How far did trams start: The first cars plied the streets already in the 19th century
In the place of today’s Brno exhibition grounds, there were still fields, which on the other bank of the Svratka flowed into wooded hills. Next to the empire castle, there was a long-demolished sugar factory. Shallow tracks led to his compound, on which on that July day in 1879 stood a box or cage with a steaming chimney sticking out of it. Dressed-up gentlemen and smug attendants ran around before the machine whistled and slowly began to move. The ride of the first steam tram in the Czech lands ended with the machines derailing after a few meters when the rails broke under it.
Horse and steam
The second attempt, four days later, ended more promisingly, except that the Moravian governorship was not initiated into the enterprise, which threatened with a fine. Further test runs showed that the track top – iron-rimmed longitudinal wooden beams on wooden sleepers – was not suitable for a heavy locomotive. He borrowed the machine from the Krauss machine shop in Linz Brünner Tramway-UnternehmungCzech Brno tram company. The company operated a horse-drawn tram in the city, which started the era of modern public transport in our country ten years earlier.
On the outskirts of the Moravian metropolis, whole new suburbs have sprung up around prosperous textile mills and engineering companies. In 1839, the first railway line in our country connected Brno to the capital, i.e. Vienna, and the people of Brno wanted to stretch the tracks through the streets as well. In 1868, the city councilors discussed several proposals for the establishment of tram lines, which replaced the carriages commuting between the working-class districts and the city center. In February of the following year, the appropriate concession was granted by the Brno Ministry of Trade.
Brno’s primacy and bankruptcy
A few weeks later, a joint-stock company was founded with capital from entrepreneurs from Brno, Vienna and Pest. for the first time, hired workers began laying tracks from today Moravian Square to the carriage house in the courtyard of the inn Semilasso in Králové Polí. However, the Brno tram company for passenger and freight transport had to wait until the beginning of August for a contract with the municipality, before the Brno officials evaluated the information sent by their colleagues in Vienna and knew that suitable types of vehicles would be running in both cities.
When, on August 17, 1869, the first tram in our country hit the streets of Brno, the Moravian metropolis became, according to many sources, the third, but in fact the fifth, city in the Danubian Monarchy with tram traffic: Mon Vienna AND Fistbut also Budina AND Timisoara. By the end of the year, the number of Brno horse-drawn carriage lines had increased to three with passenger transport and one for cargo. Passenger trains ran every half or quarter of an hour from six in the morning to ten in the evening, the ticket cost 15 krejcars (about thirty today’s crowns). Nevertheless, the tram was not used much and in 1875 its operator went bankrupt.
Only a Prague businessman brought the horse back to the streets of Brno Bernhard Kollmannwho founded the aforementioned Brünner Tramway-Unternehmung. He refused to take over the allegedly poorly maintained and significantly dilapidated fleet of his predecessors and thirteen open cars, which of course only drove in the summer. Kollmann’s company used inherited tracks, but was unable to make a profit in the long term and ceased operations in 1880.
Belgian Prague
From the beginning of the sixties of the 18th century, omnibuses for fifteen to twenty people pulled by two or three horses plied the capital of the Czech Kingdom. In 1873, Kollmann and his partner Zdeněk Count Kinský received a concession to operate a horse-drawn railway and founded by the Anglo-Czech tramway company. The first attempt to build a track did not work out due to financial reasons, so the tracks did not begin to be laid in Prague until two years later.
However, Kollmann and Kinsky lost the end in favor of the Belgian businessman Édouard Otlet, a famous promoter of a new means of transport. It was he who, on 23rd 1875, opened a regular operation of the horse-drawn carriage from the then separate one Karlina across the street On Příkopá to the construction site National Theatre. The second track from Small Parties on Smíchov it was put into operation in May of the following year.
Perhaps as a result of Otlet’s agitation, the Prague councilors soon saw the potential of “tramways” and concluded a contract with the businessman in 1882 to expand the tram network to six lines with a total length of nineteen kilometers. In some places it was double-tracked, and the wooden rails covered with sheet metal began to be replaced by metal sleepers. It is not without interest that during the construction work, Otlet’s company had to excavate only the section of the street that it was able to finish on the same day. Its lines were replaced by numbers, differentiated by color and ran at seven-minute intervals from half past seven in the morning to ten in the evening.
Over the horse, which in 1890 had a total of 117 towing wagons and 528 horses in its inventory, it was slowly getting dark. It was then that the committee started meeting to assess the proposal of the mayor of Královské Vinohrady Jan Friedländer on the connection of the two cities by steam tram. But Prague rejected the project, and a few years later it also rejected the joint electric tram project, after which the Vinohrady aldermen founded their own transport company. At the end of the decade, the capital city bought Otlet’s company for roughly half a billion today’s crowns, but he was only interested in acquiring the tracks. The Koňka drove through Prague for the last time on May 12, 1905, over the Charles Bridge, but its cars were still used by the electric railway as drag cars for several years.
Moravia under steam
In the meantime, steam trams used to run through Brno long ago, but Prague did not complete the intermediate step from horses to electricity – the Vinohrady project was finally called for electric traction. After the replacement of the rails on the line from Pisárek to Králová Pole in 1884, the sets of the newly founded company Brno steam tram. A part of the eight closed “winter” and twelve open “summer” towing cars came from the time of the horse. In addition to the passenger ones, railway freight cars also moved along the tram networks between stations and factories, which increased the profitability of the tram operation.
The Brno transport company also brought trams to Ostravawhere she bought a license to operate the railway, which she built, but is unable to revive the Viennese company Leo Arnold. From Přívoz to Vítkovice, the people of Brňa deployed four locomotives, fifteen passenger cars and six freight cars, which traveled at a speed of around ten kilometers per hour in three quarters of an hour.
At the same time, the first project was already on the table a decade earlier. Mayor of Moravian Ostrava Anton Lux in 1882 he applied for a concession to build a steam railway from the inn By the green treeof today The Palace Hotelto the main station in Přívoz. Despite secured financing, it was not implemented and the first tram did not hit the streets of Ostrava until August 18, 1894. In 1899, the line from Moravská Ostrava to Hulvák was opened, but the electrification of the local tram network, which began in May 1901, was already being prepared.
The first fifteen electric motor cars were delivered by a wagon company in Sanok, Galicia, while steam locomotives served in freight transport until 1922. A year earlier, Brno’s trams were electrified and the network expanded to five lines, and steam locomotives were also used for freight transport here.
Further downstream
In the first years of the 20th century, trams also arrived in the other seven Czech and Moravian cities, which still operate today. It was already clear then that the future belonged to electricity. Steam trams were heavy, noisy and dirty, and on the contrary, more and more power stations were opened. For example, in Olomouc, the introduction of trams was considered for almost the entire nineties, until the pair was replaced in the plans by the proud one. Construction work began in 1897 at the same time as the demolition of the city walls and ended with the start of operations in April 1899. Similarly, Bridges already completed plans were reworked in favor of electric traction and in 1901 the line from the station to Genoa was opened.
On Pilsen they didn’t waste time with the couple and contacted them straight away František Křižíkwhose company, together with Škoda, built them three monorail lines. The operation was started in June 1899 with twenty simple but modernly designed engines. They were produced by the Plzeň-based Strojírna Brožík according to Křižík’s design as electrical equipment supplied by his company. Take LiberecReichenberg, then extremely prosperous and rich, decided in 1894 to lay tram tracks and stretch wires over them. The first and already two-track section with a length of 2.8 km was put into operation in 1897, and for technical reasons trams ran on it on the opposite, i.e. on the right side.
Buying up of private individuals by the city
In Prague, however, they strung the first electric traction wires even earlier, namely on the 766-meter-long route leading through today’s Ovenecká Street from the upper station of the no-longer-existent cable car to Letná to the entrance to Stromovka. It was operated only seasonally, and although it carried passengers, it primarily served as a testing ground and marketing project of Křižík’s company Electric railway. After all, it was opened in July 1891 as part of the Jubilee National Exhibitionas well as the Letenská and Petřín cable cars and the Petrínská lookout tower. It wasn’t until five years later that Křižík, or rather his company, got off the ground Electric railway Prague–Libeň–Vysočany, completely commercial traffic from today’s Florence to both then separate suburbs.
In June 1897, a tram line was opened between the then separate towns Smíchov AND Baskets, approximately from Klamovka to Anděl. Mayor Košíř was a joint project Matej Hlaváček, however, the company failed and he took his own life due to debts. The city of Královské Vinohrady became the first non-private operator of trams, which in 1897 opened a line from German theatertoday the State Opera, on Flora. A quarter of a year later, the predecessor of today’s Prague transport company, the company, was directly founded Electric companies of the royal capital of Prague. In the same year, the city company built the first line and absorbed the Vinohrady company. In 1900, the city bought the railway from Smíchov to Košíř and seven years later the line to Libno and Vysočany.
Instead of color numbers
By the First World War, urban public transport had assumed the approximate form in which we know it today. Although trams were also used to transport goods and waste, instead of colors, the distinction of line numbers prevailed. In the center of Prague and other cities, most of the currently operating network has already been completed. Its backbone route in the suburbs grew in the 1920s, but from the middle of the century, the tram networks stopped expanding significantly.
TIP: The dawn of the railway: Since when have trains run through the Czech Republic?
Trams have even disappeared from the streets of some cities in Western Europe and North America in favor of car transport. Today, however, it is once again considered a modern device and will certainly not be lost even in the integrated, artificial intelligence-controlled urban transport of the future.