and paid him eight thousand dollars per mile to put down these tracks, four thousand in cash and four thousand in bonds; and when the road was completed that fellow had to have his dividend also, and the road was exceedingly cheaply done.

curves.

take to say that any man skilled in and acquainted with that character of work, who was not told when the road was built, if taken to the city of Richmond to-day and shown the track as it appears, would pronounce that it had been there twenty years; and it was not built over two years and a half ago. The track was laid, I believe, with second hand rails; at any rate, a portion of them are but thirty pounds to the yard, and none over forty-five pounds, and they are of most inferior quality; their condition is such to-day that the rails at many points along the road are slivered off as if they had been hammered. There is hardly a plumb rail on the track. The curves were twenty-four foot When the road was first built they were not bound anywhere; and the road was not, as I am informed, properly ballasted. That was the character of the work, and to-day it will take thirty thousand dollars, according to fair engineer estimates, to put the track in anything like good condition; with the track and roadbed neither the Sprague Company, nor any electrical company, has ever had anything to do. The cars were bought from the J. G. Brill Company, and Mr. Brill's representatives are here. They will tell you that although these cars have been there but two years, they look like wood-peckers' nests. They are dirty and unpainted. They are battered and neglected, and all that the word neglect implies. To-day they look as if they were twenty years old. Mr. Brill says he has had several orders for cars imperiled by people who had seen the Richmond cars. Mr. Brill is a gentleman who sells cars of every description. Whether the road be run by cable, overhead wire, storage battery, or any other sort of propulsion, he has a sure thing to sell his cars; and yet these standard cars-these things that are known, and about which there can be no question as to their goodness or badness, that is their condition.

As soon as the road was completed, it was placed in the hands of Mr. Flynn and his associates.. They took charge of it and gave a most fulsome and congratulatory letter, stating that they had observed its running for ninety days before accepting it; and

then, when they were to pay for it, they did not pay. They paid a portion and gave the Sprague Company bonds, which they did. not honor, as collateral for the balance, which they did not pay. As soon as they took charge they inaugurated a system of credit purchases from us. We supplied them with all the ordinary renewals and replacements that might be necessary at a reasonable cost, and the bill was presented from time to time, but not paid and went up, up, up. It was presented time and time and time again, and was never paid. Finally, it amounted to the sum of eleven or twelve thousand dollars, after making all the deductions which they claimed; and as our Company could get nothing from them, it refused to credit them further. The Flynn management turned the general contract of the road over to a gentleman who does not know one end of an electrical car from the other, and who never, I suppose, saw an electrical motor until he saw it on this road. He does not pretend to exercise any supervision over the electrical equipments, and it is but just to him to say, that he claims that he was not put in charge of the electrical propulsion. The electrical railway has been compelled to employ any one they could pick up to take charge of the electrical equipment. There is no skilled electrician connected with the road, and they run it in a happy-go-lucky way, which would be palpable to anybody who saw the road. For many months before the ultimate failure there had been little or no communication between the Sprague Company and that road, and for many months they employed local mechanics, who knew nothing of electrical equipment, to repair the motors. I am informed that they made their own brushes, which were of such inferior material that they would wear out in a very short time; and they absolutely undertook to wind armatures in their own shops, which often burnt out on the first trip. Finally, the inevitable result came, and I say it was all for the best. Notwithstanding all these drawbacks, the Sprague electric cars are being run in Richmond to-day. It is, of course, rather uphill work. One motor only is being used, as I am informed, upon six of the cars now used. They made two hundred and thirty-six thousand dollars in sixteen months on their own confession; and their estimate as to the cost of the operation

of the road is somewhat uncertain, because the money the road earned was taken by these people, not for current expenditures,

It was not only taken for that,

but to pay the cost of the road. but one item of eighteen thousand dollars was taken for doing some paving, and a good deal of the money was taken out on vouchers by Mr. Flynn himself, and these vouchers are not among the papers of the Company. At last, when the failure came, how did it come? Why, sir, the report is circulated here to-day (with what motive I know not), that the electric road in Richmond is a perfect failure, and that they are going back to horse cars; and a gentleman who never built a road in his life says he can remedy it all by putting in his system. The same argument will prove that mules are a failure, and street cars generally, because Mr. Maurice B. Flynn bought a mule car route in June, 1888, in Richmond, and the popular and newspaper verdict in Richmond is that the mule service has deteriorated worse than the electric road. It is a fact that he bought a mule car route for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars; fifty thousand dollars in cash, and the balance in six, twelve, eighteen and twenty-four months It was delivered to him in good mule order; no motors about it. He got the man from whom he bought it to give him a receipt for one hundred thousand dollars. He returned to New York and represented to his associates, among them his own brother, that he had paid three hundred thousand dollars for the road and one hundred thousand of that in cash. He collected from them sixtysix thousand dollars and put sixteen thousand dollars in his own pocket, after making his cash payment, and yet that system has run down! The City Council of Richmond has held a meeting threatening the franchise of the mule road. The public journals of Richmond, the leading papers, have come out and said: “Why, gentlemen, you cannot palm it off on the electrical system; how do you account for your mules; how do you account for your miserable service on the horse car line?" I waited twenty-seven minutes before a mule passed the other day.

Now, sirs, is it just in the Short system

to say for this reason that you ought to put on a mule line because mules are a failure? As to the system being abandoned, the statement is utterly without authority. The fact is this, that the Sprague Company, the pioneer in this work, and to-day at the head of it, has seen that its interests are imperiled by the parties who had obtained control of this road. We are in sympathy with the majority of the bondholders, and

are in co-operation with them to-day. Our President is a member of the Executive Committee of that road, elected since this thing was circulated. The man who was in charge of the motive power of that road has been discharged for incompetency, and the Sprague Company will soon come back to take charge of this grossly neglected road and endeavor to put its equipment in shape. The equipment has been banged and battered so badly that it is hardly fit to be repaired. We are going to endeavor to do that. We filed a bill to put it in the hands of a receiver and take it away from these incompetent people. We have so far succeeded, that to-day the only reason that it is not done is that every overture has been made to us and every concession been offered to us, and every assurance and promise given that a radical change will be made in this incompetent management; and that the Company will at last be put in a position where this general subject of electricity may be done justice, and justice may be done to the particular Company that has been so grossly outraged and injured. That is the condition of the thing to-day.

When these reports first went out, the statement went forth that electrical propulsion was a failure, and that Richmond was going to return to mule service. That was a report which, of course, very few people gave credit to; then came the report that the manager had said that the Sprague Company was a failure. There were and still are several people who are willing to keep that report in circulation, but the truth is, the whole statement was that the particular outfit in Richmond was not giving satisfaction. I was not surprised at that statement; it would not give satisfaction to us or anybody else. An electric car going down the street of Richmond, managed as those cars have been, and patched up as they have been, sounds as if some fellow had bought a wagon load of tin cans, and was going down over the cobble-stone pavements with them. All the Company has to say upon the subject is, that there are nearly or quite two hundred electrical roads in the United States, and that they are the outgrowth of the developments of electricity within the last two or three years; it is claimed by this Company that it has built, and is building more railways than any other electric railway company in the United States. We also state that almost every contract we have has been gained in sharp, active, honest competition with our most industrious and

advanced competitors. Our system has been selected by our patrons, as a rule, after careful observation of the relative merits of the different systems by railroad men, in the intelligent exercise of their judgment as to which is best. We ask the public to turn to the seventy or eighty other roads successfully operated in America, commercially and financially, under our system, and make up their judgments by an inspection of them; and if they will only wait until we can get back the road that was taken from us; get back the control of the road, which we built and have never been paid for; take possession of the battered and damaged machinery, which shall be repaired and removed, we will within the next three months show to the people of the United States and Richmond, upon the first route of an extended electrical railway in the United States, the best electrical railway in the country.

Mr. Eppley It seems to me that the fact has been stated here on several occasions that there are a number of new electric roads that are now running. It also seems very singular to me that none of the representatives are here, and if they are, that they are so very modest they will not tell us something about their own roads.

The President: I think it will develop.

Mr. Eppley : I do not use mules; I use horses, and have nothing to say.

Dr. Everett was called upon to speak.

REMARKS OF DR. A. EVERETT ON THE EAST CLEVELAND

ELECTRIC ROAD.

Dr. Everett I am no talker. I can talk best when I am sitting down. I am now running thirty motor cars to my full satisfaction. I am running about fifteen miles of road, and making on an average on a motor fifteen hours a day, or about one hundred and twenty-three miles. In connection with the motors, I am making eighty miles a day with the tow cars. They are running to my entire satisfaction.

Mr. Eppley: What system?

Dr. Everett The Sprague system; overhead wire.

Mr. C. J. Ernst, of Lincoln: I am very glad to hear from the doctor, and I desire the privilege of asking just one question, as