Back-tracking with the trams

WAR on the car is the municipal theme of the '90s, with schemes to make motorists pay to enter towns and cities and severe curbs on parking in a bid to reduce gridlock and pollution.

But if the planners had been as far-seeing as Coun J Charnley, Blackburn's transport chairman in the 1930s, they would have been giving buses priority on the roads long ago - and they would never have got rid of the trams.

Back then, many towns were busily getting rid of the old iron monsters and Blackburn itself had partially followed the trend by introducing buses on some routes in 1929.

But Coun Charnley lectured on the logic of making the car the poor relation on the road.

The average car, he said, carried only 1.5 people whereas the bus carried 30. All that time ago he said that bus lanes were needed, suggesting the Government should "give the working man's vehicle the prior right on the roads."

But if, in his view, buses served the nation's interest better than cars, trams did it even better still. As he told his audience, two trams would carry as many passengers as three buses. It's a formula that now lies behind the tram's revival in Sheffield and in Manchester, whose Metrolink system brought back the electric streetcar in 1992 after absence of 43 years - and is now expected to replace a million cars in the Greater Manchester area by the year 2000.

But one of the reasons why trams fell out of favour was that they were slower than buses. Even diehard Blackburn displaced them in 1935 - on the Audley section which, incidentally, was the town's last tram route to be introduced when it opened in December, 1903, and the first to be discontinued - in order to clip journey times by six minutes. In any case, Ministry of Transport regulations restricted the trams' top speed to 20 mph and insisted on a 4 mph crawl when trams went under bridges or took sharp curves. The boom in road traffic means the speed argument no longer counts. It has been estimated that a tram now only needs to travel faster than 6 mph to outstrip London's rush-hour traffic - hence a proposal to bring trams back to the West End. Another big plus for the trams is their durability. For when Coun Charnley was advocating that buses should have the priority over cars, the estimated average life of a bus was six years. Not so with the tram.

When crowds gathered in Haslingden on May 1, 1930 to watch the town's changeover from electric trams to buses, the last tram to Accrington was the very same one that had first come to Haslingden from Accrington in September, 1908.

And trams were safe. In Accrington - where the last one ran on the Burnley Road route in January, 1932 - the Transport Department calculated that, up to the end of March, 1928, at the close of the last full year of the electric tram operations that had begun in 1907, the corporation's cars had covered 14,295,829 miles and carried 168,993,098 passengers without a single fatality or serious injury.

Other East Lancashire tram operators were not so lucky.

In Burnley in 1923, a young girl and the conductor were killed and seven others injured when a Harle Syke tram, approaching the top of the steep incline from Rake Head, was hit by a lorry which skidded coming down the hill and ran backwards before crashing into a newsagent's shop. Another downhill disaster claimed two lives at Darwen in 1926 when a tram returning from Hoddlesden ran out of control on Sudell Road, failed to take the bend at the bottom of the hill and ploughed into a billiard hall in Bridge Street. And in 1941, in Blackburn's worst tram accident, the driver was killed and 14 passengers injured after when the Darwen-bound tramcar jumped the points in Bolton Road, Ewood, swung to the left and toppled against a shop at the corner of Kidder Street.

Yet, such accidents were a rarity - as highlighted by the fact that in the year of that worst-ever incident at Ewood, another 14,771,205 passengers travelled on Blackburn's tramways without mishap.

But if there was little misadventure on the trams, there was not always luxury to be had - especially on the upper-deck of the open-top trams in a downpour. Older readers may remember the autocratic conductors who would make youngsters ride upstairs in bad weather so that adults could enjoy the shelter of the enclosed lower deck.

Blackburn's tracks and trams - with their olive green and ivory livery - were rated among the best in the country. Even six years after the town's last tram ran in September, 1949, a traveller was complaining in this newspaper that buses had brought pollution, were hardly any quicker and stopped in fewer places whereas on trams the ride was so smooth that "you could read a book or newspaper quite comfortably on them." But for real luxury passengers had to wait for one of Darwen's two Blackpool-style streamlined double-deckers to come along. They were bought in 1936 - at a time when Accrington, Rawtenstall, Burnley, Colne and Nelson had already scrapped their trams and decided that the future of public transport lay in buses. Clearly, Darwen thought the opposite in investing in "modern" trams. But the war years took such a toll on Darwen's tram fleet and tracks that in 1946 the town switched to buses and sold its smart streamliners, in their vermillion and cream colours, to the Llandudno and Colwyn Bay Electric Railway.

Llandudno was no stranger to East Lancashire's trams, having bought two from Accrington.

Journey's end for the tram in East Lancashire was the Intack Depot, when Blackburn's last street car (No. 74) arrived there after setting out from the Boulevard shortly after 11.30 pm on September 3, 1949, bringing the electric tram's epoch to an end 50 years after it began in our region.

The war - above all, fuel rationing - had extended the era longer than it might otherwise have been.

All that remains to be seen is a short stretch of line leading into the shed in Simmons Street, Blackburn, which first housed the town's horse and steam trams. But nearly another 50 years on, can we be sure the era of the tram is really over?

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.