Hearse
Channel: 宇宙のすべての知識 プリンシピア
Date: 2019-02-14

Hearse, by Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=13274 / CC BY SA 3.0

#Funeral_transport
#Commercial_vehicles
#Car_body_styles
#Hearses
Hearse

A hearse is a vehicle used to carry the dead in a coffin/casket. They range from deliberately anonymous vehicles to very formal heavily decorated vehicles.

In the funeral trade of some countries hearses are called funeral coaches.

The name is derived, through the French herse, from the Latin herpex, which means a harrow. The funeral hearse was originally a wooden or metal framework, which stood over the bier or coffin and supported the pall. It was provided with numerous spikes to hold burning candles, and, owing to the resemblance of these spikes to the teeth of a harrow, was called a hearse. Later on, the word was applied, not only to the construction above the coffin, but to any receptacle in which the coffin was placed. Thus from about 1650 it came to denote the vehicle on which the dead are carried to the grave.

Hearses were originally hand-drawn then horse-drawn after the decoration and weight of the hearse increased. The first electric motorized hearses were introduced to the United States in the early 1900s. Petrol-powered hearses began to be produced from 1907 and, after slow initial uptake due to their high cost, became widely accepted in the 1920s. The vast majority of hearses since then have been based on larger, more powerful car chassis, generally retaining the front end up to and possibly including the front doors but with custom bodywork to the rear to contain the coffin.

A First Call vehicle is used to pick up the remains of a recently deceased person, and transport that person to the funeral home for preparation.
A few big cities provided special rail lines and/or funeral trolley cars and/or subway cars to carry bodies and mourners to remote cemeteries such as in Sydney, NSW and London and tram services were common. Chicago, Illinois operated 3 different funeral trolley cars over the elevated t...