Today, many towns and cities in continental Europe have flourishing trolleybus systems, employing the latest types of vehicles as well as the latest technology needed for their operation. Yet in Britain, trolleybuses are but a distant memory, with the last traditional British trolleybus system having perished in Bradford in the spring of 1972.
How different things were when I was a youngster in the 1950s and early 1960s! I was fortunate to have been born and brought up in the heart of what was then the largest trolleybus system in the world, that of London Transport. We lived in Canonbury, with route 611 passing our home and within a ride of just five minutes or so of what must have been one of the busiest trolleybus junctions in the world, that at Holloway, Nag's Head, where eleven different trolleybus routes connecting central London with various north London suburbs converged. Therefore it was only natural that my favourite mode of road passenger transport should be the trolleybus, as it still is today.
Most British trolleybus systems, the majority of which were run by municipal authorities in the towns and cities they served, had been inaugurated during the inter-war years to replace trams. This was quite a sensible move, since much of the electrical infrastructure needed for the trams could be adapted for trolleybus operation. Unfortunately, with one or two notable exceptions such as in Cardiff, the Second World War halted the further spread of trolleybus operation for the duration. This was no more starkly obvious than in London, where most of the trams south of the River Thames survived the war as a result. When hostilities had ended, it was decided to replace them by motor buses rather than trolleybuses, and only two years after the last trams had run in July 1952, the decision was taken to replace London's trolleybuses by motor buses as well. At this period, London Transport was Britain's biggest bus operator, and it was no surprise that all other operators followed London's lead by abandoning their trolleybus systems too. Thus just under ten years after London's last trolleybuses ran in service in May 1962, so did the last in Britain, in Bradford in March 1972.
I began transport photography just after being bought a camera for my fourteenth birthday at the end of December 1961. Appropriately, the very first photographs I took were of the last day of trolleybuses running from London's Colindale, Finchley and Stonebridge Park depots on 2 January 1962. I was lucky in that throughout most of the 1960s I travelled to many operators in England and Wales photographing their vehicles. Although there were a handful of trolleybus fleets I never managed to reach, for example distant Huddersfield, Newcastle and Teesside, I did visit most of the surviving trolleybus systems in the latter half of the 1960s. Therefore, I am pleased to be able to present many of the pictures taken on those visits in this volume. Most have never been published before.
It is tantalising, and indeed sad, to reflect that if the Second World War had not happened, or even if it had not been declared until, say, 1942 or 1943, London's tram to trolleybus conversion programme would have been completed. There would have been a huge fleet in London of about 3,000 trolleybuses – surely too vast to be abandoned in such a relatively short space of time. And if London had not abandoned its trolleybuses, other towns and cities would probably not have either! Similarly, if the surviving systems had soldiered on just a little longer into the era of efforts to reduce pollution from internal combustion motor-propelled vehicles, then maybe they would still be with us today. As things are, it pains me very much to hear Transport for London enthusing about a handful of ‘electric’ buses being tried out in the Croydon area as this book is being compiled in the spring of 2015. After all, when I was a lad in the 1950s, London did have about 1,800 fully electric and pollution-free buses – our splendid trolleybuses! I also cannot understand why many British towns over the past twenty years or so – including Croydon – have opted for trams rather than trolleybuses. I have nothing against trams, but surely a trolleybus system is far less costly to introduce, and the trolleybuses themselves are more flexible to operate than trams are – one of the benefits of their introduction in the 1920s and 1930s in the first place! And when so many other things are imposed on us by the European Union, why can we not follow the lead of many of its other member states by reintroducing trolleybuses to Britain's streets? I sincerely hope that, some time in the future, we may yet see the return of trolleybuses to our streets, but for now I am pleased to present this selection of photographs of how things used to be fifty years or so ago. My thanks go to Colin Clarke, Paul Everett and John Scott-Morgan for all their help in putting this book together.
Jim Blake
30 April 2015