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Derby Horse Railway and the World’s first Electric Freight locomotive by Stevens
Derby Horse Railway and the Worlds first Electric Freight locomotive by John Stevens
New Haven Colony Historical Society
Soft Cover
Copyright 1987
65 pages
Background
The first public demonstration of an electric railway took place at the Berlin Trade Exhibition in May 1879. Thousands of visitors were carried on the diminutive, locomotive-hauled train on its one-thousand-foot loop of narrow-gauge track. The little train was subsequently demonstrated in a number of European cities. The first American demonstration of an electric railway was carried out by Thomas Alva Edison in 1880 at his Menlo Park laboratory in New Jersey. The locomotives used on both of these pioneer electric railways have been preserved.
(See Highlights in the Development of Electric RaiIways.)
The electric railway was developed concurrently in Europe and America. The German firm of Siemens & Halske took an early lead, but once American innovators put their minds to solving the problems involved, they rapidly caught up with, and then overtook, their European competition. In the nine years following the Berlin Trade Exhibition demonstration, the electric railway-as applied almost exclusively to street railways-was developed to a practical state, culminating in the opening of the Richmond Union Passenger Railway, at Richmond, Virginia, through the great efforts of Frank J. Sprague and his associates.
In the October 1888 issue of the Street Railway Journal a list of electric railway installations in the United States and Canada at that time included the Derby Horse Railway with its electric freight operation that had been equipped by Charles J. Van Depoele. Thirty-eight cities and towns had electric street railways, of which the largest and most advanced was the aforementioned line in Richmond. This line had twelve miles of track and forty electric streetcars.
Just a year earlier, in a Street Railway Journal list of electric railways, only twelve such lines were reported to be in operation, six of them installations of the Van Depoele Electric Manufacturing Co. of Chicago. The largest of these, at Montgomery, Alabama, had twelve miles of track and fourteen motor cars. It was the first citywide electric streetcar system in the world.
William J. Clark (1854-1922) of Birmingham (now Derby), Connecticut, was one of the incorporators of the Derby Horse Railway, and it was he who obtained the legislative charter that authorized its construction as an electric railway. His-interest in electricity was inspired by William Wallace of Ansonia, the American pioneer in the manufacture of electric arc lighting equipment. Clark's knowledge of Van Depoele's electric railway installations was undoubtedly the reason that Van Depoele's firm was awarded the contract to electrify the Derby Horse Railway. Van Depoele needed better financing to work on his electrical inventions, and in sympathy with this need, Clark-who knew Frank Sprague, then at work on the Richmond Union Passenger Railway electrification - tried to persuade Sprague to take over
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