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A stagecoach (also: stage coach, stage, road coach, diligence) is a four-wheeled public transport coach used to carry paying passengers and light packages on journeys long enough to need a change of horses. It is strongly sprung and generally drawn by four horses although some versions are drawn by six horses.
Commonly used before steam-powered rail transport was available, a stagecoach made long scheduled trips using Stage station or posts where the stagecoach's horses would be replaced by fresh horses. The business of running stagecoaches or the act of journeying in them was known as staging.
Some familiar images of the stagecoach are that of a mail coach passing through a Turnpike trust gate, a Dickensian passenger coach covered in snow pulling up at a coaching inn, a highwayman demanding a coach to "stand and deliver" and a Wells Fargo stagecoach arriving at or leaving an American frontier town. The yard of ale drinking glass is associated by legend with stagecoach drivers, though it was mainly used for Drinking game and special toasts.
The American mud wagon was an earlier, smaller, and cruder vehicle, being mostly open-sided with minimal protection from weather, causing passengers to risk being mud-splashed. A canvas-topped stage wagon was used for freight and passengers, and it had a lower center of gravity, making it harder to overturn.
By the end of the 17th century stagecoach routes ran up and down the three main roads in England. The London-York route was advertised in 1698:
The novelty of this method of transport excited much controversy at the time. One pamphleteer denounced the stagecoach as a "great evil ... mischievous to trade and destructive to the public health". Another writer, however, argued that:
The speed of travel remained constant until the mid-18th century. Reforms of the turnpike trusts, new methods of road building and the improved construction of coaches led to a sustained rise in the comfort and speed of the average journey - from an average journey length of 2 days for the Cambridge-London route in 1750 to a length of under 7 hours in 1820.
Robert Hooke helped in the construction of some of the first spring-suspended coaches in the 1660s and spoked wheels with iron rim brakes were introduced, improving the characteristics of the coach. In 1754, a Manchester-based company began a new service called the "Flying Coach". It was advertisement with the following announcement - "However incredible it may appear, this coach will actually (barring accidents) arrive in London in four days and a half after leaving Manchester." A similar service was begun from Liverpool three years later, using coaches with steel spring suspension. This coach took an unprecedented three days to reach London with an average speed of .
Palmer made much use of the "flying" stagecoach services between cities in the course of his business, and noted that it seemed far more efficient than the system of mail delivery then in operation. His travel from Bath to London took a single day to the mail's three days. It occurred to him that this stagecoach service could be developed into a national mail delivery service, so in 1782 he suggested to the Royal Mail in London that they take up the idea. He met resistance from officials who believed that the existing system could not be improved, but eventually the Chancellor of the Exchequer, William Pitt, allowed him to carry out an experimental run between Bristol and London. Under the old system the journey had taken up to 38 hours. The stagecoach, funded by Palmer, left Bristol at 4 pm on 2 August 1784 and arrived in London just 16 hours later.The Postman and the Postal Service, Vera Southgate, Wills & Hepworth Ltd, 1965, England
Impressed by the trial run, Pitt authorised the creation of new routes. Within the month the service had been extended from London to Norwich, Nottingham, Liverpool and Manchester, and by the end of 1785 services to the following major towns and cities of England and Wales had also been linked: Leeds, Dover, Portsmouth, Poole, Exeter, Gloucester, Worcester, Holyhead and Carlisle. A service to Edinburgh was added the next year, and Palmer was rewarded by being made Surveyor and Comptroller General of the Post Office. By 1797 there were forty-two routes.
Steel springs had been used in suspensions for vehicles since 1695.Frits van Sold, Obadiah Elliott & the Elliptic Spring, The Carriage Journal: Vol 53 No 2 March 2015 Coachbuilder Obadiah Elliott obtained a patent covering the use of - which were not his invention. His patent lasted 14 years delaying development because Elliott allowed no others to license and use his patent. Elliott mounted each wheel with two durable elliptic steel leaf springs on each side and the body of the carriage was fixed directly to the springs attached to the . After the expiry of his patent most British horse carriages were equipped with elliptic springs; wooden springs in the case of light one-horse vehicles to avoid taxation, and steel springs in larger vehicles.
in road construction were also made at this time, most importantly the widespread implementation of [[Macadam]] roads up and down the country. The speed of coaches in this period rose from around (including stops for provisioning) to Gerhold: Stage Coaching and Turnpike Roads, Economic History Review, August 2014,, figure 1, p. 825 and greatly increased the level of mobility in the country, both for people and for [[mail]]. Each route had an average of four coaches operating on it at one time - two for both directions and a further two spares in case of a breakdown en route. Joseph Ballard described the stagecoach service between Manchester and Liverpool in 1815 as having price competition between coaches, with timely service and clean accommodations at inns.
Some stagecoaches remained in use for commercial or recreational purposes. They came to be known as road coaches and were used by their enterprising (or nostalgic) owners to provide scheduled passenger services where rail had not yet reached and also on certain routes at certain times of the year for the pleasure of an (often amateur) coachman and his daring passengers.
vanished as rail penetrated the countryside the 1860s did see the start of a coaching revival spurred on by the popularity of Four-in-hand driving as a sporting pursuit (the Four-In-Hand Driving Club was founded in 1856 and the Coaching Club in 1871).
New stagecoaches often known as began to be built to order. Some owners would parade their vehicles and magnificently dressed passengers in fashionable locations. Other owners would take more enthusiastic suitably-dressed passengers and indulge in competitive driving. Very similar in design to stagecoaches their vehicles were lighter and sportier.
These owners were (often very expert) amateur gentlemen-coachmen, occasionally gentlewomen. A professional coachman might accompany them to avert disaster. Professionals called these vehicles 'butterflies'. They only appeared in summer.Esdaile Malet, Annals of the Road: or, Notes on Mail and Stage Coaching in Great Britain, London, Longmans Green 1876
The diligence from Le Havre to Paris was described by a fastidious English visitor of 1803 with a thoroughness that distinguished it from its English contemporary, the stage coach.
A more uncouth clumsy machine can scarcely be imagined. In the front is a cabriolet fixed to the body of the coach, for the accommodation of three passengers, who are protected from the rain above, by the projecting roof of the coach, and in front by two heavy curtains of leather, well oiled, and smelling somewhat offensively, fastened to the roof. The inside, which is capacious, and lofty, and will hold six people in great comfort is lined with leather padded, and surrounded with little pockets, in which travellers deposit their bread, snuff, night caps, and pocket handkerchiefs, which generally enjoy each others company, in the same delicate depository. From the roof depends a large net work which is generally crouded with hats, swords, and band boxes, the whole is convenient, and when all parties are seated and arranged, the accommodations are by no means unpleasant. Upon the roof, on the outside, is the imperial, which is generally filled with six or seven persons more, and a heap of luggage, which latter also occupies the basket, and generally presents a pile, half as high again as the coach, which is secured by ropes and chains, tightened by a large iron windlass, which also constitutes another appendage of this moving mass. The body of the carriage rests upon large thongs of leather, fastened to heavy blocks of wood, instead of springs, and the whole is drawn by seven horses.One of the horses was ridden by the postilion. John Carr, The Stranger in France, or, A tour from Devonshire to Paris London 1803:32.
The English visitor noted the small, sturdy Norman horses "running away with our cumbrous machine, at the rate of six or seven miles an hour". At this speed stagecoaches could compete with Narrowboat, but they were rendered obsolete in Europe wherever the railroad network expanded in the 19th century. Where the rail network did not reach, the diligence was not fully superseded until the arrival of the autobus.
In France, between 1765 and 1780, the turgotines, big mail coaches named for their originator, Louis XVI's economist minister Turgot, and improved roads, where a coach could travel at full gallop across levels, combined with more staging posts at shorter intervals, cut the time required to travel across the country sometimes by half.Fernand Braudel, The Perspective of the World, vol. III of Civilization and Capitalism 1979 (in English 1984)
Describing a journey he took in 1861, in his 1872 book, Roughing It, Mark Twain wrote that the Concord stage was like "an imposing cradle on wheels". Around twenty years later, in 1880, John Plesent Gray recorded after travelling from Tucson to Tombstone on J.D. Kinnear's mail and express line: The horses were changed three times on the trip, normally completed in 17 hours.Richard D. Moore. Too Tough to Tame, p. 72 AuthorHouse, Bloomington 2009
The stagecoach lines in the U.S. were operated by private companies. Their most profitable contracts were with U.S. Mail and were hotly contested. Pony Express, which began operations in 1860, is often called first fast mail service from the Missouri River to the Pacific Coast, but the Overland Mail Company began a twice-weekly mail service from Missouri to San Francisco in September 1858. Transcontinental stage-coaching ended with the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869.
The first stagecoaches were brought to Palestine by the German religious group known as the "Templers" who operated a public transportation service between their colonies in the country as early as 1867. Stagecoach development in Palestine was greatly facilitated by the 1869 visit of Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph I. For this distinguished guest, the road between Jaffa and Jerusalem was greatly improved, making possible the passage of carriages. Stagecoaches were a great improvement over the earlier means of transport used in the country, such as riding horses, donkeys or camels, or light carts drawn by donkeys.
When the stagecoach ran into a difficult ascent or mud, the passengers were required to get off and help push the carriage. The trip between Jaffa and Jerusalem by stagecoach lasted about 14 hours spread over a day and a half, including a night stop at Bab al-Wad (Shaar HaGai), the trip in the opposite, downhill direction took 12 hours.
The stagecoaches belonged to private owners, and the wagoners were mostly hired, although sometimes the wagoner was also the owner of the wagon. The license to operate the stagecoaches was granted by the government to private individuals in the cities and to the colony committees in the early Zionist colonies. The license holders paid a special tax for this right and could employ subcontractors and hired wagons.
The stagecoaches linked Jerusalem with Jaffa, Hebron and Nablus, the Zionist colonies with Jaffa, Haifa with Acre and Nazareth. They were also used for urban and suburban transportation in the Haifa region.
The colony of Rehovot is known to have promulgated detailed regulations for stagecoach operation, soon after its foundation in 1890, which were greatly extended in 1911. Fares were fixed, ranging between 1.10 Grush for traveling to the nearby village of Wadi Hanin and 5.00 Grush for traveling from Rehovot to Jaffa. The stagecoach was required to work six times a week (except for the Shabbat) and to carry free of charge the mails and medicines of the Rehovot pharmacy.
While railways started being constructed in Palestine in the last years of the 19th century, stagecoaches were still a major means of public transport until the outbreak of the First World War, and in peripheral areas were still used in the early years of British Mandatory rule.
Part of the plot of Doctor Dolittle's Circus is set in a stagecoach, where the animal-loving Doctor Dolittle is traveling along with a female seal, disguised as a woman, whom he is helping to escape from the circus. The Doctor is mistaken for a notorious highwayman.
Selling stagecoaches to the fence in Emerald Ranch is a common method of making money in Red Dead Redemption 2, as well as a fast travel transportation method.
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