Canada In 1861,
Toronto Street Railway horsecars replaced horse-drawn omnibuses as a public transit mode in
Toronto. Electric streetcars later replaced the horsecars between 1892 and 1894. The Toronto Street Railway created Toronto's unique broad gauge of . The streets were unpaved, and a
step rail was employed. The horsecars had flanged wheels and ran on the upper level of the step. Ordinary wagons and carriages ran on the broad lower step inside. This necessitated a wider gauge. This broad
Toronto gauge is still used today by the
Toronto streetcar system and three lines of the
Toronto subway. The
Metropolitan Street Railway operated a horsecar line in then-suburban
North Toronto from 1885 until the line was electrified in 1890; this horsecar line also used Toronto gauge. There were a number of horse car operators in Canadian cities in the mid to late 1800s, including in:
Kitchener-Waterloo,
London,
Montreal,
Ottawa,
Quebec City,
St. Thomas,
Toronto, and
Winnipeg.
Continental Europe The first horse-drawn rail cars in
Continental Europe were operated from 1828 by the
České Budějovice - Linz railway, cities currently lying in
Czechia and
Austria respectively. Europe saw a proliferation of horsecar use for new tram services from the mid-1860s, with
many towns building new networks.
India The first horse-drawn trams in India ran a distance between
Sealdah and Armenian Ghat Street on 24 February 1873. The service was discontinued on 20 November of that year. The Calcutta Tramway Company was formed and registered in London on 22 December 1880. Metre-gauge horse-drawn tram tracks were laid from Sealdah to Armenian Ghat via Bowbazar Street, Dalhousie Square and Strand Road. The route was inaugurated by
Viceroy Ripon on 1 November 1880. On 9 May 1874 the first horse-drawn carriage made its début in the city, plying the
Colaba–
Pydhone via
Crawford Market, and
Bori Bunder to
Pydhonie via
Kalbadevi routes. The initial fare was three
annas (15
paise pre-decimalisation), and no tickets were issued. As the service became increasingly popular, the fare was reduced to two annas (10 pre-decimalisation paise). Later that year, tickets were issued to curb increasing ticket-less travel. Stearns and Kitteredge reportedly had a stable of 1,360 horses over the lifetime of the service.
United Kingdom The first tram services in the world were started by the
Swansea and Mumbles Railway in
Wales, using specially designed carriages on an existing tramline built for
horse-drawn freight dandies. Fare-paying passengers were carried on a line between
Oystermouth,
Mumbles and
Swansea Docks from 1807. The
Gloucester and Cheltenham Tramroad (1809) carried passengers although its main purpose was freight. In spite of its early start, it took many years for horse-drawn streetcars to become widely acceptable across Britain; the American
George Francis Train first introduced them to
Birkenhead Corporation Tramways' predecessor in
Birkenhead in 1860 but was jailed for "breaking and injuring" the highway when he next tried to lay the first tram tracks on the roads of
London. An
1870 Act of Parliament overcame these legal obstacles by defining responsibilities and for the next three decades many
local tramway companies were founded, using horse-drawn carriages, until replaced by
cable, steam or electric traction. Many companies adopted a design of a partly enclosed
double-decker carriage hauled by two horses. The last horse-drawn tram was retired from London in 1915. Horses continued to be used for light shunting well into the 20th century. The last horse used for shunting on British Railways was retired on
21 February 1967 in
Newmarket, Suffolk.
United States In the
United States, the very first streetcar appeared in New Orleans in 1832, operated by the
Pontchartrain Railroad Company, followed by those in 1832 on the
New York and Harlem Railroad in
New York City. The latter cars were designed by
John Stephenson of
New Rochelle, New York, and constructed at his
company in New York City. The earliest streetcars used horses and sometimes mules, usually two as a team, to haul the cars. Rarely, other animals were tried, including humans in emergency circumstances. By the mid-1880s, there were 415 street railway companies in the US operating over of track and carrying 188 million passengers per year using horsecars. By 1890 New Yorkers took 297 horsecar rides per capita per year. The average street car horse had a life expectancy of about two years.
Elsewhere .Tropical plantations (for products such as
henequen and
bananas) made extensive use of animal-powered trams for both passengers and freight, often employing the
Decauville narrow-gauge portable track system. In some cases these systems were very extensive and evolved into
interurban tram networks (as in the
Yucatan, which sported over of such lines). Surviving examples may be found in both
Brazil and the Yucatán, and some examples in the latter still use horsecars.
Decline Problems with horsecars included the fact that any given horse could only work so many hours on a given day, had to be housed, groomed, fed and cared for day in and day out, and produced prodigious amounts of manure, Horsecars were largely replaced by electric-powered
streetcars following the introduction of electric powered streetcars in the 1880s. The first public electric tramway used for permanent service was the
Gross-Lichterfelde tramway in
Lichterfelde near Berlin in Germany, which opened in 1881. This was the world's first commercially successful electric tram. It drew current from the rails at first, with
overhead wire being installed in 1883.
Frank J. Sprague's spring-loaded
trolley pole used a wheel to travel along the wire. In late 1887 and early 1888, using his trolley system, Sprague installed the first successful large electric street railway system in
Richmond, Virginia. Long a transportation obstacle, the hills of Richmond included grades of over 10%, and were an excellent proving ground for acceptance of the new technology in other cities. Within a year, the economy of electric power had replaced more costly horsecars in many cities. By 1889, 110 electric railways incorporating Sprague's equipment had been begun or planned on several continents. Many large metropolitan lines lasted well into the early twentieth century.
New York City had a regular horsecar service on the
Bleecker Street Line until its closure in 1917.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, had its Sarah Street line drawn by horses until 1923. The last regular mule-drawn cars in the US ran in
Sulphur Rock, Arkansas, until 1926 and were commemorated by a
U.S. postage stamp issued in 1983.
Toronto's horse-drawn streetcar operations ended in 1891. In other countries animal-powered tram services often continued well into the 20th century; the last mule tram service in
Mexico City ended in 1932, and a mule tram in
Celaya, Mexico, survived until 1954.{{cite web ==Operational horsecars==