S is for Sealion: the thread about the Corporation Tramway’s 1951 animal A to Z

In 1951, with the looming threat of closure and increased competition, Edinburgh Corporation Transport published a series of posters to advertise the tram as a good way to get to Edinburgh Zoo. These took the form of an A to Z of animals that one might see. I thought I would share them here.

These posters are quite unusual as the Tramway had never really troubled to advertise themselves in this manner before this; there was no real reason to. There was no real bus competition as at this time and wherever the tramways and railways overlapped, the former was nearly always much quicker, cheaper and more regular. Indeed it was overwhelming competition from trams that had meant much of Edinburgh’s suburban rail system declined in the early part of the 20th century, with many station closures prior to 1950.

I like a lot of things about these posters. I like the rather old-fashioned (by 1951 standards) design, it’s much more reminiscent of pre-war, London Transport design. It’s formal, educational and easy on the sell. This small-c conservative style fits with the image I have of Edinburgh Corporation Tramways at this time; an institution that knows it probably doesn’t have much of a future, so it’s hanging on to the past. The posters were printed locally (Edinburgh was a centre of printing and publishing) but I’m afraid I haven’t uncovered who the artist was. The initials “J.R.S.” can be seen on some.

More of these used to be available for sale on Ebay as reprints (I even bought a couple), but I cannot now find them to fill in the rest of the alphabet. You can view and zoom in on these images on the website of Edinburgh Libraries and Museums and Galleries.

Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
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The thread about #NowAndThen photo montages of old railway stations, tramways and bridges around Edinburgh and Leith

This thread was originally written and published in December 2017 and a further part in May 2019.

This thread features #NowAndThen photo-montages of long gone railway stations, tramways and bridges in Edinburgh and Lieth; period photos overlaid on the current streetscape to show just how much or little things have changed over time.

Duke Street in 1954 on the last day of service for the No. 25 tram. This service ran from Corstorphine to Portobello King’s Road via Leith Walk and the Links. Not much else has changed on this side of the road, although the occupants of the buildings certainly have. On the left was the Palace Cinema, with a snooker hall above. It is now a J. D. Wetherspoon pub.

Commercial Street in 1955. The No. 17 tram from Granton passes the “Highland Queen” bonded warehouse of MacDonald and Muir. It is running across the railway lines that crossed into the docks from the former North British railway at North Leith / Leith Citadel station. The bond is now flats, through the West Dock Gate where the railway ran is the now the Scottish Government building – Victoria Quay. The Old West and East docks are infilled, unimaginatively used as car parks. The Victoria Dock is cut off from the harbour basin and is a sterile and bleak water feature in front of Victoria Quay.

King’s Road at Portobello in the 1950s. The No. 12 tram from Corstorphine via Leith, it has just passed the ghost of a car heading the other way to Portobello. The background is dominated by the great red brick lump of Ebenenzer J. Macrae’s Corporation electric power station.

Tollcross in 1956. There was a tramway depot here – where the central fire station now is – and the route was also a junction where 3 routes from the suburbs converged and then split immediately into two to head into the city by different routes. As such this was always a busy place on the network and this scene is busy with shoppers and tramcars. The tenement on the right and the castle are all that remain of the original buildings in this shot now.

Trinity Crescent in the 1950s. A no. 17 tram squeezes under the bridge carrying the railway from Trinity Station along Lower Granton Road to the docks. The low bridge and tight S-shaped turn of the road meant that the tramway here was single line in the middle of the road, with the overhead line lowered. A set of traffic signals allowed only 1 tram at a time into this short section and warned motor vehicles that a tram was about to pass as their route swung onto the right lane to make the turn.

And Trinity again in 1986. A ghost train crosses Trinity Road on track removal duties. Click on the link to the EdinPhoto website to see more images of this series.

Moving on to animated transitions, here is Balgreen Halt station. A 1934 addition to the suburban railway network by the LNER (London & North Eastern Railway), it was closed in 1968. Estimate the old photo is early 1960s.

And at the end of the line at Corstorphine. Always a hard one to get your head around as no hint of the stations presence is left under the 1980s housing, beyond the name “Station Road”

Side fact, Corstorphine had extraordinarily long platforms for a suburban station (250m, sufficient for a 12 coach train of 60 foot stock), I believe this was because the railway company hoped that a new barracks to replace the Georgian cavalry establishment at Piershill would be built nearby. The new barracks were ultimately built at Redford instead but Corstorphine was left with its overly large station. There were 2 full platforms and 2 full length carriage sidings. As a result it was used to stable and clean coaching stock overnight and on occasions such as rugby and football matchdays.

Another overlooked Edinburgh suburban station; the awkwardly located Piershill at the foot of Smokey Brae, between Meadowbank and Restalrig. The road here running under the bridge is Clockmill Road, which connected to the Clockmill Lane. This was the ancient route from the Canongate to Restalrig, cut in two by the London Road when it was built in the early 1820s. The road was obliterated and the bridge cut off by the groundworks for the 1970s Commonwealth Games stadium, the velodrome being built on top of the road. The bridge is now blocked up as a garage, but may be re-opened as a through route in the future when the eastern end of the stadium site is redeveloped as housing.

Leith Walk station – no, not the big one at the Foot, but the one called Leith Walk towards the top.The demolished tenements of Shrub Hill and Shrub Place are in the background, plus an intriguing belfry. I’m guessing it was the old school next to Pilrig Model Buildings, which later became the “Royal Caledonian Bazaar”.

Now the site of the Inchkeith House multi-storey flats, the Royal Caledonian Bazaar was a “posting and livery establishment”; basically a horse transport depot. The proprietor was one John Croall. The Croalls were established in the horse business and were pioneers of motoring in Edinburgh. They gave their name, unsurprisingly, to Croall Place, the tenement at the top of Leith Walk where it meets Macdonald Road. Croall & Croall later built car and bus bodies and had a number of works around the West Port and Lothian Road. They later became part of the SMT (Scottish Motor Transport) empire.

Granton Road, once an important suburban commuter station and tram route. It was much more conveniently located for the wealthy suburb of Trinity than the station of that name, and later for the big new housing scheme at Boswall.

There’s an old cast iron column just outside where the station was, I always assumed it was a tramway pole for the overhead wires. This photo shows it supported no wires – there’s an actual tramway pole right behind it – and it had a crown-shaped vent cap. It’s not a pole or a lamp post at all, it’s actually a sewer vent – a stink pipe – which is why it has survived.

We move on to Granton station itself. One of the first in Edinburgh and originally the site of a pioneering train ferry to Burntisland before the Forth was bridged. It closed in 1925 as an economy as there was little need by this time for a passenger station in the middle of the docks – most people taking the ferry across the Forth found the electric tramway much more convenient to get into the city than taking the train.

The slip for the train ferries is still used by the Royal Forth Yacht Club. Thomas Bouch’s Floating Railway was an ingenious and effective solution to bridging the Forth before the technology allowed a permanent structure. Basically an early, steam-raised linkspan that lowered a ramp on to a special ferry boat, allowing wagons and carriages to be run aboard. The whole apparatus, rails and all, was on a great wheeled carriage, allowing it to move with the tides. The rails were in short sections, bolted together in such a way that they could flex.

Thomas Bouch is an engineer remembered for his greatest and most infamous creation, the first Tay Bridge, but he had a long career in which he constructed many pioneering and innovative solutions to the problems of getting railways across obstacles.

I’m quite chuffed with this image, which shows the evolution of the Upper Drawbridge at Sandport Place. Not only is the river much higher now since the docks were dammed, but the deck was widened and the central arch of the current bridge replaced the lifting section.

The Water of Leith is no longer a tidal river, as in the 1960s a set of lock gates were installed at the mouth of the docks to keep the dock basin always filled with water to allow bigger and deeper ships to use the port, and not be so restricted by the tides when coming and going. The water level these days is frequently within a foot of the central arch but you can still see the “river bed” in the right conditions only a few feet below that, there must be a good 20 foot of mud and silt and sludge built up on the river bed, unable to be washed out by the tide.

The next image is the same spot as before but looking the other way, to St. Ninian’s Wharf (named for the old North Leith Kirk behind, with its distinctive Dutch tower). The site of a dry dock and boatbuilding yard in the 1850s and 60s.

The photo confused me for a good while, as I assumed that the ship must be in the dry dock, which was one of the first dry dock in Scotland so pre-dated the photo by about 100 years. I later realised that the ship being built in the picture is not in the dry dock at all, but on a building slip alongside, with a temporary coffer dam following the line of the river wall – marked in red on the Town Plan below.

That ship may even be on a “patent slip”, a Leith invention.

Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
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The “Battle of South Clerk Street”: the thread about the brief war between the city’s students and its trams

This thread was originally written and published in January 2018.

I got a book out of the library. It’s a very interesting book, packed full of interesting tales and knowledge, related by a genuine expert on the subject. For instance, I’m only 1 paragraph in and I just found out that when Edinburgh Corporation took over the tramway system in 1919 it was used as a pretext to relieve all female clippies (“conductresses“) of their employment! Male employees were all kept on.

When the Corporation took over the network they made the decision to switch from the cable-hauled system to electric traction. Leith already used a modern, overhead wire electric system, but Edinburgh had persisted with the cable system. There were 4 winding houses around the city – at Portobello, Shrubhill, Tollcross and Henderson Row – and these powered endless loops of cables in conduits underneath the streets. The trams attached to these cables for motive power with a releasable gripper. The system was devoid of overhead poles and wires, but was slow, noisy, inefficient and unreliable. It was also very expensive on account of the endless repairs and maintenance required.

However, the prospect of overhead lines and poles on Princes Street caused something of an outcry in certain quarter. It would, they said, “result in a hedge of scrollwork“. Concerned voters formed themselves into a “Citizens Protection Committee” was formed to resist this outrage. Questions were raised in The House of Commons and a public enquiry was held. In the end a compromise was reached, a suitably stately centre pole was designed specifically for Princes Street to appease the critics. The Corporation didn’t hang about any further and forged ahead with impressive speed. The conversion of Princes Street from cable to electric was done in a single overnight shift, including erecting the entire pole and wire system and removing the cable apparatus. It took only 2 weeks to re-lay the entire north-side track 2 feet further out to allow the centre poles to fit in. Service was maintained throughout on a temporary track laid on top of the road surface

Leith Corporation – absorbed reluctantly into Edinburgh in 1920 – had taken matters into its own hands in 1904 and totally rebuilt its tram network into a modern, electric one. This had resulted in the Pilrig Muddle, where through passengers between Leith and Edinburgh had to swap from an Leith (electric) car onto an Edinburgh (cable) car at the municipal boundary at Pilrig Street. The opportunity therefore presented itself to unmuddle the muddle. There was a similar experience at Joppa, where onwards trips to Musselburgh moved onto the electric system of that district, but traffic here was less intense.

Work proceeded quickly to integrate the two networks, and the date of the first through tram was set for June 20th 1922. It would run from Leith to Liberton and a Leith councillor remarked that he was “proud the first up-to-date tramcar in Edinburgh [was to start] from Leith” (it started just within the old Leith boundary on Leith Walk, just north of Pilrig Street).

The Musselburgh News reported that “there was a natural curiosity and expectancy amongst thousands of citizens to see the public start of the new cars.” The first tramcar, displaying a plate of route No. 7, was to be driven out of Shrubhill Works by Lord Provost Hutchison, followed by a further 2 cars, “all gaily decorated“, containing the official party.

A blue ribbon was stretched across the road at the Edinburgh – Leith boundary at Pilrig to be cut. The Lord Provost handed over control of the tram to the driver at the G.P.O. at the top of Leith Street.

The car proceeded onwards into Edinburgh without event. However, on passing the Bridges and reaching the University at Old College it found that the way was blocked by the students who had formed a barrier across the road. This was an organised “rag“, a pretext for disorder and high-jinks. The student body was apparently feeling aggrieved at having been excluded form the official proceedings. “Progress was impossible, and it was soon noticed that the young ” intellectuals ” were bent on sharing in the first trip”. When the car came to a halt it was pelted with flour bombs by the throng and hundreds of students surged forward in an attempt to board it.

Although the doors of the tram were closed, the students simply boosted eachother up the outside to the open veranda decks on the top. Many of them managing to cling on to the outside and the sole police constable on escort duty could do nothing to prevent this. The cars began to proceed again, intruders and all. Some of the students managed to climb onto the roof, helping themselves to the decorative flags and bunting for their own adornment. When the trams attempted to move on again, the students dislodged the current collection pole on the lead vehicle and the tram had to proceed to South Clerk Street under gravity alone, where it ground to a halt, powerless. The following crowd of students renewed their assault on the vehicles, having been able to summon fresh supplies of flour, meal and paper bags.

Restarting, the trams slowly began to outpace the following throng and an uneasy peace ensued between the official party and the intruders until Church Hill was reached, where the police under Chief Constable Ross were waiting. They managed to instil some discipline on the students but found they could not remove them, despite a direct appeal to them from the Lord Provost; “Now that you men have had what you were pleased to call your fun, which, I may tell you, has caused considerable discomfort and annoyance to this party, among whom is a lady, I would ask you now to leave the cars and enable us to proceed on our return journey in peace”. The Lord Provost was particularly aggrieved because his wife the Lady Provost had been hit in the face with a bag of flour. The Chief Constable telephoned headquarters for assistance.

At the destination in Liberton, a Corporation bus full of police reinforcements – driven by Councillor Thomson – had been sent ahead to ensure no repeat would happen on the return journey. The trams were met by the police, with batons drawn, and the students were forcibly ejected and sent packing. The return journey was undertaken with heavy police escort and at a speed sufficient to outpace the students who tried to follow by running.

The official party then returned to the City Chambers for a celebratory luncheon and speeches. The convenor of the Tramway Committee – Councillor Mancor – used his speech to make a thinly veiled attack on the “Citizens Protective Committee” who “seemed to think they were better informed of the wishes and desires of the constituents than the Town Council.” Mancor described the objectors to “Rip Van Winkles“. The day ended on a down note when a car on Leith Street fouled the overhead wires and snapped them, bringing the network temporarily to a halt in this area, followed by a snap near Salisbury Place, again creating a temporary halt of service. These were the result of teething troubles, the overhead lines being strung too taut. The Students Representative Council that evening issued a “manifesto” calling for restraint on the part of the student body but without actually apologising;

The unfortunate incident which occurred this morning , when a student was seriously injured , is being inquired into by the police authorities, who have expressed their regret , at the occurrence . The case of the students concerned is being adequately represented by a number of students who were eye-witnesses .
It will obviously damage the case and prejudice the general body of students if any further demonstrations are made . Unpleasantness between the police and students is to be deprecated at any time, particularly as the former have always treated student “rags” sympathetically .
It is now a long time since anything , like this has occurred and both students and policemen are apt to get excited with very little provocation . All students are therefore earnestly requested to refrain from any rash act which would bring the name of the University into disgrace
The rag this morning was on the whole quite a creditable performance and it would be a pity that it should be marred by subsequent thoughtlessness on the part of a few”

A procession of over two-hundred students marched to the Empire Theatre in the evening where they applauded the performers before marching off in the direction of Princes Street before dispersing. The cable and electric systems operated in parallel for a period, but the Corporation proceeded with full electrification at a breakneck speed. Princes Street was completed by 21st October 1922. The Comely Bank and Mound section was the last to be converted from cable haulage, “much to the disgust” of the polite classes of the New Town and Stockbridge. The system was fully electrified by the 8th June 1924, a remarkable achievement in almost exactly 2 years.

Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

When the brakes don’t work: the thread about runaway trams

On this day in 1918 (June 23rd when written) there was an “Extraordinary Tramway Incident” in Edinburgh as a result of which, miraculously, nobody was hurt. This was the days of cable traction, when the city’s public transport wound its way slowly and noisily around the streets hauled by an endless loop of moving cable beneath the setts.

It was just after 10 O’clock in the morning and an empty car (they were always called cars, never trams) was standing awaiting its next service at the Braids terminus, near where Comiston Road meets Braid Hills Road. The driver and conductor were on their break in the adjacent shelter (a replacement version of which is still there to this day). But the vehicle’s mechanical brakes had not been fully set and, imperceptibly slowly at first, the car began to creep away down Comiston Road towards the City.

The driver and conductor gave chase as soon as they noticed but were already too late and were unable to catch it as it began to speed up. The cable which moved the tramcars when in service was attached to by means of a mechanical “gripper” and whizzed anything attached to it along at a rather sedate 9½ mph (to which it was limited by Board of Trade regulations). The downhill runaway quickly passed this limiting speed and quickly caught up with the car running in service ahead of it. Fortunately there were no passengers aboard. The conductress saw the approaching danger, called a warning to the driver, and sensibly jumped for it. The inevitable collision happened and the two cars became entangled together. Luckily neither derailed. Less fortunately the driver – who had heroically stayed at his post – found that the gripper which connected his car to the traction cable had become jammed; the conjoined wreckage was thus firmly attached to the cable and was being hauled inextricably towards busy Morningside at a slightly less than terrifying nine and a half miles per hour. The danger was still real however as this was where Comiston Road changed from rural to dense urban in nature and the driver now had no way to stop at any approaching junctions, for any other tram cars ahead of him or to slow for any obstructions such as pedestrians, cyclists, horses, children crossing or workmen carrying sheets of plate glass across his path like they did in the movies then.

At Belhaven Terrace, just one mile from where the runaway had started, there was a set of points manned by a pointsman for switching the cars which had terminated at Morningside Station between tracks. The driver managed to call out his predicament to the pointsman as he sailed helplessly past. The pointsman’s hut had a telephone connection to the winding house at Tollcross which was powering the cable and after a brief call the winding engine was stopped. This brought the runaway – and half of the tramway network in the south and west of the city which shared that cable – safely to a halt. It took time to untangle the damaged cars and extricate the gripper from the cable but within an hour and a quarter from the start of the incident the network was back up and running again as if nothing had ever happened. Sadly no further details were reported in the papers

Runaways tramcars were fortunately very rare, but not unheard of. In April 1890 a horse-drawn vehicle had ran away down Montrose Terrace in the east of the city. One of the animals fell but its panicked companion dragged it and the tramcar along the ground a further 1,000ft before coming to rest outside the Abbey Church. “The passengers, who were greatly alarmed, were not, however, injured”. The same cannot be said about the poor fallen horse, as “on examination it was found… [to] not likely be of any more use.” Sadly it was probably a one way ticket to Cox’s Glueworks in Gorgie for that victim.

On September 30th 1909 a cable tramcar was involved in a potentially much more deadly accident at Waterloo Place. The car approached the terminus from the direction of Abbeyhill to pick up passengers from a large crowd intending to travel to Musselburgh for the races, but failed to stop in the right place. The driver brought it to a halt further on at the top of Leith Street – outside the General Post Office – and got out to inspect why it had failed to stop in the correct place. The curious and frustrated crowd naturally gravitated towards the vehicle to see what the problem was and if they could board it.

Perhaps the driver prodded around underneath too hard, or perhaps an onlooker knocked something they ought not to have, but in an instant the car suddenly lurched back in the direction of Waterloo Place – and the thronging crowd – seemingly attached to the return cable by forces unknown. The vehicle ploughed through the crowd resulting in six people (including three police men) being injured. Again it was lucky that cable haulage did not work at faster speeds. But all was not yet over; “just at that moment a motor car.. appeared on the scene“. The motor became entangled in the front of the tramcar and was dragged along the road by it for thirty yards. The driver jumped clear, narrowly avoiding behind run over by another tramcar coming up Waterloo Place from Regent Road. And then, as soon as it started, the excitement was over: the tramcar released its unexpected grip on the traction cable and the tangle of public and private transportation ground to a halt.

Of the four hospitalised, three had been in the car; the driver Archibald Carmichael and his passengers John McArthy and James Paton, through for the day from Gourock and Port Glasgow for the races. The fourth was a pedestrian, Mrs Mathieson of Gayfield Square. This wasn’t the result of black magic or enchantment however as a simple explanation was soon found. As the tramcar had approached Regent Road it had to switch between traction cables by releasing one cable with the rear gripper and grabbing the other with the front gripper (each tramcar had a front and rear gripper to attach itself to the cables.) At it had moved across the junction where Montrose Terrace branched off London Road the gripper had damaged the cable running in the slot between the rails. This had cut into some of the wire strands which had came started to unravel, preventing the gripper from releasing properly when the driver tried to stop on reached Waterloo Place. The fraying cable meantime had run around the pulley and come back towards the now stationary tramcar from the opposite direction and when the tangle of loose strands passed through the released gripper they quickly became tangled in it and enough unravelling wire built up to suddenly start the car in motion again in the return direction.

It would prove to be a bad day for the Edinburgh & District Tramways Co. and there had already been an accident earlier that morning when at 11:40AM a car overshot a set of points and collided with the pawl near the Abbey Church between Abbeyhill and Meadowbank. This was an emergency stop device mounted in the traction cable slot beneath the road surface which, if it was hit by a tramcar gripper, detached it from the traction cable and brought the tram to a very instant stop. The pawl was a violent but important measure which prevent the gripper from entering and becoming entangled in the large underground pulleys around which the cable ran. The shock of hitting the pawl in this case was severe enough to snap the car’s front axle. But these were different and more efficient times; the tramway depot at Shrubhill simply sent out a gang with a complete new bogey, which they swapped out at the side of the road in Abbeyhill before getting the car quickly back in service.

The return to service lasted just 15 minutes following the accident before the network had to be stopped again! A tramcar going from the Bridges to Leith Street had collided with another motor car and once again the pair became entangled and took some time to clear. This was the third and final accident of the day.

An altogether more tragic runaway accident took place on Saturday 17th October 1925 when an electric tramcar proceeding down a single line section on Ardmillan Terrace ran away and jumped the points at the foot of the hill, crashing into St. Martin’s Episcopal Church. Young Edward Stirling, aged just 8, had been out to buy a toy train for his brother who was in hospital. He was killed instantly when struck by the tram and was buried in Saughton Cemetery on Wednesday 21st. The tram driver, 3 passengers and another pedestrian were hospitalised. The Corporation sent a wreath and his funeral was attended by Councillor Mancor, Convenor of the Tramway Committee and R. S. Pilcher, the general manager of Corporation Tramways. The Lord and Lady Provost sent a letter of sympathy. A subsequent Board of Trade enquiry found no fault with the tramway equipment or tramcar and did not apportion blame to the driver, who had tried to use the resistance brake to slow the tram followed by the hand brake. There was some popular discontent with the Tramways, a correspondent by the pen name of A. Mother wrote to the ‘News to complain about the speed of the electric trams – “too fast for either safety or comfort“- and to protest about plans to increase their speed even further.

The next runaway took place in spectacular fashion on Saturday June 1st 1929. Miraculously, nobody was injured when car No. 349, waiting at the Liberton terminus with no crew but four elderly passengers aboard ran off down Liberton Brae. Anyone who has ever tried to cycle up (and down) that road can attest just how severe the gradient quickly gets! As the crew availed themselves of the facilities in the terminus shelter they didn’t notice their vehicle slowly begin to roll off down the hill; they had not applied the mechanical hand brake and the pressure had leaked out of the air brake hose causing it to slowly release.

The four passengers (aged 59, 71, 71 and 84) were subjected to a terrifying half mile ride down the Brae before No. 349 came to the corner at Alnwickhill Road, jumped the tracks, slid across the road and pavement and impaled itself on a pole for the overhead wires before caming to rest in the garden of 42 Liberton Brae.

Quite how only one passenger suffered only light bruising and all four had walked away from this defies logic. Indeed the two 71 year olds who had been aboard, a married couple from Leith Walk, simply waited for the next car and carried on home as if nothing else had happened. The house at number 42 was similarly unscathed, although the same could not be said for its garden wall, gate and neat privet hedging.

As a result of this incident protective barriers were installed on the corner outside numbers 42 to 46 where they remain to this day; the dents in their metalwork show they still serve their intended purpose well.

Six years later, in 1935, an accident took place only a few hundred metres down the Brae at Braefoot Terrace. The current collection pole of a tramcar proceeding uphill became dislodged from the current wire and the vehicle lost power and ground quickly to a halt. The trailing SMT bus was following too closely to stop in time and swerved off the road to avoid a collision. Instead it demolished the shopfronts of a James Baxter’s butchers, Adam Smith’s chemist and the branch of the Commercial Bank of Scotland. There were fortunately no major injuries; the butcher’s boy had a lucky escape as he had just been sent outside to clean the windows only to find a thirty-two seater bus baring down on him. He was able to jump clear in the nick of time.

On 25th October 1945, 64 year old Brownlow Grigor of Leith, a Corporation tram driver with 30 years experience was fined £3 by the Burgh Court for “having driven a tram culpably and recklessly“. Grigor was in charge of car No. 42 and had not been paying sufficient attention as he was trying to stow away his thermos flask. He had approached the sharp bend where cars travelling between Morningside and Marchmont turned off Church Hill and onto Greenside Gardens too fast and the laws of physics did the rest. His vehicle jumped the tracks and demolished a 24-foot section of the wall of – coincidentally – number 42 Greenhill Gardens. The embarrassment was all the more severe as this house was St. Bennets, the official residence and private chapel of the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Edinburgh and St. Andrews! Grigor’s claim that it was defective rails that were at fault was not upheld.

Our last calamity took place in 1951 and it was the heroic figure of James Ferguson, a 53 year old worker from Portobello Power Station, who averted a real catastrophe. The busy tramcar he was on was hit by a lorry near Piershill which injured the driver and caused him to lose consciousness. Ferguson leapt to his feet, ran the length of the car, punched through the glass door to the driver’s compartment with his bare fist and let himself into the cab to disengage the power lever and apply the brakes. Ferguson was treated in hospital for cuts to his hands but was otherwise unscathed.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/26917130321/

Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.

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#LActu : "#Lyon. #LesÉcologistes démontent la #gratuité des #TCL voulue par #jeanmichelaulas"

"il faut maintenir la #tarificationSociale progressive déjà mise en place [avec] 532000 abonnés …pour 1,45M d’habitants. [dont] 96% ne paient pas le tarif plein… Pour faire plus de #métros, plus de #tramways, plus de #bus… il faut de l’argent …Celui qui gagne bien sa vie, qui habite en Presqu’île et qui a le meilleur réseau, il n’y a aucune raison de lui donner la gratuité. »"

https://actu.fr/auvergne-rhone-alpes/lyon_69123/lyon-les-ecologistes-demontent-la-gratuite-des-tcl-voulue-par-jean-michel-aulas-voici-pourquoi_63313056.html

The Irrepressible Mr Binko: the thread about the Engineer and Edinburgh’s first Electric Railway

My sources tell me it is was Electrification Friday and although I was saving a picture for another day it seems right to share it now. Behold! Mr Binko’s Electric Railway!

The passengers in the car are the Prince of Wales (future King Edward VII) and his wife Princess Alexandra, Princess of Wales. Regular viewers may recognise the backdrop as Donaldson’s Hospital.

It was the setting of the First International Forestry Exhibition of 1884 – held in a grand, wooden, temporary pavilion on the Hospital’s lawns – and that was the reason for Mr Binko bringing his railway to there. When the Royal Party toured the exhibition and rode his railway on 22nd August they became the first British Royals to be moved by electric power.

The carriage was named Alexandra after the Princess of Wales and was made locally by coachbuilders John Hislop & Son. The carriage was “richly upholstered in silk plush of the Royal scarlet, while the sides and roof were elegantly decorated. In the centre of the roof a brilliant prismatic lamp was placed, lit within by electricity… and by an ingenious arrangement a beautiful bouquet on the centre table was lighted up by miniature lamps on a button being pressed”. The only other time the carriage was officially used was for the visit of William Ewart Gladstone – four time Prime Minister – and a (grand) son of Leith. He is seen on the right in the car below.

Zooming in, we see some of the occupants seem more enthusiastic than others. Mr Binko is seen on the right of shot, he with dark hair and moustache infront of the carriage window and clutching his top hat.

In the background we can make out a showbill to do with Electricity. An experimental display of electric lights was also part of the Exhibition.

This was the first electric vehicle in Edinburgh and its inventor and promoter was the splendidly named Mr Binko. Henry Bock Binko was born in Vienna in 1836, becoming a naturalised British citizen in 1881. He brought to Edinburgh a modified version of an electric locomotive that he had exhibited in London in 1882. His experiments were a few years behind Werner von Siemens who had exhibited the worlds first practical electric railway in Berlin in 1879. In 1883, Magnus Volk opened the first electric railway to the public in Britain with his Volk’s Electric Railway on the sea front in Brighton (remarkably, it’s still going!). However, as far back as 1842 the Scottish inventor Robert Davidson had trialled an electrically powered locomotive using batteries on the Edinburgh to Glasgow Railway, his Galvani could unfortunately only propel itself at walking speed and could pull no useful load. The inability to recharge its batteries rendered it completely impractical.

Binko was described as a chemist, and seems to have been a serial inventor and patentee, intent on making his fortune by licensing out his contraptions to others. His Spectrograph achieved some success, and it was advertised for a reasonable sum as a money making scheme, the idea being people could get one and then duplicate photographs for sale by using it. Binko later fell out with the licensees.

The locomotive brought to Edinburgh was called Ohm and was a rebuild of the Volta that he had exhibited in London. “The line was eventually opened as a ½ mile circular route in the grounds, the charge being 3d (three pence) for the 2.5 minute journey.” 30,000 passengers were carried by the railway during its time at the exhibition. The Railway News reported;

It has been met with extensive public patronage, besides being honoured by a journey taken by the Prince and Princess of Wales and their family and subsequently by Mr and Mrs Gladstone. The length of the line laid down at Edinburgh is about double the length of that at the Crystal Palace and traverses the length of the exhibition building on the outside twice, besides making a wide sweep for turning.

Power came from a stationary 8hp Robey steam engine coupled to a dynamo which supplied DC electric power through the rails. Speed was changed by resistors built into the locomotive. The locomotive or “guiding car” weighed about 2 tons and that the whole train weighed 6 tons when loaded. It could pull up to 3 passenger cars, each with capacity for 10, and it was noted that each car had its own motor, so the train was what we would nowadays call a DC EMU or Direct Current Electric Multiple Unit.

All was not well for Binko and his railway however. Construction over-ran and it was not ready for the opening. When it finally got going on July 17th, technically it was a triumph but financially proved a disaster. Binko was unable to pay his creditors, having borrowed heavily to finance the scheme, and one of them seized his railway before it was even in operation. An arrangement was made with the creditor that he would lease it back off of them for £650 to work off the debt, payable over 13 weeks in instalments. However, even though he was making up to £20 a day (approximately £2,800 in 2022) off of ticket sales, he remained seriously in debt and the creditors lost patience. Well before the end of the exhibition they advertised the whole thing for sale – obviously they had decided that Binko could or would never pay them what he owed and storage costs would be too high. On 30th September the electric railway was cancelled and Binko locked out from using it any more.

On 10th October 1884, Binko was taken to court in London and bankrupted, still owing the creditor £100. Being in Edinburgh with his railway, he did not appear in person to defend himself. The court heard that now that the exhibition had ended, Binko did not have any way to recoup any more money from it to settle his debts, but had not provided any accounts of his income from it during the exhibition. The court adjourned to give him time to prepare the accounts and to appear in person.

But that wasn’t the end for Binko in Edinburgh. The reason he hadn’t come to London to face court was that somehow he managed to convince the Edinburgh Street Tramways Company to undertake an experiment in electric traction. He somehow managed to convince his creditors to allow him the use of the steam engine, dynamo and mechanical components from the Ohm. A few hundred yards of copper strip were laid between the horse tram rails between the exhibition at Donaldson’s Hospital and Haymarket Station, the moving parts from the Ohm were bodged into a horse tram of the Street Tramways Co. and the whole lot was hooked up to the dynamo and steam engine. On 11th October 1884, with 10 passengers on board, Mr Binko’s Electric Tram became the first electric tram to run in the British Isles when it haltingly made the short journey between Donaldson’s and Haymarket. Three journeys were made, the third (and final) hauling a second horse tramcar, and then no more was heard of Henry Bock Binko or his experiments in electrical traction.

For now.

But once again this was not the end of the irrepressible Mr Binko and his experiments in electrical traction. He resurfaced in 1886 in Great Yarmouth where he tried to start up a seaside railway, but ended up being tried for unlawfully obtaining credit while being an undeclared bankrupt – it having transpired that he was bankrupted in 1871. He was eventually acquitted, largely on the grounds of his reputation from the 1884 railway in Edinburgh being taken in evidence that his schemes were serious and practical and not just a swindle. He died in London in 1911, being recorded on censuses in the last 10 years of his life as being employed as an electrical engineer.

Electric railways returned to Edinburgh the same year at the 1886 International Exhibition of Industry, Science and Art held in the Meadows.

This scheme had nothing to do with Henry Binko and seems to have been something of a collaboration, directed by the energetic architect, builder and local politician Sir James Gowans, who was the organiser of the exhibition. The scheme is described as being a line 500 yards long, with electricity supplied to a central live rail by a 7 horsepower static steam engine. An electric locomotive hauled two tram cars sent by the Northern Metropolitan Tramway Company, a double decker with 20 inside and 26 outside upstairs and an open single decker with 25 seats. It could make 10 miles per hour. The steam engine was by Marshall & Co. of Gainsborough and the rails were made to Gowans’ own design (he had engineered Edinburgh’s first horse tramway some 15 years before), being supplied complimentary from a foundry in Barrow-in-Furness. The electric equipment was provided by King, Brown & Co. of Rosebank in Edinburgh. The fare was 2d and in the course of the exhibition it carried 80,000 passengers.

Despite all the engravings and photos taken at the exhibition, I have struggled to track down a good picture of the electric railway, but you can see a bit of it in the corner of the larger photo of the Exhibition pavilion. You can make out a sheeted vehicle, possibly the tram car, on the left behind the flag pole. The rails run parallel to the fence, off to the right.

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Explore Threadinburgh by map:

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.