part of the century. This changed with the creation of the Metropolitan Asylums Board in 1867, which embarked on the building of five planned smallpox and fever hospitals in Stockwell, Deptford, Hampstead, Fulham and Homerton to serve the different regions of London. Fearful residents succeeded in blocking the building of the Hampstead hospital, and residents in Fulham obtained an injunction preventing all but local cases of smallpox from being treated in their hospital. Thus, with only three hospitals in operation when the epidemic of 1881 began, the MAB was overwhelmed. and were leased as hospital ships and entered service in July 1881, moored at Greenwich. The following year the two ships were purchased along with another, Castalia, and the fleet was moved to Long Reach at Gravesend, where it served 20,000 patients between 1884 and 1902. The floating hospitals were equipped with their own river ferry service to transport patients in isolation from the inner city. The ships enabled three permanent isolation hospitals to be built at Dartford, effectively ending the threat of smallpox epidemics. Transport With the great railway terminal developing to connect London with its suburbs and beyond, mass transport was becoming ever more important within the city as its population increased. The first horse-drawn omnibuses entered service in London in 1829. By 1854 there were 3,000 of them in service, painted in bright reds, greens, and blues, and each carrying an average of 300 passengers per day. The two-wheeled hansom cab, first seen in 1834, was the most common type of cab on London's roads throughout the Victorian era, but there were many types, like the four-wheeled Hackney carriage, in addition to the coaches, private carriages, coal-wagons, and tradesman's vehicles which crowded the roads. There were 3,593 licensed cabs in London in 1852; by the end of the century there were estimated to be some 10,000 in all. From the 1870s onwards, Londoners also had access to a developing tram network which accessed Central London and provided local transport in the suburbs. The first horse-drawn tramways were installed in 1860 along the Bayswater Road at the northern edge of Hyde Park, Victoria Street in Westminster, and Kennington Street in South London. The trams were a success with passengers, but the raised rails were jolting and inconvenient for horse-drawn vehicles to cross, causing traffic bottlenecks at crossroads. Within a year the outcry was so great that the lines