We're All Off Our Trollies

 It’s funny how your mind can get stuck in a rut, and run along the same tracks for days, even weeks at a time, even if you try to lead it down a detour.

I grew up in the London Borough of Ealing, and have been thinking about Ealing quite a bit since I discovered a blog which the author wrote about his childhood growing up in the 1950s in a house which was a very few streets away from the one I grew up in. Alright, I was born in the mid 60s, not the 50s, but even so it brought back a lot of memories. So over the weekend I made a number of sketches of Ealing. Well and good.

Now, you know from my last post that I’ve been collecting a mini fleet of Matchbox London bus models for my shelves. Look, they make me happy, okay? So, what was the latest of the sketches I made yesterday? Well – this one.

That’s the Uxbridge Road in Ealing, looking West towards West Ealing. And on the right, well, that’s a trolleybus. Trolleybuses were introduced to London’s streets from 1931. Although I would guess they were seen largely as a solution to the problems with trams – I’ll come to those – trams weren’t completely phased out in London until about 1951.

So why did London want rid of its trams in the first place? Well, Londoners as a rule didn’t want rid of them at all, however to the London Passenger Transport Board they were a problem, and not necessarily for the reason you might think. In 1870 an act of Parliament determined that when a company built a tramway, then they assumed responsibility for the upkeep and maintenance of the whole roadway on which the rails were laid. In the short term this was a good deal for both sides, as it made tramways far more attractive to the individual boroughs that had the final yay or nay over whether the tramways were allowed to be built. The first fully operational electrified tram services in London ran from 1901. By the late 20s and early 30s, a large amount of London’s tram network was old, and would have needed huge investment to replace. Not only that but London was growing, and the cost of building new tram routes would have been hugely expensive compared with the cost of making a new bus route. Considering the expense of costly road maintenance, and also the view that trams were a major source of traffic congestion (which was later proven to be untrue) the LPTB began a process of decommissioning its trams and tramways – although this was prolonged due to World War II.

As I see it, trolleybuses had a major advantage over London’s trams, in as much as they didn’t rely on rails. Not being trams, this also meant that London Transport didn’t have to pay for the whole maintenance of an extensive road network. They had a huge capacity or around 70 passengers. When trolleybuses first took to the roads, the maximum capacity for a diesel or petrol engine bus was 56, and there were performance issues with both.

Recently bought Matchbox Model of a London Trolleybus

So, in the trolleybuses – and it is believed that London had the largest fleet of them in the world at one time – London had a public road transport system that was capable of carrying large numbers of passengers, that was more cost effective in the long run than trams, that people liked, and that was environmentally friendly. So of course, it had to go.

Although the decision to scrap London’s trolleybuses seems like madness now, in 1954 there did seem to be some sense behind it. Remember – being environmentally friendly wasn’t even really a concept in the 50s. In 1947, the Government nationalized electricity. This meant that London Transport could no longer generate its own cheap electricity. At one time trolleybus drivers were not paid as much as diesel or petrol bus drivers, but this ridiculous state of affairs ended and that raised costs, to the point where it was no longer cheaper in real terms to run trolleybuses than diesel buses.

In addition to this, improvements in technology meant that the trolleybuses lost their performance advantage over diesel buses, whose capacity to carry larger numbers of passengers increased. It’s interesting that the decision was pretty much concurrent with AEC unveiling their prototype Routemaster bus. One school of thought says that LT had put so much money into the development of this iconic bus, that they had to scrap something for the Routemaster to replace. The current fleet of RT buses weren’t 10 years old yet so it wasn’t going to be them. It is true that diesel buses gave you the opportunity to change a route much more easily than trolleybuses. Trolleybuses also needed a turning circle at the end of their routes – you can see one such outside Uxbridge Underground station.

That’s trolleybuses, then. Will they be back? There was a wee bit of media fuss in 2012 when a new Routemaster was decked out as a trolleybus to consider the feasibility, but I don’t know that much ever came of it. There are currently no trolleybuses operating in the UK apart from within museums. There are over half a dozen 2^nd generation urban tramways in the UK. I’ve been to quite a few European cities with second generation tramways, but only one with a trolleybus system – Kaunas. Who knows, though? In 1980, who’d have believed that we’d ever see trams in the UK outside the tourist trams in Blackpool?