Rails in the Road

A History of Tramways in Britain and Ireland

Oliver Green

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Transport
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781473869400
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Rail Transportation
• Index: Technology & Engineering

There have been passenger tramways in Britain for 150 years, but it is a rollercoaster story of rise, decline and a steady return. Trams have come and gone, been loved and hated, popular and derided, considered both wildly futuristic and hopelessly outdated by politicians, planners and the public alike. Horse trams, introduced from the USA in the 1860s, were the first cheap form of public transport on city streets. Electric systems were developed in nearly every urban area from the 1890s and revolutionised town travel in the Edwardian era.A century ago, trams were at their peak, used by everyone all over the country and a mark of civic pride in towns and cities from Dover to Dublin. But by the 1930s they were in decline and giving way to cheaper and more flexible buses and trolleybuses. By the 1950s all the major systems were being replaced. Londons last tram ran in 1952 and ten years later Glasgow, the city most firmly linked with trams, closed its network down. Only Blackpool, famous for its decorated cars, kept a public service running and trams seemed destined only for scrapyards and museums.A gradual renaissance took place from the 1980s, with growing interest in what are now described as light rail systems in Europe and North America. In the UK and Ireland modern trams were on the streets of Manchester from 1992, followed successively by Sheffield, Croydon, the West Midlands, Nottingham, Dublin and Edinburgh (2014). Trams are now set to be a familiar and significant feature of twenty-first century urban life, with more development on the way.

Chapter 1

HORSE AND RAIL

The passenger carrying tramway was both a very early and a surprisingly late development in Britain. There is a gap of more than fifty years between the introduction of the first recorded passenger service on rails and the opening of the first street railway or tramway in the UK. That original passenger service was started in 1807 on a recently laid mineral plateway in South Wales. It continued to run for up to twenty years but seems to have been a unique operation that was not imitated or developed anywhere else.

The first British tramway designed exclusively for transporting people, and the first to be laid along a street, opened as a trial operation at Birkenhead in 1860. This followed American practice rather than anything pioneered in this country. Indeed it was brought to the UK by an American with the appropriate name of Train. Goods and passenger carrying railways had been opened all over Britain in the interim, but nearly all of them operated on their own separate right of way and they did not run down roads.

The street railway, or tramway, providing the equivalent of a timetabled bus service on rails and sharing road space with other traffic, was an exclusively North American development that was brought to the UK from the US. After Train’s short-lived experiments here, the American style of urban street railway, first seen in New York City in 1832, was only gradually introduced to Britain’s towns and cities on a permanent basis in the 1870s and ‘80s.

The first public railway in the UK to be authorised by Act of Parliament had been the Surrey Iron, opened in 1804 alongside the River Wandle between Croydon and Wandsworth, then just outside London. This was a horse-drawn goods plateway which never carried passengers. Two years later a similar operation incorporated as the ‘Oystermouth Railway or Tramroad’ opened in South Wales along the coast of the Gower peninsula between Swansea and Oystermouth, a distance of about 5 miles. At the time there was no road link along the Gower and all minerals mined or quarried in the area had to be transported across Swansea Bay by boat.

The ‘tramroad’ was authorised ‘for the passage of Wagons and other Carriages’, but its main purpose was to carry coal, limestone and iron ore on payment of a toll. The line was constructed as a plateway with track made up from short cast iron angle sections laid on granite blocks. The small open wagons, known locally as trams, were pulled by horses, either individually or coupled together in a short train. Two years earlier the inventive Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick had demonstrated the first steam railway locomotive on another Welsh industrial tramroad at Merthyr Tydfil, some 30 miles away. This was a successful trial, but it did not lead to any further developments with steam locomotion and there were no early attempts to use mechanical power on the Oystermouth line.

Drawing by Miss J. Alford, who sketched the Oystermouth Tramway car during her holiday in South Wales in 1819. This is thought to be the second tramcar used on the world’s first passenger carrying line at Swansea from c1815. A reconstruction of the vehicle based on this sketch is on display at Swansea Museum. Swansea Museum

Goods operation on the tramroad using horse power began sometime in 1806. Benjamin French, one of the tramroad’s directors, was then authorised to start a passenger service on the line in addition to freight. French offered the company £20 a year in lieu of tolls ‘for permission to run a wagon or waggons on the Tram Road for one year from 25 March next for the conveyance of passengers’. He provided a suitable vehicle, which can be considered the first ever passenger tramcar, although at the time it was described as a carriage, and was more like a stagecoach on rails. Services duly commenced in March 1807, making this the earliest known date for the conveyance passengers by rail. It was evidently quite a successful venture as a year later French was being charged an additional £5 for the passenger contract. The fee had gone up to £25.

An early journey on the tramroad was described with great enthusiasm by Miss Elizabeth Isabella Spence, author of ‘novels and accounts of travel,’ in a letter to the Dowager Countess of Winterton dated 3 August 1808. She wrote excitedly from Swansea that:

I never spent an afternoon with more delight than the former one in exploring the romantic scenery of Oystermouth. I was conveyed there in a carriage of a singular construction, built for the convenience of parties, who go hence to Oystermouth to spend the day. The car contains twelve persons and is constructed chiefly of iron, its four wheels run on an iron railway by the aid of one horse, and is an easy and light vehicle.¹

A few years later Richard Ayton was rather less enamoured of the passenger tramway in his Voyage round Great Britain undertaken in the Year 1813. He describes the Oystermouth tramcar as:

A singular kind of vehicle…it is a very long carriage, supported on four low iron wheels, carries sixteen persons, exclusive of the driver, is drawn by one horse, and rolls over an iron railroad at the rate of five miles an hour, and with the noise of twenty sledge hammers in full play. The passage is only four miles, but it is quite sufficient to make one reel from the car at the journey’s end, in a state of dizziness and confusion of the senses that it is well if he recovers in a week.

Ayton may not have enjoyed the experience, but it was apparent that the tramroad had become more profitable as a leisure line for wealthy tourists paying a shilling a time than for its original purpose of mineral transport. Sometime in the late 1820s a turnpike road was constructed alongside the tramway, and this appears to have killed off the passenger business once a more comfortable road coach operation was started along the new highway.

It is not clear how long the freight operation limped on, but the plateway had become derelict by the 1850s, when part of it was relaid as a conventional standard gauge railway to carry coal to Swansea from a local colliery. George Byng Morris, the son of one of the original proprietors, then reintroduced a horse-drawn passenger service in 1860 between Swansea and Oystermouth. In the same year George Francis Train opened what he and most historians since have considered to be the first proper street railway in Britain, at Birkenhead on the Wirral.

Passenger car used on the relaid Oystermouth Railway in the 1860s, a curious mixture of horse tram, stagecoach and railway carriage. This oil painting with Swansea Bay in the background is attributed to John Joseph Hughes. Swansea Museum

It was of course a complete coincidence that these two services should open (and re-open) in the same year and it does seem surprising that there had been no other regular passenger tramway services running anywhere in the UK over the previous thirty years. By 1860 more than 10,000 route miles of railway had opened all over the country, mostly with both passenger and freight services available. However, the steam-hauled passenger traffic by train was nearly all between towns and cities. Rail transport was not developed on city streets.

A few examples have been found of horse-drawn operation of passenger cars on short rail lines in the 1830s, such as the Elgin Railway in Fife, Scotland. Arguably there is little distinction between a light railway and a tramway in such cases. However, there does not seem to have been any attempt at this time to lay rails in the streets of an urban area of Britain in order to provide regular passenger transport within a town. By coincidence, shortly after the Oystermouth Tramroad had effectively had its original passenger business destroyed by the arrival of a smooth macadamed turnpike road alongside it in the 1820s, the poor state of the streets in rapidly expanding New York City helped to create the right conditions for the first street railway to be introduced on the other side of the Atlantic.

New York, New York

Some towns and cities in Europe and North America were becoming sufficiently prosperous in the 1820s and ‘30s to create a market for short distance passenger transport on urban streets. The middle-class residents of London and Paris were now able to hire the latest fashionable two-seater cabs (cabriolets) rather than walk in town, and large boxlike coaches carrying up to twelve or fourteen passengers began operating on fixed routes and schedules across both cities. These ‘omnibuses’, the name meaning ‘for all’ in Latin, appeared in quick succession in Paris (1828), London (1829) and New York (1830).

While the European city streets were generally well made up and paved, the main roads of New York were poor and could become a quagmire in winter. It was logical to suggest running coaches on rails in the road which would give passengers a smoother ride through the streets and make more efficient use of horse power than an omnibus. Nobody had ever proposed this in a European city, but the idea did take off in booming New York, where the population of Manhattan alone had nearly doubled in the 1820s.

The relatively spacious urban grid layout of New York’s streets made the prospect of rails in the road much less threatening to the state and city authorities than they might have been in the crowded, medieval heart of the City of London or Paris. Accordingly, when the New York & Harlem Railroad Company was established in 1831 it was able to secure official sanction to build the first railway in Manhattan right on the city streets. The agreed route was from City Hall uptown and along the Bowery and 4th Avenue to the Harlem River, a distance of about 8 miles. The section in Lower Manhattan, which was already built up, was laid entirely on the streets and opened for business in 1832. The full length of line to Harlem, which involved excavating a deep cutting and tunnel in Upper Manhattan, then still in open country, was completed in 1838.

The first London omnibus, introduced between Paddington and the Bank by George Shillibeer in 1829. He copied the idea of a scheduled urban coach service from what he had seen in Paris. New York then followed in 1830...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Inspiration and acknowledgements
• Image credits
• Introduction: The Roller Coaster Ride 1860-2015
• Chapter 1: Horse and Rail
• Chapter 2: Steam and Cable
• Chapter 3: Going Electric
• Chapter 4: Through War and Peace
• Chapter 5: Relics and Renaissance
• Timeline of Tramway History
• Further reading
• Chapter Notes