logic control and the second one is a predictive control. These control strategies are tested and compared by applying them to a real urban street railway. The simulation results reflect the optimal performance of the presented control strategies and allow selecting the best option for being used in this type of high-power electric vehicles.

Conference report: Planning Resilient Communities in Challenging Times, UK/Ireland Planning Research Conference, Birmingham, 12–14 September 2011

The 2011 UK/Ireland Planning Research Conference (UK/I PRC), jointly organised by the University of Birmingham and Birmingham City University, was held at the Birmingham Business School, located in the pleasant university surroundings of the city's leafy Edgbaston district (Figure 1). The conference came at a time when the Coalition Government's proposed changes to the English planning system had been experiencing substantial coverage in the national press, and so this left no shortage of topics for discussion. The 2011 conference theme was based around the increasingly vogue subject of 'resilience'. The University of Birmingham is currently running a major crossdisciplinary initiative on resilience and urban living, and so the conference theme is partially an outcome of a continuing research focus at the university. The organisers hoped the concept of resilient communities in the face of changing contexts would provide a broad thematic overview for discussions around various current issues in planning. As usual, the UK/I PRC brought together researchers with a wide variety of interests related to planning, governance and the environment. The participant list for the conference contained 203 names from a variety of institutions (Figure 2). Thirtynine of the delegates had travelled from outside the UK and Ireland, coming from 14 countries, including Russia, Canada, South Africa and Australia. Opening session The 2012 conference was opened by the geographer Adam Tickell, in his role as Pro-Vice Chancellor of the University of Birmingham. In a short welcoming address he drew upon Birmingham's industrial development history in advocating the suitability of the city as the location for a planning research conference. Mel Lees (Head of the Faculty of Technology, Engineering and the Environment, Birmingham City University) also welcomed delegates, referring to the 'great post-industrial city that is Birmingham'. Peter Lee (University of Birmingham) spoke of the 'very deep' foundations of Birmingham's local governance. Bringing the discussion closer to the present, he cited the city's current major regeneration projects - a new central library and a revamped New Street railway station, including the proposed HS2 high-speed rail line to London. However, recent riots and the dropping of the city from the Lonely Planet series of guidebooks (which had in previous years featured Birmingham as a contemporary 'chic' destination) were indications of the challenges still being faced. Plenary keynote addresses Simin Davoudi (University of Newcastle upon Tyne) gave the first keynote address, opening her presentation by suggesting that planners in England were currently experiencing a 'particularly heightened sense of [...] uncertainty', with attacks on the value of their professional contributions to society, and contended that planning is facing a crisis. She then explored the specific theme of the conference and delivered a scholarly exploration of the concept of 'resilience', its etymological origins, definitions and role in contemporary public policy debates. Resilience has recently begun to replace 'sustainability' as the latest planning 'buzz' word, she suggested - indeed, citations in the social sciences literature increased by 400 per cent between 1997 and 2007. But, like its predecessor, the precise meaning of 'resilience' when used in such a context remains 'slippery'. Drawing upon the conceptual apparatus of complexity theory, Davoudi then highlighted how resilience often implies the ability of something (or somewhere) to 'bounce back' from negative external perturbations. But this is often seen as a 'return to normal without questioning what normality entails'. Drawing a contrast to this common view, she outlined the concept of 'evolutionary resilience', where there is not a 'return' to a pre-defined normality, but instead an ability to adapt, transform and evolve in response to disequilibrium. …

Who's Running the Road? Street Railway Strikes and the Problem of Constructing a Liberal Capitalist Order in Canada, 1886–1914

Street railway strikes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were frequently the occasion for large‐scale collective violence in North American cities and challenged the capacity of local authorities to maintain civic order. However, this was only the most visible manifestation of the challenge that street railway workers' collective action posed to the order of liberal capitalism, an order constructed on several intersecting dimensions. Using the example of Canadian street railway workers from 1886 to 1914, a period of rapid urbanization and industrialization, this article explores the ways the collective action by workers and their community sympathizers challenged the workplace, marketplace, and “streetplace” orders of liberal capitalism. It discusses how those challenges were met through political and legal processes of resistance and accommodation, taking into account the fragmentation of state power, hostile public opinion toward the street railways, and conflicting views over the legitimate scope for workers' collective action.

Louis J. DeLamarter: can he save a dying industry?

PurposeThis paper aims to acquaint readers with Louis J. DeLamarter and the innovative strategies he used to extend the profitability of the street railway in the USA.Design/methodology/approachInitially the researchers were interested in street railways (trolleys) and why they had flourished in Grand Rapid, Michigan when they were failing in other parts of the USA. Extensive research in local and national newspapers, business journals and trade publications of the time led to the story of Louis J. DeLamarter. His innovative approach to running the street railway in Grand Rapids MI emerged as the cause of the Grand Rapids Railway Company's unique, though temporary, success.FindingsDeLamarter conceived and implemented a number of innovative marketing practices which were rooted in a differentiation strategy: he focused on the customer whereas other transportation companies did not. His strategy made the company successful after others became bankrupt. His ideas were lauded in the industry, adopted, and are still used in public transportation today. Only external factors such as the depression, the advent of the automobile and burdensome regulations undermined his success.Research limitations/implicationsDespite extensive searches, no original papers by DeLamarter could be located.Practical implicationsPublic service companies worldwide can learn about the importance of customer focus from DeLamarter's work. Additionally, managers can learn that even the most successful innovative strategy will only yield a short‐term competitive advantage if the industry faces unfavorable external factors.Originality/valueThe story of Louis J. DeLamarter and his innovations in public transportation are presented for the first time.

<i>The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century</i> (review)

Reviewed by: The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century Bruce Laurie The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century. By Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. xi plus 242). This collaboration of two urban historians promises to provide a wide-angle perspective on the role of the horse in the development of the nineteenth-century [End Page 819] city. It delivers on its promise for the most part. Clay McShane and Joel Tarr take the reader from the market for horses to efforts to regulate their care and use through the rise of the street railway (a main source of horse usage) and then to such topics as stable location, horse nutrition, and equine health. The authors press the two related themes of the treatment of the horse as a "living machine" (p. x) and the horse-drawn street railway as the force that "shaped the nineteen-century city, " just as "motor vehicles created the twentieth-century city" (p. 179). The Horse in the City has inspired moments. The section on breeding, a surprising aspect of the history of the horse as beast of burden (if not as race horse) is interesting and engaging, as are the descriptions of changing spatial relations in the city. Urban historians will doubtless appreciate the informed discussion of the displacement of the omnibus by the horse-drawn streetcar, as well as the sophisticated analysis of economic interchange between country and city anchored by supply and demand in each locale, which together produced a wide range of innovations and spin-off enterprise in each place, including greater crop specialization and facilities for the upkeep and feeding of horses. On a related note, the authors demonstrate how the movement for better treatment of horses, sponsored by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, had the unintended effect of serving the interests of larger owners more effectively than the animals. Horses further suffered when cost-conscious owners substituted cornmeal for oats and hay, which increased "nutritionally related disease" (p. 147). Horse ailments of various kinds, in turn, stimulated veterinary science, which came up with cures for the most threatening diseases at a time when the horse was giving way to the motor car. The horse simply couldn't win and didn't. Two shortcomings detract from an otherwise useful book. The first is a tendency to slide into presenting evidence of questionable value. Do we really need to know that in 1870 New York's "38, 272 horses produced an estimated 1,146 cartloads of manure daily?" (p. 124). Is it really surprising or important to learn that conditions in "small, private stables . . . owned by individuals . . . could vary greatly?" (p. 115). Do we really need tables and other graphics showing "Feeding Practices of Urban Stables" (p.128) or the "location of Boston stables in 1885, reflecting changes since 1867?" (p. 106). Such trivia leave the impression of quantification for its own sake and makes for a distracting read. Better editing from the authors or the press would have reduced the anecdotes and made for a more compact and stronger book. If portions of The Horse in the City are burdened by excessive detail, its central thesis would have benefited from more detail. Thus, the authors claim that horse-drawn street railway "stimulated the evolution of the modern American city . . . characterized by a central business district, specialized residential neighborhoods, and peripheral suburbs" (p. 57). This otherwise plausible hypothesis needs evidence that would have rounded out the picture. Spatial relations in the pre-streetcar era, which may well have anticipated modern urban patterns, are not fully or properly discussed, leaving the impression that the new transport system created modernity afresh. Moreover, the lineup of interests that brought about modernity seems incomplete. It is restricted to the street railway entrepreneurs with a hint of realtors in play despite the likelihood that they were allied with building construction interests and possibly insurance companies. [End Page 820] There seems little doubt that the department store entrepreneurs were on board as well. They may have been in the lead, but Filene and Wanamaker are not mentioned, while Macy...

The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (review)

Reviewed by: The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century Ann N. Greene (bio) The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century. By Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Pp. xi+242. $50. Historians often state that industrialization eliminated the use of animal power, and they have often used the replacement of work animals to gauge a society's technological progress. Clay McShane and Joel Tarr set this paradigm on its head by showing that horses occupied an essential niche in the industrial ecology of the nineteenth-century American city. They argue that the nineteenth century was the "golden age of the horse" (p. 17). Nowhere was this more true than the city, with which horses are least associated in popular culture but in which horses were indispensable sources of power. As horses moved goods and people around the city, and powered construction and shipping, they shaped its economy, ecology, built environment, culture, and social relations. In turn, the urban demand for animate power reshaped the horse population. During the nineteenth century, many Americans saw horses as "living machines subject to technical refinement" (p. 2). Horse technology was dynamic; it produced improved horseshoes and modes of harness, better nutrition and care, vehicles with less friction, and pavements with more traction. It also produced different horses, as breeders increased the size and variety of American workhorses to meet the specialized demands of the urban economy. Urban horses were valuable not only for their power but also for their manure, which was sold as fertilizer, and even for their dead bodies, which were rendered for hair, hides, bone, hooves, meat, fat, and chemicals.Horses were also important urban consumers. The urban economy included manufacturers of goods for horses, owners of stables, and an extensive horse services industry. This horse economy was not separate from the urban economy—indeed, to a great extent it was the urban economy. [End Page 462] There were many ramifications of having dense resident populations of horses and using horses as machines. Controlling equine behavior meant first controlling human drivers. Traffic regulations were rarely enforced, but starting in the 1870s humane societies began monitoring the behavior of teamsters and horsecar drivers (though not the drivers of upper-class carriages or their owners) for cruelty and recklessness. Stables were noisy and posed the risk of fire and disease. Trade regulation and commodification changed urban grain and hay markets. Owners of freighting and street-railway companies rationalized their operations around the characteristics of horses. They put equine workers on different schedules than their human workers to prevent excessive fatigue, they constructed state-of-the-art stables, they sought out the latest information on nutrition and shoeing, and they arranged to have veterinarians provide regular medical care. One of McShane and Tarr's best chapters addresses horse-powered mass transit as "a path-breaking technology, setting in motion far-reaching changes in urban spatial structure" (p. 83).Horse railways altered the use of streets, sorted space into specialized categories, and facilitated suburban development. As new public spaces that brought people of different groups into close contact, horsecars "focused and exacerbated the tensions latent to the city" (p. 82). By the end of the century, public health officials were decrying the pollution that horses created. Meanwhile, as traffic congestion highlighted horses' animal nature and unpredictable behavior, they were viewed as potentially dangerous. Yet despite the rapidity with which Americans took up the automobile, the use of horses in urban settings declined slowly. Although horses disappeared rapidly from mass transit as street railways electrified during the 1890s, and from private urban and suburban transportation, they remained essential to urban freighting and delivery for decades. The Horse in the City presents a rich and complex picture of nineteenth-century urban life. (The Chicago Stockyards, for example, employed nine horse barbers!) McShane and Tarr have given us a book that is simultaneously an urban social history, a social history of a technology, and an environmental history. It adds to our knowledge of urban development and, more broadly, shows the importance of understanding how the industrialization of horses and other organisms affected the direction...

Economic Phoenix: How A. B. Hammond Used the Depression of 1893 and a Pair of Defunct Oregon Railroads to Build a Lumber Empire

GREG GORDON Economic Phoenix How A.B. Hammond Used the Depression of1893and a Pair of DefunctOregon Railroads toBuild a LumberEmpire THEMOST SEVERE ECONOMIC depression of thenineteenthcentury, thePanic of 1893,affected thebusiness world much theway an understory fire acts upon a forest, leaving thebig trees unscathed while clearing out smaller and marginal players. Those with shallow roots and overextended financial commitments ? Henry Villard, for example ? toppled over, while men like JohnD. Rockefeller, JayGould, E.H. Harriman, and Andrew Carnegie profited from the reduced competition. Particularly hard hit by the Panic, dozens of overextended railroads owning one third of the nation's trackage fell into receivership. With operating expenses exceeding earnings by over half amillion dollars, theNorthern Pacific Railroad (NPRR) failed. James J. Hill and J.P. Morgan took advantage of the situation and bought controlling shares in the railroad. The condition of the otherMontana railroads built by local entrepreneurs Samuel Hauser, A.B. Hammond, and E.L. Bonner was worse than theNorthern Pacific's, with a total deficit forMontana branch lines of $525,000. All these lineswent into receivership as well.1 Vilified by the local press as "theMissoula Octopus," in 1893,Andrew B. Hammond controlled everymajor business inwestern Montana, including the First National Bank ofMissoula, theMissoula Water Works, theMis soula Street Railway, the Missoula Gazette, the Florence Hotel and downtown blocks, the Missoula Real Estate Association (land speculation and develop ment), the Bitterroot railroad, and the area's only flourmill. Hammond's Big Blackfoot Milling Company dominated the region's lumber industry.He even owned the cemetery. Underpinning itallwas theMissoula Mercantile Company (MMC), the largestwholesale and retailbusiness between St. Paul, OHQ vol. 109, no. 4 ? 2008 Oregon Historical Society Courtesy of theDixon Collection, Archivesand Special Collections,Mansfield Library, UniversityofMontana Many residents of western Montana resented A.B. Hammond's domination of theregions economyand politics. On October 28,1891, the Weekly Missoulian caricaturizedHammond as the"Missoula Octopus, that isundertaking to reach itsslimyarms over thecountyand strangle the lifeout of it."The following year, Hammond purchased thenewspaper. Minnesota, and Portland, Oregon, andMissoula County's largest employer, which critics often referred to as the "Missoula Mercantile Monopoly" or simply, "The Monopoly." Although fellow businessmen, including Marcus Daly and H?user, acknowledged Hammond's business acumen, his ruthless practices and brusque manner had won him few friends. In the 1889 election for town council, for example, he received one vote.2 Previous to 1893, the profits fromHammond's Montana enterprises were running $300,000 to $400,000 per year.Although he suffered a fortypercent loss in thePanic, the MMC and thebank were breaking even by the following year, and his lumber business was operating at a close margin. Hammond's Gordon,A.B. Hammond and Oregon Railroads 599 aversion tomining and cattle ventures, combined with his adroit handling of the banking crisis and the solid foundation of theMMC, allowed him toweather this greatest crisis of his career relatively undamaged. Finding his finances, credit rating, and business reputation still intact,Hammond enlarged his empire, but he was careful not to overextend his finances and used little of his own money.3 Inmany ways, 1893 marked the end of the era of thepioneer entrepreneur and the beginning of the rise of the corporate businessman. Alfred D. Chan dler, Jr.,traces the rise ofmodern corporations to the expanding railroad network, the development of national markets, technological innovations, the vertical integration of industry, and bureaucratic structure? all of which were predicated on railroads connecting the source of rawmaterials with urban markets. Prior to 1893,American investments were primarily in railroads, but with their financial collapse, a new economic order emerged from the ashes, themodern corporation designed around mass production, global markets, and government bureaucracy.4 Although he retained many nineteenth-century practices inhis businesses, Hammond readily adapted to the emerging industrial model. As Hammond shed old partnerships inMontana, he applied the new paradigm identified by Chandler to the development of theOregon coast, connecting the nascent lumber industry with national markets via railroads. HAMMOND REALIZED THAT Montana was, and would remain, a hin terland, subordinate to themetropolis that controlled capital investment. Portland and the Willamette Valley were, inmany ways, more established versions ofMissoula and the Bitterroot Valley, but on amuch...

War of the Wires: A Curious Chapter in Street Railway History

The street railway industry searched for a reliable and efficient motor to replace the horse for decades. By 1890 electricity was adopted for this purpose by transit operators. The new technology was in fact adopted with enthusiasm and most of the horse cars were gone by 1900. The universal plan included a single overhead wire charged with 600-volt DC current. The ground return was aided by bonded rail joints to complete the circuit. Only one major U.S. city , Cincinnati, chose to use a double-overhead trolley wire system. It had one power and one return wire separated by insulators. There was no substantial technical reason to justify this peculiar way of handling the power collection system. It was adopted because of a legal battle over interference with telephone service because of the ground return and efforts to consolidate the local street railways into a single system. Other factors included a city ban on disrupting street pavements and the opinion of a senior street-railway Titan that the double-wire plan was somehow superior.

Light Rail in Britain and France: Study in Contrasts, with Some Similarities

Great Britain and France have experienced a dramatic resurgence of light rail in the past two decades. Beginning in the early 1980s, following a 30-year abandonment of street railways in favor of motorbuses, cities in both countries developed new light rail transit systems as a response to declining transit ridership, faded downtowns in need of revitalization, and the high construction costs of heavy rail and metro. Britain and France have pursued greatly different approaches to the implementation of light rail. The purpose of this paper is to point out these differences and, through the use of case studies, draw conclusions as to the efficacy of each approach. A few cities in each country were studied with secondary sources. Commonality within each country was observed with great divergence between the two countries. In Britain, the requirements for light rail are onerous: a specific act of Parliament is needed for each new start. Each system must achieve full recovery of operating and maintenance costs ...

Before the Big Dig: Boston’s Central Artery as a Construct of Mid–Century Modernity

AMY D. FINSTEIN Before the Big Dig: Boston's Central Artery as a Construct ofMid-Century Modernity AMY D. FINSTEIN 0 n July 1, 1959, Boston's politicians, business leaders, and city planners gathered to celebrate the opening of the Central Artery, a six-lane elevated highway running through the heart of downtown (Fig. 1). This celebration marked the culmination of dreams and schemes of a high-speed, crosstown road that leaders had toyed with for decades. But more than simply easing traffic congestion, the Central Artery represented a conscious effort by city leaders to re-invent Boston as a "modern" city in the northeast corridor. This commitment to "modernity" encompassed maintaining and attracting new commercial interests to the city and updating Boston's characteristically nineteenth-century urban landscape. Planners viewed the Central Artery as a way to achieve both these goals. With its green steel girders soaring 40 feet into the air and a concrete roadbed spanning 100 feet across, the Artery announced the arrival of a new scale, style, and attitude about architecture, automobiles, and progress in Boston. Boston's Central Artery represented an ongoing dialogue about what it meant to be socially and aesthetically modern between 1920 and 1950. In his seminal commentary on modern life, All that is Solid Melts into Air, Marshall Berman explored the contradictions and ambiguities that industrialization brought to society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Berman's construct of modernity as an ongoing dialectic between technology and people's responses to it applies to the Central Artery as a specific representation of, and reaction to, conditions of change in Boston. The Central Artery posits two specific approachestomodernitythatconformtoBerman's construct. From a public policy and economic standpoint, the Central Artery demonstrated leaders'determination to embrace the automobile and to make the city's businesses accessible and attractive to an increasingly mobile public. From an architectural standpoint, the Central Artery's route and bare machined forms manifested these policy concerns, reflecting popular urban planningphilosophies and celebrating modernity in the simplicity of its engineered steel parts. In planning the Artery, Boston's leaders fit into Berman's framework, becoming "subjects as well as objects ofmodernization," trying "to get a grip on the modern world and to make themselves at home in it."1 Though constructed in the 1950s, the Central Artery actually reflected planning and transportation challenges identified three decades earlier. Proposals for the Central Artery developed largely in response to contradictions between Boston's lingering nineteenthcentury landscape, the growing presence of the automobile in the early twentieth century, and the implications of both of these factors on the health of Boston's economy. Leaders first discussed a major crosstown highway as early as 1911 and completed full plans for an elevated road in the late 1920s. Even though the Great Depression and then World War II postponed implementation ofthe elevated highway scheme until mid-century, the Central Artery remained a product of the 1920s-a solution responding to the burgeoning appeal of the automobile and its disconnect with Boston's nineteenth-century urban fabric. ARRIS Volume Sixteen 69 AMY D. FINSTEIN Fig. 1. A 1962 view of Central Artery snaking along Boston's waterfront , stretching from South Station, atfar left, through the North End, at right. (Massachusetts State Archives) Nineteenth-Century Transportation Infrastructure The landscape that early twentieth-century Bostonians sought to modernize was one full of nineteenth-century contradictions about technology and architecture. On the one hand, city planners had eagerly embraced new technology to develop the city's infrastructure. Bostonians spent much of the 1840s and 1850s expanding the city's originally small footprint by using steam shovels to fill in the shoreline around its peninsula.2 The growth of the city's public transportation network in the 1870s and 1880s demonstrated a similar enthusiasm for new construction techniques. Starting with horse-drawn street railways, then evolving to include electric trolleys and the nation's first subway system, Boston made a substantial commitmentto enabling streamlined movement within the city.3 The increasing scale of this transit system offered residents the modern option of living farther from the downtown business district and commuting easily to and from the city center...

Electric Railways, 1880-1990 (review)

Reviewed by: Electric Railways, 1880–1990 William D. Middleton (bio) Electric Railways, 1880–1990. By Michael C. Duffy. London: Institution of Electrical Engineers, 2003. Pp. xxi+452. $84. In reviewing the development of electric railways from their inception, Michael Duffy has taken on an ambitious topic. While he emphasizes developments in Great Britain, he provides full coverage of work in the United States and in Europe in order to complete the story of what has been very much an international engineering endeavor. Going further than previous works on electric railways, Duffy describes the developments in centralized power-generating plants and distribution that proved crucial to the success of electric traction. Equally important is his account of the development of the signaling, communications, and control required for the operation of high-density electrification. An early chapter covers the period that brought electric railways to the beginning of commercial practicality, which Duffy attributes largely to American inventors. Another describes the work of Frank J. Sprague and others in developing street railway systems and then interurban electric railways and heavy-duty electric rapid transit, notably the extensive London subway system, which in large part followed American practice. While low-voltage direct current (DC) systems were adopted for the early electric railways, there were many doubts about the suitability of this technology for general electrification. During the 1890s the Alsatian electrical inventor J. J. Heilmann conducted studies on a variety of electrical systems and developed the "Fusée E´lectrique," or Electric Rocket, a self-contained DC locomotive carrying its own steam power plant. Early British electrification largely went to low-voltage DC systems developed for urban and suburban networks, with the Southern Railway and its predecessors growing into one of the largest of all such systems. Most of the early electrification projects in the United States, such as the New York Central's and the Pennsylvania Railroad's at New York, used low-voltage DC as well, but North American suppliers soon recognized the potentially superior properties of alternating current, completing notable AC electrifications as early as 1907 on the New York, New Haven and Hartford. Later development of electric railways largely used AC or high-voltage DC. [End Page 211] In Europe, systems involving both three-phase and single-phase in a variety of voltages and frequencies were tried, with extensive three-phase electrification being installed in Switzerland and Italy. The only three-phase electrification in North America was the Great Northern's first Cascade Tunnel in 1909. The Norfolk and Western, and later the Virginian, used a single-phase power distribution and locomotives equipped with phase-splitting devices to provide three-phase induction motors that were superior to single-phase commutator or DC series motors for heavy-haul coal service. High-voltage DC electrifications, ranging from 1,200 to 3,000 volts, were widely adopted in North America, while almost all AC electrification used an 11,000-volt, 25-hertz system employing commutator motors; a few lines used motor-generator locomotives to provide low-voltage DC to the traction motors. The preponderance of European practice from the 1920s followed similar single-phase AC and high-voltage DC. Duffy devotes particular attention to the development of electric power generation and distribution. Early electrifications that used low-voltage DC generation were too inefficient except in rapid transit or other installations that Duffy calls "enforced electrification." The advantages of centralized power stations using high-voltage AC power supply and distribution were recognized early, and this system was helped by the development of high-capacity rotary converters installed in on-line substations to convert the supply to DC. But the problems of high power drops and the requirement for frequent substations rendered the large-scale use of low-voltage DC infeasible for heavy-duty electric railways. Although the development of efficient high-voltage DC and AC systems greatly expanded the potential range of electrification, many early lines required their own generating plants, and even when industrial power supplies became available they required expensive conversions to the railway systems. The expansion of industrial-frequency systems and the use of mercury-arc rectifiers in fixed installations from the 1920s on improved the efficiency of power supply. The...

Light Rail in Britain and France

Great Britain and France have experienced a dramatic resurgence of light rail in the past two decades. Beginning in the early 1980s, following a 30-year abandonment of street railways in favor of motorbuses, cities in both countries developed new light rail transit systems as a response to declining transit ridership, faded downtowns in need of revitalization, and the high construction costs of heavy rail and metro. Britain and France have pursued greatly different approaches to the implementation of light rail. The purpose of this paper is to point out these differences and, through the use of case studies, draw conclusions as to the efficacy of each approach. A few cities in each country were studied with secondary sources. Commonality within each country was observed with great divergence between the two countries. In Britain, the requirements for light rail are onerous: a specific act of Parliament is needed for each new start. Each system must achieve full recovery of operating and maintenance costs and contribute toward capital investment while competing against unregulated buses. That some British systems have been built and successfully attract traffic is to the credit of their proponents. France has a more uniform approach published in government circulars. All French cities of substantial size must have a “versement transportes,” a 1% to 2% tax on salaries and wages dedicated to regulated and coordinated public transport. French new starts, which have no need to attain 100% cost recovery (the versement transportes covers operating losses), have been implemented in about half the time of those in Britain.

African Americans Versus the Memphis Street Railway Company

The traditional interpretation of the southern justice system is that African Americans rarely, if ever, won. This article examines a seemingly anomalous situation in Memphis in which at the turn of the twentieth century, African Americans successfully sued the Memphis Street Railway Company for personal injury and racial insult. African American working-class men and women were often financially compensated for physical injuries, while African American middle-class women won their lawsuits against white conductors who insulted their personal dignity. These lawsuits amounted to personal victories for the plaintiffs but were in actuality political losses for African Americans in general. Through a detailed examination of race, class, and gender, the authors show how notions of middle-class respectability were contested by blacks and whites to influence the verdict in these lawsuits while simultaneously reinforcing negative stereotypes of African Americans that relegated the race to second-class citizens.

The Decline of the Urban Horse in American Cities

Urban horses were phased out gradually, function by function, over the course of a century. Between 1850 and 1880 the number of urban horses grew dramatically, since most freight on the new railroad network required local delivery and rapidly growing cities required more passenger service. The displacement of the horse was slow: for stationary purposes beginning around 1830, for street railways from 1885 to 1895, for light passenger use from 1895 to 1915 and for heavy freight from 1915 to 1930. Equine technology, supposedly made obsolescent by the steam engine, showed remarkable resilience, persisting for more than a century after its supposed replacement.

Framing Miss-Conduct: The Rhetoric of Paradox in the Struggle of Cleveland Conductorets During World War I

This essay explores a specific historical example—the experiences of the Cleveland Street Railway conductorets during World War I—in order to shed light on how women's roles in the workplace were framed during World War I. A rhetoric of paradox framed the arguments of street railway owners, government officials, Progressive Era reformers, and female street railway workers who variously argued for or against women's participation in jobs traditionally deemed “men's work.” The article explores how the paradox was managed through arguments of expediency and arguments of feasibility.

Second metropolis: pragmatic pluralism in Gilded Age Chicago, Silver Age Moscow, and Meiji Osaka

By exploring and comparing North America's, Russia's, and Japan's second cities of a century ago-Chicago, Moscow, and Osaka- Second Metropolis discloses the extent to which social fragmentation, frequently viewed as an obstacle to democratic development, actually fostered pluralistic public policies. Such policies are explored through six case studies-the politics of street railways and charter reform in Chicago, adult education and housing in Moscow, and harbor revitalization and poverty alleviation in Osaka-that illustrate how even those with massive political and economic power were stymied by the complexity of their communities. Chicago, Moscow, and Osaka, though the products of very different nations and cultures, nonetheless shared an important experience of inclusive politics during an era of extraordinary growth and social diversity. The success of all three cities, which went well beyond mere survival, rested on a distinctive political resource: pragmatic pluralism.

More Than an Ocean Apart

U.S. cities were quick to accept and construct street railway (SR) networks in the late 19th century. In examining SR electrification, historians observed that while U.S. SRs were eager to embrace the new technology, their European counterparts were reluctant to electrify, causing a technological 'lag' in the development of the European systems during the latter half of the 19th century. This is attributed to Europe's stricter government oversight of railway leases and operations as compared with the U.S. However, despite this initial disadvantage, most European systems gradually caught up with U.S. systems by the early 20th century. By World War I, European SRs were offering service equal to or better than that of U.S. SRs. By examining the cities of Birmingham, England, and Cleveland, Ohio, from the 1880s to 1911, this paper argues that, rather than racing to catch up with U.S. developments, Birmingham's SRs actually benefited from more conservative, long-term policies emphasizing permanence, while Cleveland's SRs suffered from policies emphasizing the immediate future and ignoring considerations of the long term.

Prairie Fire Fizzles

WHAT COULD REASONABLY be asked of film produced in 1999 on the Winnipeg General Strike? It should reflect the current state of the historiography; should be sensitive to the discourse deployed by the participants in the strike and those who commented in 1919 and later — including historians; should invite the viewer to approach the strike with an open yet analytical perspective; and finally should avoid simple-minded narratives, gratuitous assessments, or dubious conclusions. Measured by such criteria, Prairie Fire fizzles. Producers Audrey Mehler and David Paperny ask remarkably few questions of the events they portray, presenting the strike as unique, localized and ephemeral explosion — a time of in the words of consultant David Bercuson. The focus is, indeed, on excitement as the film is preoccupied with the violent denouement of the strike — Bloody Saturday— to the detriment of creative or analytical thinking about its popularity, meaning and outcome. Never exploring the character or scope of the challenge to the social order, the film trivializes the strike. Why did tens of thousands of working-class Winnipeggers join the walkout? Prairie Fire gives no response to this question. Narrator Ann Medina explains that it began as fight for workers' rights, but such fights were and are commonplace. Few explode into the generalized confrontation of 1919. The filmmakers appear unaware of the geographical extent of the post-World War I national and international labour revolt and so assume that the source of the conflict has to be found in Winnipeg itself. But even here, they do not look very hard. The film examines some specific confrontations earlier in the century such as the 1906 street railway strike, but such contests, along with the neighbourhood mobilizations that they provoked, were ubiquitous across the continent. The poverty of north-end Winnipeg is portrayed, but there is no explanation of why poverty may provoke resistance rather than resignation. The important ethnic mixture of the city is described, but the significance of ethnicity in the strike itself is all but ignored. The existence of