Happy Birthday, Horse Car -- November 25, 2007

November 26 marks the 175th birthday of the horse car. On 26-November-1832, the John Mason rolled out for the New York and Harlem Railroad. I added a page about horse cars to my cable car site. It includes:

-- An account of the John Mason's first trip, which included being rear-ended by the second horse car

-- A newspaper article about a franchise-holding horse car line which ran until 1906 on California Street in San Francisco

-- A newspaper article about the last run of the last horse car line to operate in New York (shown in the postcard), on Bleecker Street in 1917

Two notes:

-- Some people claim that the John Mason was just another horse-drawn railway car. They say the real birth of the horse car was in New York and Boston in the early 1850s.

-- I use "horse car" rather than horsecar because I looked at many contemporary sources and the most common usage was "horse car" or "horse-car".