Birney Trams
Updated: 23 February 2008
View an image of ALL the Australian Birney cars
For many years, there has been some conjecture among Australian tramway enthusiasts regarding the building dates of MESC Geelong Birneys #s 14 and 15. Recently, noted Birney tram researcher and author of "The Birney Car" (view an on-line copy) - Harold E Cox - was able to verify the building dates of these trams.
Mr Cox provided the following commentary regarding these trams:
"The
dates given on the list in the Birney book are the promised delivery dates
as listed in the Company order book. For order 21863, Brill showed
an order date of 2 August 1923 and a promised delivery date of 31 December
1923, which was the date that I listed.
For the most part, Brill met their dates. For overseas shipments, however,
this appears to have indicated when the cars left the Brill shop, not when
they arrived at their new home. While this would not be a significant
problem for domestic orders, a considerable amount of time would elapse
while a ship found its way from Philadelphia to New Zealand.
Brill would not let an order for cars lie around for five months before
completing it. Delays of this length took place only during World War I.
By 1923, they were meeting their deadlines pretty consistently. It
is my considered opinion, therefore, that the cars were finished on time
during 1923 and shipped at the end of the year, arriving in Australia in
1924."
Mr Cox's research also included the other Bendigo Birney trams - now Bendigo #s 28, 30 and 302 and AETM, Adelaide #303.
In response to a query regarding the order and completion dates of these trams he says; "Brill order 22154 was purchased through Noyes Brothers for the Adelaide Tramway Company. The order was placed on 22 December 1924 and the promised delivery date (probably at the Philadelphia docks) was 31 March 1925."
The Origins of the Birney Car Name
by
Harold E Cox.
The
name "Birney car" was one which seems to have arisen
spontaneously among users, rather than one which was created as a
distinctive name for a particular style of car. There was little question
about what was being described when one referred to a Nearside Car or a
Peter Witt. Birneys, on the other hand, came by the name comparatively
late and were described in advertising literature and articles by a
variety of terms descriptive of one or more of the characteristics of the
cars.
Birneys incorporated a number of features which were experimented with
beginning just before World War I for the purpose of cutting operating
costs and improving revenues by transit companies which were confronted
with declining revenues as the automobile came of age, and rising
operating costs, particularly during and after World War I. The three most
important considerations were platform expenses, power costs, and accident
and damage control. The Birney car addressed all three issues.
A review of Brill Magazine articles on Birneys shows no consistency in
names. The first article about a Birney appeared in April 1916 and
describes the cars as "One-man." The cars were built to Birney's
specifications and he was mentioned by name in the article. However, the
article made no effort to apply the name to a car type. Birneys name would
not be mentioned in any of the several later articles chronicling the
evolution of the early "Birney" cars until June 1917 when an
order of cars for the Ironwood & Bessemer (Michigan), appear to be the
first to be described as "Birney Lightweight Safety Cars."
Still there would be no consistency in names. While Birney's name was
mentioned in a February 1918 article, the name applied to the cars in that
article was "Safety Car." During the same period, Brill also
described other cars which were clearly NOT Birney design as
"Double-end One-man Cars," and "Safety cars." There
was no consistency in their nomenclature. Cars built for the Omaha Lincoln
and Beatrice to the Birney design were given no name at all in a May 1917
article, but were referred to in the June 1917 article about the Ironwood
& Bessemer cars as "Safety cars." They were not called
Birney Safety Cars in this article, even though the designs of the two
groups of cars was obviously identical.
By June 1920, Brill appears to have adopted the name which appears to have
been popularly used of "Birney Safety Car," which appears again
in the next article in June 1921.
Brill appears to have been more preoccupied with selling car features than
promoting Birney. At one time or another in developmental period of the
Birney car, it focused first on one-man operation as a means of cutting
platform expenses, then on car weight as a means of reducing power costs,
and finally on safety features, a concern which had been raised soon after
the move towards one-man car crews began. The Birney appears to have been
the first successful car design to combine all three changes into one
vehicle and the name came into common use after the explosion of car
orders in the period immediately following World War I spread the cars all
over the country. (1)
In
our first posting on the subject, we examined the evolution of the name
"Birney safety car" as it was used in the Brill Magazine.
In fact, the name "safety car" did not originate with Brill even
though a majority of the early cars of this type were built by American
Car Co., a Brill subsidiary. Instead, it originated with the St. Louis Car
Co. The evolution of the name prior to World War I appears to have begun
in the Electric Railway Journal which called in its 16 September 1916
issue for a new name to describe one-man cars.
To quote the Journal, "There is no doubt that the choice of a good
name for any new device has a great deal to do with its future success.
This is a time when advertising writers are studying what they call the
psychological effects of the words they employ, and they tell us that a
great deal depends on first impressions. The instance which we have in
mind is the one-man car. The name conveys the chief thought back of the
car very clearly to the railway man, but some railway managements have
found the name a handicap in popularizing the cars on their lines. To the
public the characteristic of the car to feature is not its economical
advantage but some other merit. For this reason, if the car bore a name
which represented the benefit which the public would get from its
introduction, it would be more popular. This benefit, of course, is the
frequent service which a company can give with these cars on lines with
light traffic as compared with those which require two men to operate
them. Possibly the title "frequent service car" would answer. At
any rate, there is in the minds of a number of managements a demand for a
popular substitute for the name "one-man car."
The early responses to the call for a name were less than inspiring,
including names like "Tram-Bus." Most of the proposed names
showed a lack of imagination, focusing on the one-man concept but changing
the nomenclature. The Vice President of the Charlottesville &
Albemarle (Virginia), which operated one-man Near-Side cars, suggested
"single-operated cars." Another contributor, missing the point
completely, suggested using the terms "mono-man" and
"bi-man" cars. Mercifully, these proposals sank without a trace.
The first appearance of the safety car name in print that we have found
was in the ERJ's 25 November 1916 issue, Nic LeGrand of the St. Louis Car
Co. proposed the name "light safety car, " a name which was
apparently already being used in publicity on sales of St. Louis-built
cars to Monroe LA, Aberdeen SD, Mahoning & Shenango OH/PA, Brockton
& Plymouth MA, and Puget Sound Electric WA..
An article by Raymond Smith VP of Eastern Wisconsin Electric Co. in
the ERJ for 17 March 1917 (p.492) proposed getting rid of name
"one-man car" as soon as possible. "The publicity attendant
upon the elimination of one man from the operation of a street car is so
great and two-man operation is of such long standing, that the first
impression of the public is that the company is requiring one man to
undertake the work of two busy men, whereas, as a matter of fact, it is
merely requiring one man to work to his reasonable capacity. This first
impression is made more lasting by the constant designation of this type
of car as a `one-man car.' The sooner this designation is eliminated the
better. As to safety of operation, the writer has heard of no instance
where the use of but one man has resulted in an accident."
The name "safety car" was endorsed in March 1917 by the
secretary-treasurer of the Three Rivers Traction Co. in Quebec. The term
"light" had disappeared by then, no doubt because it would
convey an image of a car which was fragile, precisely one of the images
which had been given by those who felt the lightweight features were being
pushed too far.
The appearance of an article entitled "The Design and Development of
the Safety Car" which appeared in the ERJ for 22 September 1917 went
a long ways towards legitimizing the name, particularly since the article
was written by C. O. Birney. Birney also tried to sell the name
"standard safety car" in the article. However, by 1917, the
Birney design had already gone through several variations and would go
through many more in subsequent years. Complete standardization would
remain an elusive goal.
The name still was one of many in competition. Other articles in the same
magazine issue referred to the "Light-weight Frequent-service
single-operated Car, One-man car, Quick-service car, and Light-weight
Automatic Safety car." The name used in the various articles
appears to have varied according to the point that the writer was trying
to make.
In the same issue, an article on the use of "light-weight safety
cars" on the city lines of the Illinois Traction System emphasized
the work of J. M. Bosenbury who was IT's superintendent of motive power
and equipment. Bosenbury had designed a single-end one-man car in 1916 for
use on the Illinois Traction which was virtually indistinguishable from
the first two Stone & Webster safety cars designed by Birney. The
article also, interestingly, referred at one point to the Illinois
Traction car as the "Bosenbury car."
By the time that the next series of articles on the progress of the
one-man car phenomenon appeared in the ERJ on 28 September 1918, the name
"safety car" was firmly entrenched. In a series of articles
spanning 23 pages of text and pictures, the cars are described by no other
title. It should be noted that the breadth of car types covered had
expanded considerably with some two-man safety cars, none of which could
have been mistaken for a Birney product, being included in the study. By
this time the publicists had obviously decided that the simplest way to
deal with the one-man problem was to meet it head on. Statistical evidence
was produced that one man was safer than two if he was properly provided
with safety car equipment, including dead-man controls and air-operated
brakes, something which had been unknown on older single-truck cars.
Perhaps this expansion of the title's coverage to include other types of
one-man cars and a number of rebuilds of older cars which did not
originally have safety car equipment, was what would lead to the gradual
introduction of the term "Birney safety car" to distinguish the
true lightweight safety cars which originated with Birney and Stone &
Webster. Since this name apparently evolved spontaneously, a definitive
answer is probably unattainable.
My next posting will deal with technological changes and economic conditions which brought the safety car into being. (2)
More
What's In a Name.
As a final check on the origins and use of the name Birney Car, I checked
the Brill builder list. The results were interesting.
Brill did not begin taking orders for Safety cars until July 1918, the
earlier orders being taken by its subsidiary, American Car Company.
Beginning in July, it began accepting large orders which were farmed out
to American, and as business increased, to Wason Manufacturing Co., also a
Brill subsidiary. Brill did not begin building Safety cars at the
Philadelphia plant until June 1919 when it received an order for 200 cars
for Brooklyn Heights RR in New York.
The early orders were referred to as One-Man Safety Cars. However, the
Brooklyn order was specifically described in the order book as Birney
Safety cars. However, as additional orders were received and processed,
the person entering the orders into the book went back to the One-Man
Safety name until October 17, 1919 when the company ordered one car built
for Exhibition Purposes. This was described as a Double-End Birney Safety
Body. This car was apparently retained for those purposes and is believed
to have been dismantled in 1930.
All of the remaining cars ordered in 1919 were described as Birney Safety
cars. However, there was an abrupt change with the first order of 1920
which were described as One-Man cars, both the Birney and Safety
designations disappearing. In February the term was expanded to One-Man
Safety Cars and One-man and One-Man Safety were used interchangeably for
several orders until the description was changed once again, this time to
Single-End or Double-End Safety cars.
The name Birney never appeared again in the Brill order book - at least
through 1926, which is as far as I looked.
There must be a story behind the abrupt change at the beginning of 1920
but it is unlikely that the reason will ever be discovered. I have checked
the handwriting to see if the clerk making the entries had changed.
Unfortunately, the same clerk kept the books through the entire evolution
of the name. (3)
Harold E. Cox
Source:
(1) Cox, Harold E (2002). What's In a Name? http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Birney_Cars/message/366
(2) Cox, Harold E (2002). What's In a Name: Part 2. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Birney_Cars/message/376
(3) Cox, Harold E (2002). More What's In a Name. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Birney_Cars/message/424
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