Electric tramways are with us in Greater London for good and all, with their network of lines in every direction. Some are locally worked by the various Borough Councils; others on a comprehensive scale by the London County Council, who now strongly advocate also another system, the Shallow-Underground, by which the cars run in a kind of open trench just below the surface in the middle of the street. Next we have endless provincial and urban council electric tramways, including some very extensive systems for feeding the enormous traffic of cities and large towns in the Midlands and North of England. Electric Light Railways, originally intended to be worked on rails laid down upon the ordinary highway, form a special class by themselves to serve short-distance traffic in country districts; but to all intents and purposes they are rural electric trams. Lastly, we have motor-cars, carriages, omnibuses, cabs, vans, and cycles, that with electricity as their means of propulsion, will possibly ere long supersede every other form of traffic in our streets and along our roads and lanes. To individualise these various outcomes of electrical traction spread over the length and breadth of Great Britain is impossible. Their names and their statistics are enrolled in _Garcke’s Manual of Electrical Undertakings_, a work that, like _Kelly’s London Directory_, grows bigger and bigger every year. I propose, therefore, only to notice some of the principal ones; and, naturally, the pioneer railway lines should have the place of honour. CHAPTER II _SOME PIONEER ELECTRIC RAILWAYS_ “A worthy pioneer.”--SHAKESPEARE. THE GIANT’S CAUSEWAY RAILWAY In the month of March, 1883, by the opening of the Giant’s Causeway, Portrush, and Bush Valley Railway, the sister island achieved the honour and glory of showing the way to the “predominant partner” in the matter of electrical traction enterprise; winning, however, only by a head, for in August of the same year the Brighton Beach Electric Railway was inaugurated.