Old Bus

 I made this sketch since it combines my home borough, Ealing, and a gorgeous old Type B bus. Just as a bonus, you can see in front of the bus and to the left, a London United Tramways tram trundling off into the distance. 

Horse Drawn Bus Sketch

 I acquired a London Horse drawn bus model for my Matchbox London Bus collection, and so in celebration I made this ink sketch. I know it's vulgar to talk money, but then I'm a vulgar person, so I don't mind saying it's been a really good week for business with my Etsy shop - starting with a bumper order of Port Talbot prints, and then selling the first prints from my new Ealing range , and receiving a sketch commission. 

This bus has the destinations Waterloo and Somerset House on it. Well, surely that can't have been the whole route - after all, you can walk from one to the other in a few minutes. My great great grandfather wasn't a horse drawn bus driver, but he was a horse drawn dustcart driver, and I sometimes think back to what it must have been like, even on the streets of Victorian Hammersmith. Apart from anything else, with everything being horse drawn in those days the amount of manure deposited on the streets every day must have been prodigious. Poor man, I think he died at the age of 29 from penumonia, leaving 4 children behind him. Don't try to tell me about the Good Old Days. 

Ealing Sketchbook

 I think that I mentioned in yesterday's post that I've been making a series of sketches of my old home town, the London Borough of Ealing. When I get up in the morning, one of the first things I do is to fire up the computer and check on the Etsy shop. You can imagine my joy when I fired it up this morning, and found I'd sold my first Ealing print. In honour of that. I thought I'd share the sketches I've already made: -

This is the Odeon CInema in Northfields Avenue. It was built in the 1930s in a style that seems heavily influenced by Spanish Morish style, and I don't think there's another cinema quite like it. Sadly the cinema was closed in the 90s, and now is used by the good people of the Elim Pentecostal Church. I have sketched it before in its modern appearence. It's a real Ealing icon though, and brings back happy memories for several generations of Ealing people. 

This is the Wharncliffe Viaduct in Hanwell and it was built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Well, I say buuilt - I doubt he laid all of the bricks himself, but you know what I mean. It carried the first stretch of the Great Western Railway out of London and was built in the 1840s. 

This is St. Mary's Church, the original parish church of Ealing, and although the centre of the area has now moved towards the North in Ealing Broadway, it was the centre from which the settlement originally grew. The byzantine style used by architect S.S.Teulon isn't everybody's cup of tea, but I rather like it. 

A 607 ytolleybus plying the route along the Uxbridge Road, as it approaches Ealing Broadway. 

Ealing Town Hall, a fine example of high Victorian Gothic Revival Civic Architecture. Last I heard at least part of it is going to be made into a hotel. Sheesh!

This is the Hanwell Coronation Clock Tower, built to commemorate the Coronation of King George VI in 1937. It's a nice part of Hanwell, this, and when I was growing up I think that this place was nicknamed Taplin's corner, after an outfitters there. 

When the Ealing Broadway Centre was officially opened by the Queen in the 80s, she unveiled this statue called "Small Work Horse". I've always liked it very much. 

Now, I've no doubt that I don't need to remind the good people of Ealing that I do not give permission for any of these images to be downloaded and printed, but just in case people from other areas were thinking of doing so then please don't. If you'd like prints of any of these pictures they are all available, for ridiculously low prices, from my etsy shop - just click this link - 

My Etsy Shop

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?