Hanging Fire
“Hanging Fire & Heavy Horses: A History of Public Transit in Nelson”
by Art Joyce
Published by the City of Nelson, ©Art Joyce 2000
ISBN#0-9686364-0-3
Available at Touchstones Museum of Art & History gift shop and Otter Books, Nelson BC.
200 pages, gloss cover and coated stock “coffee table book” format, hundreds of historical photographs plus a 100-year timeline in the margins, five Appendices with additional historical information, plus an extensive Index.
“Hanging Fire”
Nelson was the smallest city in Western Canada during the 1890s to have its own street railway. From its beginning in December 1899, however, it was wracked with problems—derailments, out of control operating deficits, and heavy maintenance costs. But the “fire” that kept the electricity flowing into the trolley wires came from the people of Nelson, who refused to let the streetcars die.
“Heavy Horses”
Hailed as the great wonder of modern mass transit technology from the late 1920s onward, buses often failed to prove their potential. Brought in to replace Nelson’s aging streetcar fleet in 1949, they soon ran into the same roadblocks faced by the street railway—a population too small to sustain profitable operation, a sharply mountainous terrain, and treacherous winter streets.
This beautiful book is a must for all lovers of British Columbia history. In addition to archival research, the author reconstructed from original sources the entire 50 years of Nelson’s bus history because the original records had been destroyed in a garage fire. Recognizing that the audience for this book needed to go beyond streetcar and bus enthusiasts, Joyce created a historical timeline for the period 1899–2000, with sidebars featuring both local and global historical news events. There’s also a hidden “Easter egg”—an old-fashioned flipbook that gives Nelson’s Streetcar 23 a cinematic motion throughout the book. See if you can find it!