From the mid-19th century onwards, horse omnibuses were used to transport passengers on fixed routes and at fixed times. These horse omnibuses were initially set up by resourceful innkeepers to attract customers from the city's establishments, most of which were located in the suburbs. Horse omnibuses can be described as the city's first form of mass transportation before the introduction of the horse-drawn tramway.

The horse omnibus presented here, which is believed to have been manufactured by the imperial and royal court carriage factory J. Rohrbacher in Vienna, Hietzing, is, to the best of our knowledge, the only one still in existence.