Friday Reads – 9 November 2018

8 comments

1. The “London” article as a pean to a great city – very nice.
   Thanks for the “E-mail in the 18th Century article …. I will be adding “Low-Tech magazine” to my regular reads, in an ttempt to “Keep it Simple”
   As for the “streetcar” network of LA, well, who did kill Roger Rabbit?

2. @Greg Tingey: Not General Motors. Governmental neglect and a preference for buses amongst the people running the system, just like in London.

   Meanwhile, according to the T2M presentation, the Soviets were reading and taking note of the British Henry Watson’s 1933 book about traffic flow – Watson as it happens was very much pro-tram and anti-bus, which put him on the losing side when London’s municipal-socialist tramway networks were taken over by the London-General-bus-dominated public-private partnership that was London Transport.

3. Ian J
   The curious thing about London of course, was th halfway house solution that I can remember …
   Trolleybuses ( “Trackless Trams” ) – the largest system in the world, done in by not re-investing as time went by. [ Which might, yet, happen to Sheffield, though it would be a disgrace if it does. ]

4. @GT

   “done in by not re-investing as time went by.”

   The villain of the piece here was everyone’s favourite bus, the Routemaster,
   In 1959 London Transport (in the guise of AEC) were all ready to start building them. But the existing bus fleet was still comparatively new – not counting the handful of pre-war examples, there were 6,800 RTs (including RTLs and RTWs), all less than ten years old. At the time, most of the trolleybus fleet was over twenty years old.

   There was a new overhaul depot at Aldenham, miles from any trolley wires, waiting for business).

   At least one trolleybus factory in London (Leyland’s in Ham) had been converted for aerospace use in WW2, and was in no hurry to convert back again.

5. @timbeau – the Routemaster was actually originally conceived as a trolleybus version according to the standard history of the bus. What did for the trolleybus network was, perhaps, two things: the failure to implement the S London tram to trolleybus conversion programme, which would have seen a fleet of over 3000 vehicles and routes penetrating more effectively into the CAZ, and the need to replace the electrical distribution network (the trolleys had originally been introduced in London as elsewhere to use up the remaining life in the existing networks. The RM was a consequence rather than a cause and the die was cast well before the RM appeared as a motorbus, unfortunately.

6. The thing that anooyed me, as a secondary-school pupil at the time, was that the RM’s were smaller than the trolleys & slower & noisy & put out fumes,
   What a wasted opportunity.

7. GT 11/11
   My time at Chiswick during the 60s (working on Routemaster development) gave me the distinct impression that LT was run solely by ex LGOC people and their descendants. Any interest expressed in Trams and Trolleybuses was severely frowned on. Indeed I was hauled in when a letter I wrote to Commercial Motor praising the Brussels trams was published even though there was no reference to my place of work. Trams were certainly doomed from the start of LPTB. The war stopped the South London Trolleybus scheme and the need for diesel buses for evacuation purposes was a suggested motive for the scheme being abandoned.

   I could rant on about this for hours but LT in my day was a bus and bus only organisation. The RM was a very good but old-fashioned bus and the lack of innovative thinking held back development of more up to date vehicles. At least I left before the DMS!

8. @Jim Jordan

   “Trams were certainly doomed from the start of LPTB.”

   Indeed so – it came as a surprise to me when reading the history of the tram network to realise that, notwithstanding the age of some of the fleets inherited by the LPTB in 1933, it built not a single new one (until the opening of Tramlink in 2000).

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