Worldbuilding XI: Liveries · 11:10am Jun 25th, 2018
WORLDBUILDING: Liveries
Time to cast our minds back to some forgotten history!
As y’all will recall from my series of blog posts about harnesses, horses--and by extension, ponies--wear harnesses so that they can pull things.
Farmers and businesses usually had their own horses, and all the wagons that they’d need for day to day life. But not everyone did. And here’s where the livery stable comes in.
The thing with horses is that they need space to live, and they need food. And if a person only needed a horse or wagon occasionally, there was no reason to keep a horse for the few times that they might need it. Much like many of us have had experience moving, and going to U-Haul or someplace like that to rent a truck or trailer . . . most of us aren’t going to want to own a box truck for the rare occasions that we need one. It’s way cheaper to rent one.
Likewise, even someone who owns a truck might not own a box trailer, or a landscape trailer, or any of the other various things that can be towed behind a truck.
This was the niche that the liveries served. There, you could generally rent wagons or horses or both. If you were going to move across town, let’s say, you could go to the livery and get a team of horses and a wagon to carry the stuff for you. Presumably, some good liveries would also have a teamster or driver who could direct the horses as well, although at that point you’re basically renting a moving van.
One other important thing to mention is the team track: back in the day, there were three ways that you would get things by rail. The first was to be a big enough customer that you had your own railroad siding. The second was for generally small parcels or packages; those might be delivered through the post office or picked up directly at the train station. But if you ordered something bigger, like a house, it would be delivered to what was known as a team track--a spur with a loading dock and space for a team of horses with a wagon.
Now, obviously since we’re dealing with sapient equines here, a livery stable in Equestria would be slightly different, but they would almost certainly exist.
The first thing that they might rent is harnesses. While I said in a previous blog post that every farm would have harnesses for every pony in the family and probably extras that were pass-me-downs from prior generations, non-farm ponies might not all have them, especially if pulling wagons isn’t a major part of their day-to-day life. Or they might have a lightweight breastcollar harness that’s fine for the wagon that they normally pull, but not enough for some occasions.
Likewise, if a pony’s harness gets broken and can’t be fixed quickly, they’d need something to get them by until the new one arrives. When it’s planting or harvesting time and a harness breaks, the farmer isn’t just going to give up on the crop for the year. If it takes renting a harness to get the job done, than that’s what’ll happen.
Wagons, too, would be an obvious thing for a pony livery to rent. A lot of ponies seem to have the ‘standard’ single-axle cart, but sometimes you need a bigger cart. Davenport might deliver sofas to ponies’ homes with a small cart, but when it comes time to receive a shipment of them by rail, he wouldn’t want to take them one-by-one from the train station back to his store. It would be much more convenient to get a big wagon, load them all on, and make one trip.
Likewise, there could be certain specialty wagons or coaches available. A fancy coach for pony prom, weddings, and funerals, or even just for fun. “Live like a Canterlot elite for a day, riding in our Princess Coach! Seats six, can be pulled by two ponies, only 10 bits per day or 50 bits a week.”
In larger towns, they would almost certainly also offer ready-to-go teams and wagons--basically, a full delivery service. There could certainly be options available at the time of rental. How big a wagon do you need, how many ponies will you need to pull it (and remember, most people who are unfamiliar with that type of work are going to underestimate), and what other services are those ponies going to provide? If you’re moving, are the rental ponies going to help load and unload the wagon, or you going to do that, and they will stay hitched to the wagon for the duration?
Another service that a livery stable might provide is extra teams. For example, Silver Spanner has a big, strong wagon, since pipe is heavy. Normally, she can pull it herself, carrying all the supplies she might need for a normal job. But what if she discovers that she can get a big discount on pipe if she orders it by the railcar load? She can’t pull that much weight herself, and she can’t take forever empting the rail car,* so she might want to rent a couple of ponies to help her pull the wagon back to her shop. During harvest season especially, there would be a glut of loaded wagons and likely a shortage of ponies to pull them.
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*In a nutshell, railcars are often charged on a per diem (per day) basis; the local train would drop it off one day and expect to pick it up empty the next day--if it isn’t ready, she’s going to pay for an extra day.
Other services that a livery might offer could include farrier work, harness repair, wagon repair, and potentially even classes on pulling wagons, proper harness fitment, wagon repair, etc.
The exact nature of the livery stable is going to vary depending on the town. In a rural town like Ponyville, a livery stable might be somewhat light on rental ponies and rental wagons--as I’ve said before, most farm ponies are going to have all the wagons that they’d need, and in most cases would know ponies who will help then when they need help. They’d know who to borrow a bigger wagon from if they needed to.
Most of the houses would have room to keep a small wagon, if a pony wanted to have one. And most Earth ponies would probably rather gnaw off their own hoof rather than pay somepony to load a wagon for them.
In a bigger town like Manehattan, though, the livery stable would be needed. A lot of ponies wouldn’t have the space to keep a wagon, nor as much need for one. They might not have a bunch of close friends or family members who can help them pull a wagon, or for that matter be familiar enough with the city to get around with a wagon. A livery team might know all the shortcuts, narrow roads where a wagon doesn’t fit or bridges that a loaded wagon shouldn’t go over. They might know the right ponies to efficiently get a rail car unloaded at the team track.* There could be permits required, or certain times of day that you aren’t supposed to take a loaded wagon through parts of town.
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*Depending on what you’ve got to unload, if your rail car isn’t at the loading dock when you arrive, you’ll have to wait until it is. Knowing the right ponies who work the team track could ensure that the rail car is there, ready to be unloaded, when you get there with a wagon.
In a small town like Ponyville, the livery stable might not normally have ponies for hire on-site. More likely, they’d have ponies on call*, ponies in town who are willing to do a little bit of extra work for pay . . . obviously, if their services were scheduled in advance, they would have a team ready to go.
I would also think that if scheduled in advance, the livery could get a wagon that they wouldn’t normally carry. They might rent it from a livery in a larger town . . . imagine that Bon Bon needs a molasses wagon. That’s probably not something that the Ponyville livery would keep on hoof, but they could probably have one shipped to them with enough advance notice.
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*On call in a pre-telephone society probably means having a runner--perhaps a filly or colt, or possibly a pegasus--who can get a message to the ponies needed for a particular task.
A larger town probably is going to have ponies there for walk-in customers, and some of them would be professional. Some of them would have their cutie marks in things like towing wagons. Some of them would probably be specialized, even, or have certain specialty endorsements/licenses. For example, IRL truck drivers need to have a commercial license, and then they often need additional endorsements to haul hazardous materials or oversize loads or passengers, etc.
I believe the last horse drawn bus was in use where I live as little as 50 years before I was born, and yet apart from the local farms, coaching house inns and animal feed stores, I cant remember seeing actual livery stables or supplies until the last 20 years or so, due to the massive uptake in recreational equines.
Wonder how much Ponyville has changed over the seasons and years, how large with actual shops etc at the beginning and currently. Theres a ratio between the size of town, number of residents and not just number of shops but size of induvidual shops, Davenport would be the largest because everyone buys large things from him, same with Livery Stable, it needs to hold a fair amount of stuff of induvidual large sizes, even though mostly it would be empty because a good dispacher would have most of the stuff in transit rather than store, with extras for those times when you absolutely need it?
Would the livery stable be where the water pump fire fighting equipment be stored if pegasi, weather teams with raij clouds wernt available, or for in mid summer when theres lots of dry burnable stuff and little cloud in store?
Was thinking of one use for a heavy overland transport, taken from an Irish joke.
Smuggling shipping containers.
I do love this world building series, it's useful for my stories.
Here's one from Britain:
cdn.images.express.co.uk/img/dynamic/130/590x/secondary/British-Army-ambulance-wagon-893351.jpg
I like how it's coach and hearse. XD (Also, Ravenna is the next town over from me. c.c)
Also it looks like Derpy works with one, if the whole moving cart and dropping a piano seems to indicate. Maybe even the garbage carts that Bon-bon was using in the Iron Will episode could have come from one.
You might want to define this word. If I hadn't been a fan of Flanders and Swann's Slow Train, I might have been very confused as to what housing materials had to do with anything:
"Hm..." Rarity strolled back along the line of employees again, swishing her tail and giving them all a close examination. "There's just so many to chose from."
"Lady!" Heavy Roller huffed in exasperation and stormed out of the office. "What did I tell you about this place? It's not some sort of house of ill repute, we just rent carts and haulers to move stuff!"
"Keep out of this, boss." Singletree straightened his shoulders and flexed, making Rarity suck her breath in with a most unladylike sound. "We're fine."
"And very moving," added Rarity.
More jobs require carts in Ponyville than in Canterlot, so I'd imagine a Canterlot Livery gets far more traffic.
Possibly a freight elevator service due to the tiered nature of the city, as well.
Davenport needs to figure out flat packing for those large orders.
Fascinating. And now I can't help but think that a settlement founded by mercenaries, a bad joke, and a couple centuries led to the town of Liverypool. ("We're here to rent. We'll even cart away the bodies if you pay enough!")
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I think the last horse-drawn commercial vehicles were dairy wagons. A nightclub/restaurant in Bern, Switzerland where I worked for a while in 1976, got their milk delivery that way.
4889487
:)
I remember a book where a common method of travel were carts pulled by humanoid robots. Being able to afford a cart drawn by a human was considered quite the status symbol, it was also noted that in many cases the people pulling the carts would also double as prostitutes.
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Unfortunately, the primary bewery, origional I think was closed in late 2017, and I dont know any details, but they switched between motor deliveries and horse drawn several times, Found this article but its badly written, no years mentioned except for teh video at the end, 2007.
Thwaites Horse Deliveries.
In their heyday they delivered to the local pubs, over 6 miles over the open moors each way etc.
Formed Brick image on old brewery wall, at least if it links. I would hope its stylised, otherwise, the artist, cant?
Thwaites Brick Horses
4889613
That's awesome!
Since they call hotels stables in Equestria, at an Equestrian livery you can probably hire day laborers for just about anything, not just hauling.
4889487 So when Rarity hires him to pull a cart in a circle around Carousel Boutique 3 times a week, is there actually anything in the cart?
4889751 Big, giant rocks, so he can work up a sweat.
Don't worry. She has a shower.
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In England (according to my research), Livery Stable these days refers to what we'd call boarding stables. That was actually a function of them back in the day, which I may not have mentioned in the blog post since sapient ponies presumably have their own houses.
That's a good question. I have to figure that when the railroad went through, it changed a lot of things. Now there would be some stuff that was easier to get from elsewhere, pre-made; on the other hand, farmers could produce more than the town could or would eat. A lot of the smaller general stores seem to have been hit hard, as well as grocery stores.
For the livery stable, depending on where they get their equipment, there might not be a huge need to keep the shop empty, depending on what could be charged for a particular piece of equipment. For example, if they keep the only hearses in Ponyville, they'd probably keep them even though they wouldn't go out too often. They might also keep some seasonal equipment that's constantly in use for part of the year and the rest of the year available at a super discounted rate.
I don't think so. My opinion is that Ponyville has a steam-powered, pony-drawn fire engine, and one thing about those is that you always want to keep the steam up in them, so they'd probably keep it at the fire station.
Of all the things you could smuggle . . . just come to New Jersey. IIRC, more containers go in to NJ than go out. I'm sure you can get them really cheap if you want them.
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Thanks! I hope everyone finds something useful in them!
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When I was looking for pictures of a team track in action, I found several of wounded soldiers being taken from wagons onto a train (or possibly the other way around).
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The two are different. The coach is for the mourners to ride in, and the hearse is for the body . . . and some of those were pretty cool (I actually found lots of pictures of horse-drawn hearses).
c1.staticflickr.com/4/3937/15677310892_e30f90a75a_b.jpg
Also, if memory serves, the army has several teams of horses that are trained to pull hearses, and I think that they're trained to do the route without drivers.
The source link gives a brief outline of the company, if you're interested.
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Not really, Ravenna sucks, outside having the best donut shop in the area. :B
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There are really a lot of questions that could be answered there. I think that Derpy was probably working part-time with a moving service; maybe they were short-hooved or maybe that's just something that she does as a mailmare (it could have been a post office delivery), or maybe it was her day off and she was helping a friend.
Likewise with the garbage carts, there are a lot of possibilities. Cherry Berry and Bon Bon might work as volunteer garbageponies, or maybe ponies at market take turns hauling off leftovers. Maybe they bought the garbage cheap in order to make compost with, or feed pigs, or who knows what.
Either way, those are totally the types of wagons and/or services that livery stables might provide, especially in all those cases it seems to be a one-off of those particular ponies with a wagon (I think Cherry Berry's pulled a wagon before, but I don't recall ever seeing Bon Bon do it).
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I thought that it was obvious from context, but perhaps not. I'll clarify.
4889487
It's funny you should mention this; I'd already had an idea along these lines.
I have been having a look at the ethymology of "livery" and ponies migth reasonably even use the same word if you have them speak english or a wor of similar origin and meaning if you have them speak an entirely different language.
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That, and space is more at a premium in Canterlot, meaning that ponies wouldn't keep them unless they had to use them a lot.
That certainly is a possibility. They could also do it by winch; back in Ye Olden Times, lots of things were moved that way, including sometimes locomotives and sometimes houses.
Winches and capstans are also easily designed for horsepower.
i.imgur.com/btA5EXh.jpg
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Maybe all his couches are shaped like Tetris pieces.
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Ooh, I like Liverypool. I'll try to remember that one.
Horse-drawn hearses were (and are) a thing. If you prefer to be more discreet or just to keep costs down, there's also a second option:
static.nautil.us/12686_1dd5a4016c624ef51f0542d4ae60e281.png
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Unless you live in Amish country. When a church my dad served at in the late 90s/early 00s needed new concrete bases for their light poles, the winning bid was from an Amish guy with a horse-pulled cement mixer.
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Do you remember what book it was?
4889613
That's really awesome! Thanks for sharing it!
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That's possible. I think it would depend on the town (the local bar the night before might be a better place to find somepony). A livery is likely to specialize in ponies who can pull things and other wagon-related tasks; they probably wouldn't be the right place to go if you were looking for a painter, for example.
But of course that could really depend on what else there was in the town.
There'd be something in the cart--gotta get those muscles flexing and sweat coursing down his trembling muscles, and. . . .
derpicdn.net/img/view/2018/5/23/1739861__safe_artist-colon-brendahickey_maud+pie_rarity_spoiler-colon-comic_spoiler-colon-comicff29_amazed_cute_dilated+pupils_drool_earth+pony_eyes+on.png
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Well, if it makes you feel any better about Ravenna sucking, the closest good donut shop I know of is an hour and a half away.
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There are so many good donut shops within an hour of me, it's not even funny. :B
Ohio: We may suck at everything, but by golly, we'll all die of coronaries by 45! :D
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Ohio's arguably better at war than Michigan, since y'all did wind up with Toledo.
Or else Michigan was playing the long game.
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It was Corpse Marker but Chris Boucher, one of a long series of Dr Who spin off novels written while the series was off air in the 90s and 00s. In this case it was based around the background a TV story called 'Robot's of Death' which was a who done it set on an enclosed vehicle crewed by hundreds of robots and about half a dozen humans who were being killed off one by one. The novel itself is at least partially about the government trying to hush up the fact that robots can be reprogrammed to kill people.
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Oh, cool!
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If you fuckers want Toledo back, you can have it. D:
4890029
Nah, we're good, we've learned to live with the UP.
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Added to my Amazon cart!
No promises on how soon I'll get around to reading it, though.
Turns out that writing takes up a lot of the free time I used to have for reading. 
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I might recommend getting a DVD of the original TV story as well, it's one of the best Dr Episodes in my opinion and it might help you visualise how everything looks in the book.
4890458
I'll consider it--I might be completely lost, since I have never watched Dr. Who. I know some of the basics, though, so maybe not.
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Its from the classic series (the episodes first showed in early 1977) which in a way benefits from lack of continuity and each story being 4-6 episodes long. It means that each story has to lay out it's own world and explain roughly how things work to the viewer each time.
4889793
If you use Four Colts from Liverypool, would the Beatles be Changelings?
4903002
Perhaps.
And incidentally, if you happen to come across any art of a changeling in harness, that would be most excellent.
Especially if it’s accurate harness.