Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 26, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 July 1895 — MARCH OF THE TROLLEY. [ARTICLE]

MARCH OF THE TROLLEY.

Electric Railway Making Headway All Over the Country. Withing the past five years the trolley electric cars have covered so many localities that they are getting a great deal of the passenger traffic in the suburbs of cities and between populous country towns a short distance apart. In Pennsylvania and Connecticut the courts have recently held that the trolley lines are not authorized to use public roadways for their tracks under the permission of the authorities until they secure the consent of every proprietor whose land fronts the roadway. This ruling checks the progress of the trolley in these two States, and yet they are making headway there and in other States, especially in the thickly settled North. In Pennsylvania the Legislature lias passed an act authorizing street railways to carry freight, and the Lehigh Valley road will equip all its charter branches as trolley roads for freight and passengers. In Vermillion County, Illinois, a trolley line has been granted' for twenty years the free use of public highways for freight and passenger service for a distance of thirty miles, paralleling the Chicago and Eastern Illinois road, on condition that passengers shall not be charged more than a cent and a half a mile. In Michigan an electric road forty miles long is being constructed from Port Huron. It is laid with heavy T rails and will be equipped with standard freight and passenger cars. It will cost less than $7,000 a mile to build and equip, whereas the cost for a steam railway would be between $40,000 and $60,000. What it will cost to operate and renew the trolley lines the future will determine, but there is good reason to believe that this cheap, rapid and satisfactory system of transportation will be greatly extended in the next few years. The electric lines will be very useful in the farming districts, connecting them with their country towns and the markets and acting as feeders to the steam railways. It is not likely that there will be any serious discrimination against them attempted by the State Legislatures. Such measures would be very unpopular, and the steam railways will in the end find the electric lines such valuable auxiliaries that they will not oppose them.