Laconia Car Company

The Ranlet Manufacturing Company began building horse-drawn wagons, carriages and stagecoaches in 1844.

In 1870 the company began producing railway passenger cars at the rate of about one per month.

[1] The company was reorganized as the Laconia Car Company in 1882, occupying seven acres of downtown Laconia including a four-story brick foundry for casting and forging metal parts.

Wood remained Laconia's preferred building material, but steel underframes were used beginning in 1908.

[1] Laconia employed nearly five hundred men completing electric railway cars at the rate of one a day;[2] and their products could be found operating as far away as the Los Angeles Railway.