END OF LONDON TRAMS

NINETY YEARS OF GROWTH AND

GOOD SERVICE

From a Correspondent

On March 23, 1861, an American witlh the apposite name of Train started a horse tramway in Bayswater Road from Marble Arch to Notting Hill Gate, and the artist Cruikshank was his first passenger. Though this line and two other experiments by Train aroused so much hostility among residents and road users that the closing of all was ordered within a year, the London tramway system had been born. Its adolescence was to be speculative, its maturity assured and vigorous. Now it has mellowed into a faltering but not unloved nonagenarian, due to expire to-night, when the last trams run between the Embankment and Abbey Wood and from Southwark Bridge to Woolwich, finally withdrawing to the dep6t at New Cross.

With the Tramways Act of 1870 protecting timorous local authorities with a right of veto, enthusiasts tried again and opened a line of horse-drawn double-deck vehicles between Kennington and Brixton. Its success was decisive; other routes followed, and London was never without horse trains until the first Great War. By 1880 three companies were working 63 miles of track with 479 cars and 4,178 horses, carrying that year 64m. passengers on ten routes. Inanimate sources of power now found advocates. In 1884 the first cable tram in Europe assailed Highgate Hill; next year Finsbury Park and Edmonton welcomed the earliest efficient steam tram. Compressed air, electric batteries, coal-gas, and oil-gas motors were used.

ELECTRIFICAITON

Doubtless the dockers' strike and Jack the Ripper drew off the attention of East Londoners in 1889, but a significant event was the opening at Northfieet of an electric line. Though the London County Council was steadily acquiring powers to buy, own, and run tramways, there was no plan for general electrification until the turn of the century. In fact the pioneer company in providing electric transport on the metropolitan streets was London United Tramways, from Shepherd's Bush to Kew and Acton, in 1901; East' Ham corporation followed in the same year. Then came the outstanding date in the story, May 15, 1903, when George, Prince of Wales, opened the electric line of the L.C.C. from Westminster and Blackfriars Bridges to Tooting. Its trams, Class A, drew power from a conduit, whereas the L.U.T. had overhead trolley wires; they were mounted on bogies, had open tops, and seated 66 persons.

It must suffice to follow the L.C.C. tramways, giving only honourable mention to the London United, Metropolitan Electric, and South Metropolitan Electric systems, and to those of West and East Ham, Barking, Ilford, Leyton, Walthamstow; Bexley, Erith, Gravesend; and Croydon. With many of them the L.C.C. had agreed on " through running " before the survivors were brought into the London Passenger Transport Board at its inception in 1933. Westminster Bridge was crossed by rails in 1906, and the completion of the Kingsway subway in 1908 allowed...