Electric railways, however, have still many worlds to conquer. They are now in much the same position as electric tramways held about the year 1896. That is to say, they have already given practical proof of their capabilities and enabled engineers to point out the directions along which they are certain to develop. In the railway world there is a growing conviction that the adoption of electric traction on all suburban and inter-urban railways must be simply a matter of time. For main line traffic the possibilities of using electricity are as yet only an article of faith among electrical engineers. Although the earliest experiments in electric traction were made in the railway form, the first electric lines could hardly be regarded as railways in the ordinary sense. They were really light railways, in which the traffic conditions approximated to those of tramways. The routes were short, the cars small, and the traffic of modest dimensions. They contained the germ of both the tramway and the railway; but, in the case of the railway, many years of technical development had to pass before the problem of applying electricity to the handling of large masses of traffic under standard railway conditions was solved. The fact that the first electric railway in the United Kingdom was constructed at the Giant's Causeway (in 1883) is significant. The Giant's Causeway is one of the few places in our islands where water power is available close to a district with a demand for traffic facilities. In 1885 another electric railway deriving its energy from water-driven turbines was built between Bessbrook and Newry. At that period it was considered that waterfalls provided the only really feasible source of cheap electricity on a large scale. Even yet the impression survives that electric power stations using steam cannot produce current so cheaply as those which 'harness' waterfalls. Many people, in fact, are inclined to attribute the comparative backwardness of electrical development in Great Britain, not to legislative conditions, but to the lack of large waterfalls.