On Sunday morning we left Buxton, but instead of driving straight home went south by the Via Gellia to Crich. I've visited the National Tramway Museum a few times and like it a lot - the way the place is run, quality of the trams on exhibition, chatting to the volunteer motormen and conductors.One could go on, enough to say a totally re-built London car and a standard hex-dash Glasgow car were in service.
It seems so obvious why everyone fell out with these things. They're like the contents of an iron monger's shop lumbering along the highway. They are cold and uncomfortable. But of course there is an answer and that was the Presidents' Conference Committee single deck car from the USA in the 1930s. British tramways did not take it up, but just streamlined their cars a bit and held-fast to the ridiculous double-deck layout . The PCC is now accepted to be the basis of all the engineering and aesthetic design improvements for the rest of the last century and right up to the present day, as the fine cars of Sheffield and Manchester testify.
A Glasgow 'Cunarder' below trying to look streamlined but to my mind no more comfortable than the standard cars it didn't actually replace.
The moquette is a bit of an improvement. That re-upholstery on the London car which Chris is sitting on below was woven in Ireland. She is a wonderful and very long-suffering woman.
Chris wanted a record of this London car, despite its lack of provenance, because in this guise it appears to one that she could have taken when she was a kid! South London from the Old Kent Road to Woolwich might not have had much track, but this tram appears from its destination blind and route board to be going there!
It seems so obvious why everyone fell out with these things. They're like the contents of an iron monger's shop lumbering along the highway. They are cold and uncomfortable. But of course there is an answer and that was the Presidents' Conference Committee single deck car from the USA in the 1930s. British tramways did not take it up, but just streamlined their cars a bit and held-fast to the ridiculous double-deck layout . The PCC is now accepted to be the basis of all the engineering and aesthetic design improvements for the rest of the last century and right up to the present day, as the fine cars of Sheffield and Manchester testify.
A Glasgow 'Cunarder' below trying to look streamlined but to my mind no more comfortable than the standard cars it didn't actually replace.
The moquette is a bit of an improvement. That re-upholstery on the London car which Chris is sitting on below was woven in Ireland. She is a wonderful and very long-suffering woman.
Chris wanted a record of this London car, despite its lack of provenance, because in this guise it appears to one that she could have taken when she was a kid! South London from the Old Kent Road to Woolwich might not have had much track, but this tram appears from its destination blind and route board to be going there!
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