Trolley Buses - any enthusiast?

[John]

I live in Derby - had Trolley Buses until 1967.

Just wondering:

1. Did they have any form of heating?

1. Were there any electrical dangers when a trolley ple came off the wires. Thinking no return path.

[charles]

no "go" path either.

[Jeff Layman]

Not that I remember, but then I don't remember them /not/ having one either. That was in London in the 50s and early 60s.

The question does not apply. Trolleybuses were connected to twin parallel wires (550V DC). There was no return to earth as there was/is on trams, with one connection through the metal wheels. Trolleybuses had normal rubber tyres.

[NY]

What was the convention with trolley buses? Were the two wires at + and - some voltage wrt earth, or was one wire earthed and the other at a larger voltage.

The greatest danger with either a tram or a trolley bus was that you lost regenerative braking and so only had mechanical braking which may fade on a long descent. When he was little in the early 1900s, my grandpa (and my great grandma) witnessed a tram crash in Dewsbury when a tram got out of control on a long hill, and crashed into a hotel in the market place, having eventually run off the end of the rails. When we interviewed my grandpa in the 1970s, he said that the repairs to the damage were still visible, but the building has since been demolished and replaced with a modern building. He described seeing "a ball of black rags" - the conductress jumping off the top deck to save herself.

[CD]

I visited Vancouver in the late 90s & saw the poles come off a trolley bus at a junction. The driver got out, got a big stick from underneath & just hooked them back on. Seemed a regular occurence.

[Jeff Layman]

I don't know for sure, but I think both were floating above earth. That's because both were insulated from the support. If one was earthed, there wouldn't have been any need for an insulator on that wire.

Are there any reports of trolleybuses whose brakes failed and they ran away downhill?

[Paul]

Our system used ropes on the back, ropes that retracted into a winder to take up the slack. There was a rope per pole, and the driver would put the overhead poles back, one at a time using the rope. The electric trolleys replaced electric trams, where the trams used a similar pole+rope arrangement (but the two pickups were not compatible and the overhead wiring had to be completely redone).

I can't find any information on the voltage of the system. There was an electrocution event caused by that system, but it's quite possible the article got the voltage wrong. A crane operator snagged a boom in the wiring overhead. He was safe at first, until he tried to step down from his cab for a look. Killed on the spot (because he still had his hand on the door of the cab when he stepped down).

Paul

[Tim Streater]

Always seemed a bad idea, to me, that they scrapped them. Electric buses with no range limitation. IIRC, they had an onboard battery, which would certainly have been enough to get one trolly past another, if the one in front had broken down. Just lower and park the poles, drive past, and re-connect them. Something trams (which seem to be everyone's favourite for some reason) can't do.

[Tricky Dicky]

I don?t know about runaways or brake failures but do remember coming to a shuddering stop when one of the booms came off the wires. I do remember a large lever switch in the drivers cab which had to be reset following a boom coming off the wires.

Richard

[Bob Eager]

When I was a child, I was often taken out to the Lyons Corner House in the Old Steine in Brighton. The trolley buses used to stop right outside. I always wanted to go to the fairly deserted upstairs, because you could see the top of the buses. Being the centre of Brighton, I was sometimes lucky enough to see them pull the big bamboo pole from under the bus, and change to a different set of wires.

[Bob Eager]

The main reason they went, I think, was the heavy cost of infrastructure for new routes. How trams justify the outlay I don't know.

[Tricky Dicky]

Yes, during the house building boom of the sixties it was cheaper and quicker to provide diesel buses to all the outlying housing estates. The main road by our estate had trolley buses but a gas leak one day meant they had to run diesel buses and that was the last time we saw a trolley bus on that route.

Richard

[Nick Odell]

They still have them in Vancouver. They are modern and up to date and part of the regular transport infrastructure. We used them quite a lot when we were there last year. Google-image search Vancouver trams for lots of nice pictures!

Nick

[The Natural Philosopher]

People are just in love with trains. A friend in the public transport business referred to Lord Adonis as ' a small child with a very big train set'

COVID-19 will change the face of public transport and mark the end of a lot of it. I think the better way to achieve 'social transport' is to subsidise driverless taxis once they work properly. That solves the 'I am poor in a village and need to go shopping/go to hospital' moan. As far as commuting goes, I think its far better to let the electrons and photons do that, and stay at home.

After my last 999 call and ambulance I asked them to call me a taxi at the hospital when I was discharged, They called a riving ambulance with two drivers to run me home.

Public transport was built at a time when only very heavy dangerous expensive steam locomotives existed. Harking back to the days of stage coaches when only the very rich could afford private transport. It really has very little place in a post COVID world. All teh arguments about 'one bus full of passengers takes up less space than three cars' is nonsense when the bus doesn't have more than 4 passengers.

If you really want to get to Birmingham in a hurry take a plane from docklands air[port, or drive,

Trains and trams are just another bit of LeftyBollox thinking. Centralised provisions of socialised services in transport.

Juts give people the equivalent of an oyster card that they can use to pay electric driverless taxis for.

[Smolley]

Excellent form of transport, clean, smooth, fast and quiet, although weighing 12 tons they could out accelerate the average car. I had trouble hanging on to the platform handle whilst on my bike when the bus was starting off from a bus stop, because it built up speed so quickly and I would get into a speed wobble, with only one hand on the handlebars.

[GB]

What did you mean to type there, out of interest?

A plane journey, London - Birmingham, takes around 15 minutes in the air and 3+ hours on the ground. Docklands Airport is very hard to get to, unless you happen to live in that part of London. Connections to the airport are poor.

The train journey time is much longer, but the time spent before and after the journey is much less.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Roving...itinerant, of no fixed abode. There is an ambulance that circulates around the whole of east Anglia ferrying passengers from homes to hospitals. They came from I think Colchester, picked me up at Bury st Edmunds and dropped me home before charging off to Addenbrookes in Cambridge.

Now look at the time it takes for anyone to get to a central London station...I frew up[ with f****ng trains. At least three hours waiting on platforms waiting for connections. And taxis at both ends

Lies.

I th9nk I mentioned last year that I had attended a family gathering in Wets Germany. People in the UK came by train and hired car, by plane and hired car and I alone drove overnight and caught a ferry.

Only the fact that the train persons actually lived in London made the train in anyway comparable: My journey was almost identical to the fliers, and the train was slightly slower. Any form of transport that requires you to get to a station or airport slows you down. Yes we had ferry crossings BUT ferries are very much drive on drive off if pre booked.

When I was a lad doing 150 miles to visit the grandparents took 8 hours by train and taxi, when we got a car with my mother driving it came down to 5, and when the motorways arrived and I was driving, I could do it in

2 1/2.

[newshound]

Trams and light railways make sense where the conditions are right; Docklands, Sheffield, etc. What I think "did" for them in many places was partly that diesel buses are cheap and flexible, plus the increasing availability of private transport (first motorcycles, then cars).

I'm sure TNP is right that COVID-19 is going to give the whole work and transport systems a "kick". We've got the growth of Uber (easily made safer with a black cab type partition and better cabin materials) and eventually self-driving. I can see there being more dedicated taxi and bike lanes, and technology could make dual use lanes safer: mandatory transponder on bikes, mandatory detector on the powered vehicle.

[The Natural Philosopher]

It is a similar story with the arrival of the passenger jet - especially the Boeing 707 as opposed to the DH comet. They burnt more fuel to get a passenger to his destination, but the journey times were shorter and most importantly, the ease and lack of need for engine overhauls every thousand hours or so, meant they spent more time in the air- for the capital outlay maintenance cost were way down and passengers per year way up, and when you are borrowing to buy them at a fixed interest rate, the profits are far higher (or the fares lower). The greatest cost of a railway or tramway is the track. At least buses share the road with other traffic.

I am also wondering if it will herald the death of the city.. Cities grew up as market towns, then as ports and communications hubs and finally as manufacturing places where vast quantities of workers could be housed. Today they are just dormitories. And extremely disease ridden ones.

With the internet giving high speed connectivity, and the postal and courier services acting as shopping trolleys, we don't need no stinkin' high streets.

They were already destroyed by the big brands into 'me-too malls'

Shopping is now a social activity - a stroll along the Mall in a Burlington Bertie sort of way.

[charles]

DLR goes right to the airport