Trams magic and two tram museums

What is it about the old fashioned tram that continues to excite so much interest?

They  came in all sorts of shapes and sizes, some pulled by horses and others powered by ugly cables which disfigured street scenes. By all accounts they were uncomfortable to travel in.

And yet they remain some of the most popular stories on the blog.

I suppose it is that they are so different from any form of public transport today.  Few will remember the trolley bus which was a cross between the old tram and a bus and always made me feel ill.  Nor do they have much in common with the modern Metro tram which for great chunks of the journey is like sitting in a train.

But looking at the tram opposite I think I can see some of the attraction.  They look old and are a link with a different time when they did things differently, and they have a style and a grace which mark them out.  This one is tall, narrow and to my mind quite elegant.  It is a tram I have shown before and I guess is what we think when the word tram is mentioned.

So instead here is a single deck “California” ready to depart for Belle Vue from West Point about 1905.

We are on Seymour Grove, and our trams is about to head down Upper Chorlton Road to Brooks Bar and on to  Hyde Road.

But I am at the limit of of my tram route knowledge, and there will be someone out there  who will correct me.

But back to the tram and the moment.  It looks to be a warm summer’s day with at least one person comfortable enough to be walking out with just a blouse on.  And like so many photographs of the period the presence of a photographer has drawn the curious and the passers by.  The tram driver and conductor pose for the picture, a man with a fashionable straw hat looks on and away in the distance a policeman and group of pedestrians stare back.  Only the young woman and the boy are oblivious to the event unfolding.  She is too busy with the child in her arms and the lad seems to be captivated by the tram.

Which is just about where we came in.

All there is left to say is that we do have our own transport museum http://www.gmts.co.uk/ on Boyle Street off Cheetham Hill Road.  And as a fitting close to the story we also have  The Manchester Transport Museum Society which has a collection of trams at Heaton Park http://www.heatonparktramway.org.uk/ It came into existence in the 1960s when a group of enthusiasts met to restore  a Manchester California tram car, number 765, which had been discovered on the moors above Huddersfield.

Pictures; from the Lloyd Collection