Democratic Sentinel, Volume 20, Number 34, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 August 1896 — RURAL ELECTRIC ROADS. [ARTICLE]

RURAL ELECTRIC ROADS.

Ideal Transportation for Suburban Commodities. Electric railways not a few are now in operation which carry freight as well as passengers and serve rural communities as well as city and suburban dwellers. An example is found in a line in southwest Missouri between Carthage and Joplin, a' distance of about nineteen miles. The car fare is a nickel, but as it is collected five times between the two places named, the total fare is 25 cents. This, however, is comparatively cheap, for each of the two great railways—the Missouri Pacific aud the St. Louis and San Francisco—which parallel each other and the new competitor between Carthage and Joplin, charge fifty-five cents, or about three cents a mile, while the trolley rate is about a cent and a quarter a mile. A transfer about midway from one electric car to the other interferes, however, with the perfection of the route as a through line, and there are those who will prefer the solid comfort of the steam trains to the bounding buoyancy of the trolley car, particularly in cold or stormy weather. But the farmers along the line are delighted with the new road, whose accommodating cars stop wherever the patrons desire, and which moreover will take the farmer’s vegetables to market for a consideration as cheerfully as they take him and his wife and children into the city to church, theater or shop. For freight transportation the car platforms are made very spacious, and one of the loads is said to have consisted of a piano and ten trunks. Strawberries are carried from any point on the road to Carthage for five cents a crate. Traveling men find the line handy for trips to the villages, carrying their sample trunks on the car platform; though the absence of station houses must make some inconvenience in handling baggage and freight. In a few weeks this line is to be extended ten miles farther, to Galena, Kan., making the total length—owned by two companies—about twenty-eight miles, and with a cheap tariff for farm products. The farmers along the line are pleased because now they can go to town of an evening just like the city folks, and don’t have to hitch up the horses to take a picking of berries to market.—Railway Age.