Spotted the new #tramways on the line T1! As said in my previous post, the new rolling stock is 11 meters, which increases their capacity by 30%.
Will try and do more spotting to get cool pictures for this account, even though I'll have a ton of work to do in the next few weeks. My next goals are to take pictures of the new busses on the TB12 that opened on 28th February, and see the new portion of the line T6.

#publictransit #lyon #france

🇫🇷 Ce soir, quelques photos de la "Thüringer Waldbahn" un tramway vicinal qui relie Gotha-Hbf à Bad Tabarz et son antenne de Waltershausen-Bahnhof à Waltershausen-Gleisdreieck.

En septembre 2002, les tramways de fabrication tchèque Tatra étaient omniprésents aidés par quelques rames Duewag rachetées d'occasion à des réseaux ouest-allemands.

Bonne soirée! 👋 🙂

🇬🇧 Tonight, a few photos from the "Thüringer Waldbahn" a long distance tramway that joins Gotha-Hbf with Bad Tabarz and its branch from Waltershausen-Bahnhof to Waltershausen-Gleisdreieck.

In September 2002, the Czech-made Tatra Tramway vehicles operated the service helped by a a few Duewag véhicle bought second hand from West-German Networks.

Have a nice evening! 👋 🙂

#trams #strassenbahn #tramways #tram #railwayphotography #railways #trains

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/in/photolist-226kxHm-2nsTewY-2nTHjmS-2hfcDKE-2iU8A9N-2jDXFBt-2n4mPiw-2n5L7wp-2j2SqzQ-QWjur3-UCFFfN-D5VnNV-dZN3tD-2iriC1Q-2eqrcdo-JXr4pn-DmKy8a-awA1sk-nwjsJs-awACNn-SETEZM-86nFZc-XaX2By-n1khke-2gwCUbu-QMWmmF-SYsgsg-KR12f3-e8bKFa-DwCURs-H1zk4P-E5T5Gs-2oCJnjm

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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.

If you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site – including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget to find further stories to bring you – by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

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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.