Re: Trolley wheels/carbon skids on Melb trams

[Dave McL <davemcl@REMOVEiprolink.co.nz>]

Les Brown wrote:

> When I was about 10 years old, we lived above a Milk Bar in Waverley
> Road, East Malvern. A favourite pastime was watching the trams go past
> on a Saturday morning from a bedroom window that fronted the road. It
> was around 1961-1962 when I noticed the change from trolley wheels to
> carbon skids, the height of the window made this observation very
> easy. It did not take very long for the change to occur - probably no
> more than six months. It was also around this time that the Sunday 3D
> tram service was "busified".

When was it changed back to trams, Les? I noted on my last visit to
Melbourne that all three bustified Sunday lines (East Malver, West
Maribyrnong and Footscray-Moonee Ponds) were using trams again after all
those years. I presume the change back came about with the driver-only
trams Kennett brought in after he was elected? Or was it before, after
the Great Tram Strike?

Re wheels and skids, I noticed on my many visits to Brisbane as a kid
that the trams there had wheels right to the end, even the eight new
ones built in 1963-64. It gave them a distinctive swishing sound as they
rolled along, quite different to the sound Melbourne's trams with their
skids made. Interestingly, Brisbane's trolley buses used skids.

Someone told me recently that the trams on Philadelphia's subway-surface
lines still use wheels. They are one of the few systems left in the
world still using poles, the others being, IIRC, the F-Market line in
San Francisco, New Orleans, Toronto, Naples, Lisbon, Calcutta, Riga and
maybe one or two other places (apart from the Ws in Melbourne). Most
systems have long ago changed to pans. St Etienne in France changed to
pans last year, the last French system to do so.

David McLoughlin
Auckland New Zealand