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The New York Press

New York's Horse Car Days Are Almost At an End

Tim Quailley, Who Has Only Been Driving a Car for [[cut off]] Years, Admits It is About Time to Abolish Old Style Transportation in Manhattan

[[image]]  Tim Quailley.
[[image]]  Henry Si [[cut off]] 


THERE are about 106 horse drawn
cars in New York and 1,500 of
the electrically propelled vehicles.

Not even the Legislature could
achieve the herculean task of making New York "horsecar-less." Governor Sulzer, a horse lover, remembered his equine friends, and placed an extra emphatic veto upon the bill.

The obsequies of the horsecar, however, have been sung. The East Belt Line, from Fifty-ninth to Grand street, and within the week the West Belt Line, from South Ferry to Fifty-fourth street, along West street, will know them no more.

The horse car has maintained its own. It never surrendered; it just died of inanition. And those who still take their dauntless stand, dusty with the
germs gathered when trolley and cable and elevated and subway cars were unknown, are fiendishly aware that the
problem of transportation they seem to solve will not really be disposed of until they have perished from the earth and
the vehicles the supplant them just must be modern. The traction companies are disinclined to put in modern
equipment and profess to doubt the ability of newer cars to thread the narrow streets where their contemporary ancestors now meander.

[[cutoff]]

to me it's about time to take 'em off. They don't appreciate us, they don't. What could a trolley do on these streets? Nothin'; absolutely nothing'.
The horses can jump over a truck or climb a barrycade, an' the car, it can turn right angles. Who cares? Nobody! All we get is jeers an' curses. Gid ap! Gid ap!"

It is hard lines, when you come to think of it. A car that created a sensation when it made its initial trip from Prince to Fourteenth street on the
morning of November 26, 1832, and was the progenitor of many sturdy sons, to see the last of the stock winding through the millions of children that litter
Madison street, or slowly traversing a staring Broadway, unreverenced by youth and ignored by age, more often -
have you ever taken one of them? - oh, far more often held up then holding.

Oldest of Car Drivers.
If you still insist that the glamour of the past clings to the tiny relics, go to the past and sate your soul with its
more intimate details. On car No. 2 of the East Belt line, that now runs from Grand street to South Ferry, relieved of its journey to Fifty-ninth street by storage battery cars, stands
Tim Quailley, the dead ringer for

[[ cutoff ]]

grizzled white beard. Tim's toothless jaws are still strong, and as they clinch themselves upon his blackened clay pipe his eyes glitter jokingly.  It won't be even a white fib to call Tim the oldest horsecar driver in the city; he only "thinks" that some one else has been driving a year or so longer than he has.  But what's a year when it comes to a matter of nearly half a century? For Tim has been flapping the reins over the horses for more than forty-two years.

"Indeed, an' it was a cold ride in the mornings," said he, "when I drove me car down the old Second avenue line from 125th street to South Ferry.  That trip, an' the return used to take three hours and twenty minutes, an' when it was sleetin' or snowing', you had to be told you were alive by the time you got back.

"But" - Tim chuckled with glee - "it was pretty hard on the passengers, too.  Stoves! Say, d'ye think you're kiddin' me? They had no stoves in those days; nary a one.  All they had was straw on the floor, an' how much of a warming you could get out of that you can just imagine.

"Don't think I'm glad at the thought of the passengers suffering.  I'm not.  They were a lot better set in those 

[[cut off]]

ger had his own car; yes sir, hi [[cut off]] car.  He'd wait for the particular [[cut off]] every morning; and if there [[cut off]] block along the line, he'd let any [[cut off]] ber pass until his came along. [[cut off] then he'd say 'good morning' t [[cut off]] driver and the conductor. He [[cut off]] them and we know him. And [[cut off]] missed him we noticed it, and [[cut off]] sorry.  Yes, sir. 

Recalls "Owl Cars.
"Sure, they used to run more [[cut off]] then. What are ye talking [[cut off]] They had to; there wasn't n [[cut off]] else.  During the day they used t [[cut off]] 'em along Second or Third avenue [[cut off]] a minute or two headway, and at [[cut off]] with a fifteen minute headway.  [cut off]] were about the only roads that [[cut off]] cars at night.  The Sixth avenue [[cut off]] the others, huh" - true profess [[cut off]] jealously envincing itself healthily [[cut off]] one took those! Some of the [[cut off]] used to charge more than five [[cut off]] six, seven and ten cents, but th [[cut off]] came down, especially when the [[cut off]] vated was put up. 

"Lord bless me, the way the [[cut off]] has changed! Rush hour in those [[cut off]] used to be from 6 to 9 in the mo [[cut off]] 'cause it took so long to get to [[cut off]] Look how late it is now! But ch [[cut off]] or no changes, I don't think the [[cut off]]