On the 5th of July 1952, so 70 years ago this week, the last of the old London
trams trundled off to the depot for the last time. At the time, it was the end of an era.
No more would the double-deckers rattle and sway through the streets of London.
Now their paths would echo to the sound of diesel-engined buses. How the mighty had fallen!
The first permanent tram route was established in 1870. The trams were cheap to build,
cheap to travel on and served suburbs that even today are untouched by the Underground.
The once-unstoppable railway companies came to fear the appearance of rails in
the streets and found themselves playing catch-up once electricity arrived.
Among the upper class, trams were loathed as transport for the lower orders. But for
the working class they were loved for the very same reason. They represented a trip into town,
a shopping expedition or just a sightseeing tour - all for a flat fare of sixpence.
Where did it all go wrong? Well, by the 1920s, the various corporations operating
trams in London had grown complacent. They'd let their fleets become dilapidated and out-of-date.
In 1923, for the first time, bus ridership overtook trams. Metropolitan Electric Tramways
responded with new up-to-date trams known as the "Felthams." Meanwhile, London United Tramways were
going in a different direction. They were playing with trackless trams, or, as they would become
better known, trolleybuses. These were lighter, quieter, cheaper to run, had better acceleration,
didn't need rails, could use existing overhead lines built for trams and could pull over to stop.
They began appearing in 1931. That same year, the Royal Commission on Transport declared that trams
were obsolete. In 1933, all of London's public transport (with the exception of the
main line railways) came under the control of the London Passenger Transport Board,
or London Transport. For the first time, coherent city-wide decisions regarding transport could be
made. That included the 324 miles of tram track in operation at the time. From the very start,
London Transport planned to get rid of the trams. In fact, the Act of Parliament creating London
Transport included authorisation to replace them. Trolleybuses were the obvious solution,
and within five years, over half the tram routes had been replaced. The Second World War came to
highlight the biggest problem with both trams and trolleybuses: inflexibility. Bombings resulted
in lines being taken out of service and in some cases, even facing the indignity of being replaced
by diesel buses that could get around obstacles. Yet the war also prolonged the life of the trams.
During the war, major transport projects were firmly on the back burner.
Immediately afterwards, the priority was to repair war damage and deal with the maintenance backlog,
but once things had stabilized a little, by 1950, it was announced that the trams would be replaced
by what London Transport described as "a more modern and attractive form of transport."
In other words, diesel buses. There would be no more trolleybus routes. Tram routes would
skip straight to conventional buses. The AEC RTs had begun to arrive in quantity to replace both
the trams and the trolleybuses. They would soon be joined by the iconic Routemasters.
The stage was set for a mass scrapping of the tram network, codenamed "Operation Tramaway." The
tram network was closed in nine stages, although 1951 actually saw the addition of a bit of track
around Waterloo to serve the Festival of Britain. Thereafter, the routes were swiftly reduced. The
trams were either sold to other cities or scrapped at Penhall Road in Charlton. London Transport did
consider the idea of selling them for conversion into houses, but sadly this did not go ahead. The
last week of operation was heavily promoted and the trams saw heavier use than they had in years,
thanks to enthusiasts and people wanting one last ride. In fact, with so many trams having
been withdrawn, the remainder were unable to cope with the sudden influx of passengers.
The final tram service ran from Woolwich to New Cross, just before midnight, full to capacity.
Those who couldn't get on walked alongside. Crowds of people, enthusiasts and ordinary
Londoners alike, stood and cheered it on. It must have been quite a surreal scene, but one that
shows how beloved these supposedly obsolete and workaday vehicles were to the people of London.
The very last tram movement in London consisted of a procession of nine trams to the scrapyard.
And so ended the first age of the tram, less than a century after it had begun.
Indeed, there would have been people alive in 1952 old enough to remember the first tram routes.
As we now know, though, the first age of trams in London was not the last.
The late 20th century brought a resurgence in trams, and in 1999, London joined the trend
with the highly successful Croydon Tramlink. Several other proposals have been put forward
since then, and it seems that Londoners are certainly not willing to let the concept go,
whatever London Transport might have thought in the 1950s. Those final trams of 1952 weren't
the last gasp of an outdated mode of travel, but simply the end of one generation.
Well, I hope you enjoyed today's video. The more I read about the trams,
the more interesting I find them, so no doubt this will be far from my last video on the subject.
I also had to skip over a lot of the trolleybus story, and that's pretty interesting in itself,
so one of these days I reckon I'll have to talk about those in more detail.
Thanks as ever to my donors on Ko-Fi and Patreon,
you are the available seats to my upper deck. And I'll see you all again very soon. Cheerio!