ELECTRIC TRAMWAY CAES.

Globe, Volume XXIV, Issue 2520, 6 May 1882, Page 3

ELECTRIC TRAMWAY CAES.

(From the “ Times,” March 6 ) The first application of electricity to the driving of tramway cars in this country was made on March 4, at the works of the North Metropolitan Tramway Company, Leytonetono. The car employed was one which has bean the subject of a similar experiment in France. It was fitted with a large number of Faure accumulators ranged under the seats and communicating with a motor underneath, which, in its turn, by means of pinionwheels, acted upon the wheels of the car, The accumulators having been charged at a dynamo machine in the company’s yard, a number of ladies and gentlemen who had been invited to witness the experiment mounted on the car, and had a few runs with it np and down a quarter of a mile of tramway in Union road, to the amassment of the inhabitants, who for the first time in their lives, saw a tramcar full of people travelling at the rate of seven or eight miles an hour without any visible motive power. As proving the applicability of electric force to locomotion, t lie experiment was an undoubted success. The accumulators, which weighed a ton and a half, exerted, with one charging, a force equal to that of twenty-five horses for one hour —that is to say, five horses for five hours, and so on. In other words, the car could have run with its full number of passengers for half a day, with an ample allowance for waste of energy. The objection to this system as at present carried out rests on two grounds—first, that the car with its load of accumulators weights as much as five tons ; and secondly, that the pinion-wheels make a loud grinding noise, such as seriously to incommode the public. Both these defects the promoters hope to be able to remedy by attaching the motor, which is practically a dynamo machine reversed, direct to the axle, thus dispensing with pinion-wheels and reducing friction. The attachment of the motor the axle would necessitate in the case of tramcars the use of driving wheels small enough to make a large number of revolutions per minute with a low rate of progression. In the case of railway trains it would enable a very high rate of speed to bo attained —probably 100 miles an hour—with driving-wheels of moderate size. The promoters are sanguine enough to believe that at no distant day they may be able also to introduce electric cabs and omnibuses guided like velocipedes. All vehicles driven by electricity could of course with a little additional expenditure of force bo lighted by the ssme means. It only remains to add, with reference to tho electric tramcar, that it can be worked, started, stopped, and reversed, by the moving of a small switch handle, and that the promoters calculate upon being able to work tramways with electricity at one half the cost of horse power. The experiment was carried out by Mr Badcliffe Ward on behalf of tho. Faure Accumulator Company.