Leo Daft

Leo Daft (* 1843, † 1922) was a native of England high school teacher and pioneer in the field of electric propulsion of railway vehicles.

Daft built in Newark (New Jersey) with the amp one of the first good working electric locomotives. The testing was done on 24 November 1883 on the narrow gauge Saratoga, Mount McGregor and Lake George Railroad in the U.S. state of New York. She pulled an ordinary railway carriage of ten tons weight and 68 passengers plus five people on the locomotive itself with about 13 km / h over a slope of 1:57. The electric power supply was via a conductor rail between the running rails. Already at the end of the ride should the vehicle, however, derailed and gone to pieces.

Even before the opening of the tram has become well known in Richmond to the system by Frank Julian Sprague led from the August 10, 1885 Daft on the Hampden Branch of the Baltimore Union Passenger Railway one of the first electric trams in commercial operation. In this case, a third rail was used for the power supply that was replaced at the crossroads by a consisting of a bare copper wire catenary, against a current collector anpresste from below. The operating voltage was 125 volts. For this operation, Daft built three tramway locomotives with the name Morse, Faraday and Ohm.

More electric locomotives by Daft were the nine -ton Benjamin Franklin for the New York Elevated who could pull a train of eight cars at 40 km / h, and the Volta and the Pacinotti.

Overall, however, these vehicles have been unsuccessful, so that Daft focused on the construction of cable trams. He built the Second Street Cable Railway in Los Angeles a cable railway, which in the years 1885-1889 perverted.