In its eighty-square-mile area, between Wolverhampton and the headquarters of “Chamberlainism” on the one side, and Stourbridge and Walsall on the other, dwell over a million people, distributed among some twenty-one towns ranging in size and population from Quarry Bank (8,000 inhabitants) to Wolverhampton (94,000), and including such familiar places as Handsworth (38,000), Stourbridge (17,000), Tipton (33,000), Wednesbury (29,000), and West Bromwich (68,000), all busily engaged in the industries before mentioned. Such in a few words is the Black Country district, which the adjoining Potteries closely resembles. A more promising field for tramway enterprise could hardly exist. No wonder that George Francis Train in 1860 selected North Staffordshire for one of his earliest, though unsuccessful, ventures--a two-mile tramway from Hartley to Burslem, in the very heart of the Potteries. THE NEW ORDER OF RURAL TRAMWAYS Subsequently tramway companies came on the scene, with horses and steam traction, and--in one instance--with electricity. There were five distinct enterprises: the South Staffordshire Tramways Company, the Birmingham and Midland Tramways Company, the Dudley and Wolverhampton Tramways Company, the Wolverhampton Tramways Company, and the Dudley, Stourbridge, and District Electric Traction Company (a short line of about four miles). Not only were these lines entirely separated and disconnected, involving tedious changing of cars, but two of the five were actually of different gauge from the rest, making through communication impossible. It was no system, merely a conglomeration of _disjecta membra_. The tramway condition of the district became thoroughly unsatisfactory, utterly inadequate to the needs of the travelling public. Matters gradually went from bad to worse, and a financial Lord Kitchener was urgently needed to remodel everything. He appeared in the form of a powerful organisation, the British Electric Traction Company, with a share capital of £4,000,000, which entered into negotiations with the various companies and with the local authorities controlling no fewer than twenty-two districts, into which the Black Country area is divided. The proposition was to combine all the Black Country tramways into one great system to be worked by electricity in the most up-to-date manner, to give frequent service, to ensure rapid and comfortable communication between all parts, to straighten things out well, and to adopt this motto, “One management, one method, one gauge,” provided the local authorities would for some years suspend their rights under the Acts of 1870 and 1896 to buy the tramways for practically the worth of old iron.