It was like a stab in the back, by one form of railed transport to another. The first victims had been the horse omnibus operators, who suddenly found that they were facing competition from a new mode of transport that was smoother and quicker and could take more passengers, literally for the same horse power. Nevertheless, all the horse bus operators had to do was move to routes that could not justify the construction of a tramway further out in the growing metropolis. The railways, of course, had no such flexibility.
As every schoolboy used to know, the first tram was run by a Mr Train, George Train, in fact, but Train’s horse-drawn trams were not a success. They were first introduced in Birkenhead in 1860, and the following year he laid three lines in London. It was immediately clear that running along a smooth iron rail was far superior to being bumped along the road in a bus, and one horse could handle a tramcar that was heavier than a bus, and for passengers Train ensured that the interior was much roomier than the bus. It should have been an immediate success, but it wasn’t.
In an age that was more suspicious of change than today, and also more xenophobic, for Train was an American, a foreigner, people were immediately suspicious. Naturally, the vested interests of bus operators and hackney carriage proprietors were also against the new invention which threatened to have mass appeal. Other road users also objected to the trams, and with good reason, for the rails were laid, in railway-fashion, in the street, so pedestrians and animals, and other wheeled vehicles, had to cross over them. The accusation that the rails were a danger to animals and to the wheels of other vehicles was not without foundation. Added to which, Train had gone for the heart of London, which he saw as Westminster, then as now a prosperous area, and at the time that meant the residents had their own carriages and did not use public transport.
All in all, it was no surprise that Train’s London trams were off the streets within a year.
However, help was at hand from the very Westminster that had neglected Train’s trams. The Tramways Act of 1870 provided a basis on which tramway systems could be established, and insisted that a new type of rail, one that was grooved and did not protrude above the road surface, be used. That same year, London saw trams again, and they were to remain for more than eighty years.
The Tramways Act was not a licence for tram operators to do as they pleased, but it did provide an easy statutory route for those wishing to establish a tramway. Hitherto, they had either to use light railway legislation or go to the expense and delay, and uncertainty, of a parliamentary bill. They could lay tracks in urban streets, the cost of which was almost a guarantee of monopoly on a route in contrast to the unbridled free for all that existed between horse bus operators, who would crowd out a busy route and ignore others offering thin pickings, but in return for the disruption the laying of tracks caused, they had to keep the road between the lines in good repair. Indeed, they had to look after the road surface for eighteen inches on either side of their tracks, and this was sufficient to discourage many schemes.
In some towns and cities, part of the tramway was on reserved track, away from the constraints of the public highway, but apart from a short section underground, this did not happen in London.
The legislators doubtless thought that these conditions were fair and reasonable and intended to encourage responsible behaviour by the tram companies, but there was a sting in the tail. Nationalisation of railway companies was already a political topic and as early as 1843 a London solicitor, William Galt, had written a series of four books on Railway Reform. In the Railway Regulation Act 1844, Gladstone included a measure giving the Government the power to acquire, from 1865 onwards, any company sanctioned following the 1844 Act. The Tramways Act 1870 also provided a means for the compulsory purchase by local authorities, but not the state, of tram companies after a period of twenty-one years, and every seven years thereafter. The intention was that a local authority unhappy with the performance of a tram operator could take it over, but in the late Victorian and Edwardian heyday of municipal pride, many councils saw owning a tram network as a form of status symbol, along with an imposing town hall. The outcome was that few tramway systems remained in private ownership. Many councillors also saw the profits from a municipal tramway system as offsetting the local rates and, once electrification became a possibility, a municipal tramway was seen as providing a base load for often over-ambitious municipally-owned local power stations and electricity supplies.
Another unforeseen but inevitable result of this was that many operators failed to invest in modernisation of their trams or their infrastructure for fear that they would in effect be making a gift of their investment to the local authority.
Many of the tram companies found the exacting demands of the legislation onerous and there were undoubtedly those who were glad to be relieved of the burden of tram ownership. Cheap fares did attract the volume of traffic, but costly tram networks needed to be kept busy all day. Unlike the railways, there was no goods traffic to augment revenues, and unlike the railways, their responsibilities did not end with the track and the vehicles. Not every tram company saw matters in this way. When the Provincial concern was forced off Portsea Island after Portsmouth Corporation exercised its right to buy, the company immediately crossed to the other side of the harbour and set up an operation running between Gosport and Fareham, happily in not one but two adjoining council areas which made municipal ownership more difficult. It was also the case that not every council realised that its ambition to own its own trams was a blessing. In Poole, in Dorset, the council eventually decided to abandon trams, and a bus company, Hants & Dorset, took over the town’s local passenger transport. Hastings handed over the trams to another bus operator, Maidstone & District, but this kept the Hastings Tramways as a local trading name and eventually replaced them with trolleybuses.
Horses and iron horses
The first trams were horse-drawn and influenced by the early buses, so that when in 1870 the London Street Tramways Company ran its first service between Brixton Station and Kennington Gate, the tramcars were double deck with passengers sitting back-to-back knifeboard fashion. Another feature of bus operation was also adapted as an early print showed a lady, complete with hood, crinoline dress and umbrella, signalling frantically for a tram to wait, while the conductor looked studiously in the opposite direction. Plus sa change!
There seems to have been almost a burst of tramway mania, the London Street Tramways being followed by the North Metropolitan Tramways Company, with a line between Whitechapel and Bow. Even the hills of North London did not deter the tram, as the vehicles mounted Highgate Hill using a cable tramway, and these also appeared later in Brixton. By 1880, there were 500 trams trundling around the streets of London requiring the efforts of 4,000 horses. Nevertheless, the trams did not enter Central London again other than running over Waterloo Bridge and then through a subway to Kingsway. No doubt the disruption caused by installing and maintaining track was regarded as too much for the congested centre, but many years later the trolleybus was also denied access to the West End and got no further into the City than the Minories.
If the trams borrowed their configuration from the omnibus, they borrowed some of their operating practices from the railways. Soon, cheap workmen’s fares were being offered. The trams needed the extra business as they had a carrying capacity that the horse bus could not match, and they needed to be the transport of the masses to justify the cost of installing expensive track. At last, this was a mode of transport for the common man, and had the advantage over the railways of running closer to most people’s homes and closer to their destination as well; doorstop to destination transport! A typical tram could carry forty-two passengers, of which twenty were inside, with the lower deck passengers enjoying seats upholstered with horsehair, which was no doubt in plentiful supply, and covered in velvet. Access to the upper deck was by stairs rather than exposed steps, and the stairways were at both ends of the tram. Compared to the horse bus, which had to be built as lightly as possible, trams were solid, and despite the low fares to attract the working classes, they were not spartan. However, they were still restricted by the energies of the horse.
The trials of the horse were alleviated in some areas, and on some routes, by some dramatic infrastructure improvements. While not a tram route, Holborn had entailed horse-drawn buses descending the sides of the Fleet Valley and then up the other side, with a third horse added to the team to help on the incline, but the construction of Holborn Viaduct, completed in 1869, marked the creation of a new level east-west route between the West End and the City, part of a road network that ran from Oxford Street to St Pauls and on to the Bank of England. Before long, little of the viaduct remained to be seen as buildings hemmed it in on both sides.
True relief for the horse was soon to come from the adoption of steam power to the tramway network. The steam tram was in fact an unpowered tramcar hauled by a small steam locomotive. Tight regulations were enforced to ensure that the emission of steam and smoke was limited and that noises were suppressed, all to avoid frightening the horses that were still the prime mover in Victorian streets. Instead of looking like a scaled down railway locomotive, the tram locomotive looked like a box on wheels. There were two advantages to the steam locomotive, with the first being that it could work all day, unlike the horses, and needed less attention, while the second was that it could pull even larger trams, and with these seating as many as sixty passengers, with some having a covered upper deck, so that the advantage of the tram over the bus became even more pronounced. The steam tram gained widespread acceptance during the 1880s and 1890s.
A rival means of locomotion to the steam locomotive was the cable tramway, or cable car. These required a duct to be laid between the tracks and an endless cable installed, to which the tram was attached by a grip, hence the drivers were sometimes referred to as ‘gripmen’. The cable was worked from a power station, which could use steam or electric propulsion to turn the cable, and increasingly the latter became commonplace as it enable a single power station to power several different cables. Attaching a tram to the cable enabled it to move, while releasing the grip and applying the brakes brought it to a halt. The cable tramway operating up Highgate Hill was Europe’s first.
As the century drew to a close, London had around 130 route miles of tramways with more than a thousand cars, described by Carl Baedeker in 1895: ‘The cars are comfortable and the fares moderate.’ Indeed, the fares varied between ½d and 4d, which was a smaller range than the ½d to 6d, and occasionally 9d, of the omnibus. Either way, the visitor was warned both to indicate his intended destination to the conductor on boarding, to avoid mistakes, and never to proffer a sovereign for their fare but to keep themselves supplied with a variety of small change. By contrast, there were around 150 different bus routes crossing the centre of London, which remained a closed area for the tramways.
A variety of different operators had their vehicles rumbling and clanking along the streets. The South London Tramways served Wandsworth, and the London Tramways served Greenwich, Peckham, Streatham and Tooting, and the London Southern to Norwood; while towards the north ran the London Street Tramways to Hampstead and Highgate; and the North Metropolitan to Clapton, Dalston, Finsbury Park, Hackney, Leytonstone and Wood Green. There was also the Harrow Road and Paddington Tramways to Willesden and to the east the London, Deptford & Greenwich Tramways, or the South East Metropolitan which linked Catford with Greenwich; while the Woolwich & Southeast London ran from Woolwich to Plumstead and the Lea Bridge, Leyton & Walthamstow Tramways to Epping Forest.
This was a substantial mileage, but it was hardly a network.
The sparks effect
Railwaymen today talk about the ‘sparks effect’, meaning the tremendous growth in traffic that occurs when a line is electrified. In fact, today the change is from diesel to electric and the boost to traffic is less than it was when the change was from steam to electric, with a much cleaner and more pleasant travelling environment as well as much improved journey times.
While the first electric railways in the British Isles were intended for tourists, it soon became clear that the new means of propulsion had more than novelty value.
The first successful British street tramway to use electricity was in Blackpool and opened in 1885. This used a conduit in which the live rail was carried in a channel and a shoe or, in some descriptions a ‘plough’, picked up the current. In Croydon, electrification was also by means of a live rail concealed in a conduit. Maintenance of this, and indeed the cable conduits, was always a problem. Dirt and all manner of foreign matter, including horse dung, tended to clog the conduits. Far more practical was the overhead wire and the trolley pole, and this first appeared in Leeds in 1891. Travel by tram was transformed. Acceleration was quicker and costs were reduced.
The horse tram was finished, but the horse omnibus also found itself driven off those roads where an electric tram service operated. Replacing horse buses with electric trams proved to be viable, but where there was already a tramway laid, the change took effect quickly and for the person returning after some time away, it was nothing less than a revelation.
Arnold Bennett seems to have captured the impact of the electric tram in the reactions experienced by one of his characters returning to the Five Towns after an absence of more than twenty years:
In twenty minutes he was leaving Turnhill Station and entering the town. The first thing he saw was an electric tram, and the second thing he saw was another electric tram. In Toby’s time there were no electric trams in Turnhill, and the then recently-introduced steam trams between Bursley and Longshaw, long since superseded, were regarded as the final marvel of science as applied to traction. And now there were electric trams at Turnhill! The railway renewed his youth, but this darting electricity showed him how old he was.
This was, of course, fiction, and in the Potteries, far away from London, but there is no doubt that the author effectively captured the impact of the tram. One couldn’t ignore the fact that one’s tram was no longer horse-drawn, or no longer steam-hauled, as it was so obvious, even to those who profess to notice nothing about transport.
Soon, there were nevertheless plans for cross-country trams and even one in Essex from Southend to Colchester that would have included a ferry crossing. There was even a proposal for a Thames tram tunnel, but only the one under Kingsway was ever built. There seemed to be no limit to people’s ambitions for the tram.
‘A rather novel innovation is to be introduced on the London United electric tramways between Shepherd’s Bush and Hampton Court,’ reported the London Evening News in 1903. ‘As an additional attraction for parties of trippers it is proposed to equip the line with tea and luncheon cars, so that refreshments may be served on the way without loss of time.’
This was a step too far and what we may call the ‘Pullman’ tram never materialised. Even so, London United did put a ‘Special Saloon Car’ into service, which was a single-deck tram with curtain-windows and wickerwork armchairs, while there were vases of flowers on the tables. This never ran in regular service but was available for hire by parties of up to twenty people. A charge of £1 10s was quoted for a return trip between Twickenham and Hammersmith.
It should not be thought that the trams were universally loved and popular. Many disliked the noise, what they perceived as their speed, and what could often be a fairly rough ride. The gradients for trams were far steeper and the curves far tighter than those on the railways, while the much shorter wheelbase, especially before longer cars with bogies were introduced, meant that the trams jolted and bounced. One had to climb up into a tramcar, rather than step off a platform onto a railway carriage, and in most British systems, the tram lines hogged the middle of the road, so one had to step off the pavement and through whatever traffic there might be before boarding, and alight into a busy roadway at the end of one’s journey. When asked whether bogie cars would offer a better ride for passengers as well as increasing the carrying capacity of each tram, one tramway manager retorted that the conductor couldn’t collect all of the fares in time and he was not prepared to lose revenue. Even in municipal ownership, revenue came before comfort.
Some tram operators, such as the North Metropolitan, even tried to run hourly express services, such as that between the Nag’s Head and Moorgate, but how successful these could have been is doubtful as they would not have travelled far before coming up behind a ‘stopping’ service.
Especially as memories of the old horse buses faded, the tram was not everybody’s’ delight.
Private, municipal or nationalised?
There were other problems with the trams. In London there were company trams and then, once Parliament granted the necessary powers, municipal trams, but there was little attempt to create a network. Parliament in its wisdom had eventually enforced standard railway gauges for main line railways, but never attempted any such thing for the trams, so through running over another operator’s lines, which was commonplace on the railways from the earliest times, was less common on the tramways.
Even when gauges were the same, sometimes the tracks would be out of alignment at the municipal boundary. In London, the boundary between East Ham and Ilford was a few hundred yards from an important traffic point, but Ilford’s council would not allow through running for many years, even though it would have benefitted both operators. At the Rising Sun public house, the networks of Leyton and Walthamstow met, but were left for many years eight inches out of alignment. Even when the London County Council was created and acquired the local tramways, there remained the opportunity for friction at the boundary, as the journal, Modern Transport, reported:
Loud and heated argument developed over the Abbey Wood to Plumstead section, which the LCC [London County Council] was slow to build; several times Erith offered to build it on behalf of London. Erith wanted to build it in 1902, obtained powers to do so in 1903, had them confiscated in 1904, was told in 1905 that the LCC could not build it for the time being, decided in 1906 to work it itself with motor buses, was told in 1907 that the LCC was anxious to build it, but not to operate it, and it would have to be leased by Erith on terms that were, to Erith, financially impossible, and finally for the 1908 session, Erith promoted (but withdrew) another Bill asking for its 1903 powers to be restored and also for running powers into Woolwich. Eventually the LCC constructed the line and opened it on July 26th 1908, but terminated it 80 yards short of the county boundary, and the council refused to join up with Erith rails and permit through running. It is doubtful if the LCC would ever have applied for powers for this route if Erith had not obtained them first. Abbey Wood was not then very built-up, and it was natural that Erith should show a far greater desire to get to Woolwich than that the LCC should desire to go to or towards Erith. Erith always hoped for a through service to Woolwich or even to London, and in constructing its track it allowed sufficient clearance on all corners to take the large LCC bogie cars.
All the Woolwich, Erith, Bexley and Dartford tramways were compulsorily acquired by London Transport on 1 July 1933, and a few months later the junction was at last inserted at Abbey Wood. The through tram service did not materialise.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at the outcome of this sorry tale. If municipal undertakings lacked the entrepreneurialism to see a commercial objective, doubtless what railwaymen today would call a ‘traffic generator’, a nationalised body was even less enthused with the need to meet the demands of the market.
And yet, the tram was far faster than any street transport so far. The impact on the railways can be judged by the statistics for the London Brighton & South Coast Railway’s South London Line, running from Victoria to London Bridge. This was the archetypal inner suburban railway, providing the fastest means of travel between the two termini and through congested South London, that is, before the advent of the electric tram. In 1902, the line carried more than eight million passengers, but competition from the electric trams more than halved this to less than four million in 1909.
It was this that forced the railways to consider electrification, initially on the South London line, with trains using overhead electrification and the service inaugurated on 1 December 1909. It was an instant success, so that in 1910, more than 7.5 million passengers were carried, and the figures were still rising, so that a return of 10 per cent was earned on the capital invested. Such a result encouraged the railways south of the river to start a rolling programme of electrification, although the South East & Chatham plans were delayed by the First World War and not implemented until after Grouping, when they were changed considerably by the Southern Railway. The widespread electrification of first the inner suburban lines and then the outer suburban may well have been another reason why London south of the Thames has been so badly served by the underground network, with only the Northern and District Lines penetrating to any extent.
Enter the motor omnibus
Early attempts to harness steam power to road vehicles had been less than successful. The early attempts had centred around the stage coach, but the result was too little and too late on the one hand, but on the other the resultant vehicle was so heavy and unwieldy that it damaged the turnpikes and posed a threat to bridges as well as frightening the horses. For many years the sole application for steam power was with traction engines slowly pulling heavy loads. Tight legislative controls from 1865 onwards also underlined the objection felt by many to steam on the road, except for steam-hauled trams after 1879. The infamous Red Flag Act of 1865 imposed a 4 mph speed limit on mechanical road transport and required a man carrying a red flag to precede any mechanical road vehicle other than a tram, and if this imposition by Parliament was not enough, it also bestowed upon local authorities the right to specify the hours during which mechanical road vehicles might use their streets. Later, this was limited to the power to ban mechanical road vehicles for eight consecutive hours out of every twenty-four.
Even so, the development of lightweight steam engines suitable for road vehicles was a quest that many would not give up. As early as 1873, a bill was promoted in Parliament to ease the restrictions, but this met determined opposition and the measure was lost. It was only when it became apparent that in several European countries success was being experienced with the internal combustion engine that Parliament relented, and the Locomotives on Highways Act 1896 removed many of the restrictions on vehicles of no more than three tons unladen, or with a trailer, four tons unladen. The speed limit was increased to a breathless 14 mph, although local authorities were given the power to reduce this until the Local Government Board intervened and reduced the speed limit to 12 mph.
All of this was very fine indeed, but for one point, which is that as far as public transport was concerned, there was nothing available to take to the roads. A few enthusiasts had their own personal motorcars, and that was all. One and two cylinder vehicles put-putted along with frequent breakdowns and undertook short journeys, often requiring attention along the way, but it was impossible to scale up the crude mechanical devices to the size of a bus. To be fair to the early pioneers, they also had to contend with poor road services and primitive suspension systems, so that the chances of mechanical reliability were much reduced.
Just as the first railway carriages were based on the design of the stagecoach, the first attempts at bus design were based on what was essentially a horse-drawn bus body, modified to take the internal combustion engine, a lightweight steam engine, usually with the driving cylinders on the back axle, or a battery electric motor. The alternative was to develop the larger private cars to produce an open wagonette, although later some of the latter were offered as convertibles or even had enclosed bodywork, but the number of passengers seated longitudinally behind the driver in these was usually no more than about eight.
The wrangling between not just the transport industry and government, but even between what Parliament would allow and the Local Government Board would permit, continued. But, in 1903, the Motor Car Act raised the speed limit to 20 mph, although local authorities could reduce this to 10 mph in ‘dangerous areas’. The Act introduced the registration of vehicles from the beginning of 1904 and provided for drivers to be licensed, but not tested. At the end of 1904, the maximum vehicle weight was raised to 5 tons, or 6½ tons with a trailer, with a maximum speed of 12 mph on condition that all wheels had rubber tyres, which at this time meant solid rubber.
This legislation was just in time to allow development of the motor omnibus. The first attempt at an urban motor bus appeared in September 1904, an open-top double-deck bus with sixteen seats inside on the lower deck, and eighteen upstairs, or ‘outside’.
Nevertheless, as early as 1889, a battery electric bus was built by Radcliffe Ward, who founded the Ward Electrical Car Company, and was granted a licence from the Metropolitan Police before making the first of many trial runs.
‘During the past weeks a vehicle without horses and without steam power has been at different times observed in the streets of London, travelling at the rate of 7 miles an hour, and threading its way through the maze of Metropolitan traffic,’ reported the Financial Times. ‘In character and form it resembles a large and rather cumbrous omnibus. The driver…occupies a platform which is equipped with steering gear…The new style of conveyance is the Electric Omnibus.’
Despite this report, plans for a service starting that July did not materialise. Others reports tell of trial runs of as much as seven or eight miles, which might seem little to us today, but horses pulling buses only worked a twelve mile day. Ward was sufficiently encouraged to form the London Electric Omnibus Company in May 1896, and after enjoying much publicity, in November felt able to announce the launch of an electric bus service. The Metropolitan Police licensed the vehicle, a ten-seat, single-deck bus, but its use was confined to demonstration runs.
The steam bus was the other promising arrival on the scene. In January 1899, the Motor Omnibus Syndicate Ltd was awarded a licence by the Metropolitan Police for a double-deck Gillett steam bus, which was a converted horse bus body, but only seating ten inside and fourteen outside, on a steam lorry chassis. A light canvas awning covered the upper deck, doubtless so that smuts from the chimney, which protruded through the awning, did not fall on passengers. This too failed to see regular service.
The internal combustion engine was not far behind. And indeed, it was ahead as it finally provided a regular service for Londoners. On 9 October 1899, two buses incorporating twenty-six-seat horse bus bodies and using four-cylinder twelve-hp German Daimler petrol engines, with steel tyres, opened a route from Victoria Station to Kennington across Westminster Bridge. Painted white, they belonged to the Motor Traction Company, which had been formed the previous year as the London Steam Omnibus Company, but never operated steam buses! The name was changed in September 1899. In spring 1900, the route was changed to run between Kennington and Oxford Circus, but by December, the buses were withdrawn.
It was left to Thomas Tilling’s sons who put three Milnes-Daimler twenty-four horsepower motor buses into service in 1904. These were open top double-deckers, with sixteen inside seats and eighteen ‘outside’, on the upper deck.