Our quickest path to a post-fossil-fuel future may actually be hurtling toward us from our pre-fossil-fuel past. I am talking about the stagecoach. Electric cars hold the promise of dramatically reducing climate change. Yet it is little wonder that only two percent of Americans drive them, given that their batteries take hours to charge. That is no problem for most commutes, but frequent drivers fear being trapped for hours at a recharging station — or, worse, out on the Capital Beltway. And long-distance road trips are out of the question, unless you are willing to periodically cool your heels for hours at a time while recharging.
But a solution lurks in our pre-automotive past.
From the mid-1600s to the mid-1800s, travelers of means could cover hundreds or even thousands of miles through Europe, North America and much of the rest of the world without long stops. Travelers’ horses gave out, of course, but they knew what to do: get new ones.
That may sound extravagant, like a cartoon billionaire who buys a new Tesla every time the old one runs out of juice. But that was not how it worked. Stagecoach companies positioned horses or mules at 10-mile intervals all along the route. When a coach reached one of these “posts,” the driver unhitched their hungry and exhausted animals and replaced them with others that were fed, rested and raring to go.
These passenger stagecoaches grew out of a system for rapidly conveying royal messages. Marco Polo observed the posts system in 13th century China, and it soon spread to Europe. To supervise his network of posts where royal messengers swapped out their horses, Henry VIII appointed the country’s first “Master of the Postes” — the root of the modern term postmaster.
In the 1600s, passenger carriages began plying the same routes, also dividing the trip into stages and swapping steeds after each one — thus the term stagecoaches.
Most horseback riders used the same steed the whole way, with horse and rider eating and resting during the same hours. But some equestrians could afford to swap out horses the way stagecoach drivers did. In the “Count of Monte Cristo,” the Count and his companion Morcerf traveled from Paris 120 miles west to the French coast. And “thirty-two horses, dispersed over seven stages, brought them to their destination in eight hours.”
While the Count was a fictional creation of Alexander Dumas, express riders were very real. By the mid-1600s, they were using horse relays to carry personal and business correspondence as well as monarchs’ messages, shortening travel times less by spurring their horses than by swapping them.
Starting around 1840 in populous and industrialized regions like Britain and America’s East Coast, stagecoaches began to give way to wood-fired steamboats and locomotives, which reigned for less than a century before succumbing in turn to another fossil fuel, petroleum.
In the more sparsely-populated American West, though, mail continued to travel by horse relay until the Civil War, and stagecoaches rode on even longer than that.
In April 1860, Pony Express riders began carrying letters and newspapers from St. Joseph, Mo. to the Pacific coast. The following November 7, a rider headed west out of Fort Kearney, Neb. carrying news of Lincoln’s election. The final relay rode into Sacramento less than eight days later.
But the Pony Express did not last long. The first transcontinental telegram was sent on October 24, 1861. Days later, the Express went bankrupt after only 18 months.
Our history offers us not only the swap-out strategy but also solutions to some of the challenges it entails.
One of the major hurdles to rapid replacement of run-down battery packs is automakers’ reluctance to standardize them and their compartments. But the history of long-distance travel brims with examples of hidebound manufacturers finally accepting the need to standardize. Indeed, the railroad business owed its success to its adaptability.
On the eve of the Civil War, the United States was a patchwork of different railway lines of different gauges. Some tracks were six feet apart, others barely four and others in between. And of course passenger as well as freight cars had to fit the tracks, so they came in all sizes, too, meaning that one railroad’s trains could not travel on another’s track. People as well as merchandise covering long distances had to repeatedly change trains.
But during the Civil War, the need to rush armies and their materiel to battlefields forced both sides to standardize the width of their trucks (the wheel assemblies on which train cars ride) and tracks.
Standardization continued its march after the war. Most Southern tracks were three and a half inches wider than most northern tracks, so on May 31 and June 1, 1886, thousands of White and African American workers all over the South shoved one track closer to the other, allowing trains to traverse nearly every stretch of track in the U.S. and Canada. And the two countries’ railroad companies furthered the integration of the rail networks by allowing their cars to travel on each other’s tracks. That is why you can sit at a railroad crossing in Maryland and watch Canadian boxcars roll by.
If our ancestors could pull off that supreme act of standardization nearly 150 years ago, surely we can similarly standardize electric vehicle battery packs. And if Congress listens to President Biden and agrees to subsidize the switch-over to EVs, we will be in a position to set conditions for that aid.
True, EV battery packs weigh hundreds of pounds, so swapping stations will need machines to do the heavy lifting. Those same devices will also have to assess the relative condition of the two batteries. If you exchange a beat-up battery for a factory-fresh one, you will have to pay a premium — which you will recover when you later trade that new one away.
In an 1863 essay, Charles Dickens stirred his readers’ nostalgia by describing a typical country village that had been “a great stage-coaching town” before “the ruthless railways … killed and buried it.” Needless to say, Dickens had reached the site of this romantic musing by train. Will we someday experience a nostalgia similar to his as we tour abandoned oil refineries? Maybe, but at least if we deploy the stagecoach solution, we will not have to worry about having enough juice to get home.
Correction: a previous version of this piece incorrectly stated that Southern railroad tracks were three and a half inches longer than Northern tracks. In reality, they were three and a half inches wider.