Wikipedia Deep Dive

Trams in London

14 min read

For nearly half a century, London had no trams at all. The last one rumbled into New Cross Depot in the early hours of July 6, 1952, greeted by crowds who had come to witness the end of an era. The city that had built the largest tram network in Europe simply let it die, replacing it with diesel buses that officials promised would be "eminently flexible and much cheaper."

The replacement was, by most measures, a failure. No general improvement in traffic flow was seen after the trams disappeared.

Forty-eight years later, in May 2000, trams returned to London's streets. The new system numbered its first vehicle 2530, deliberately picking up where the old network left off with tram number 2529. It was a quiet acknowledgment that perhaps the city had made a mistake.

The American Who Started It All

London's tram story begins with an American entrepreneur named George Francis Train, who in March 1861 launched a horse-drawn tramway between Marble Arch and Notting Hill Gate. A month later, he added a route along Victoria Street in Westminster. The service was immediately popular with passengers, but it had a fatal flaw: the rails stood proud of the road surface, creating obstacles for carriages, carts, and anything else trying to share the street.

The backlash was swift. Train was arrested in 1861 for "breaking and injuring" the Uxbridge Road. His plans came to an abrupt halt.

It took nearly a decade for Parliament to sort out the mess. The Tramways Act of 1870 finally permitted tram services, but with strict conditions. Rails had to be recessed into the carriageway so other vehicles could pass over them. The tramways would be shared space, not dedicated corridors. And crucially, the tram companies would bear the costs of maintaining not just their tracks but the road surface around them.

This last provision seemed like a gift to ratepayers, who had been footing the bill for highway repairs ever since the old turnpike system was abolished. In reality, it planted a poison seed that would eventually strangle London's tram network.

The Golden Age of Horse Power

The new tram companies made a smart decision early on: they all adopted the same standard gauge, with dreams of eventually linking their services into a unified network. Horse trams soon spread across London, typically using two horses to pull cars that could carry sixty passengers.

Why were they so popular? The trams were cheaper than the competing omnibuses and hackney carriages. They were smoother, too—steel wheels on steel rails created far less jolting than wooden wheels on cobblestones. The cars were roomier. And they were safer, running on fixed tracks rather than weaving through traffic at a driver's whim.

Fares were set by law at one penny per mile, with half-price services for workers traveling early in the morning or late at night. For the working poor, this was transformative. Suddenly, living outside the crowded inner city became possible.

The Search for Something Better Than Horses

Horses were expensive to feed, house, and replace. Entrepreneurs immediately began searching for alternatives.

In 1873, John Grantham tested an experimental steam tramcar in London—a 23-foot monster that performed so poorly he withdrew it almost immediately. The North London Tramways Company had more persistence, operating 25 steam engines from 1885 until the company went bankrupt in 1891. Steam trams worked in some cities, but London's streets proved inhospitable. The tracks couldn't handle the weight. The engines accelerated too slowly for stop-and-go urban service. The noise was intolerable. The power was inadequate.

Between 1881 and 1883, someone tried compressed air trams on the Caledonian Road. This experiment has been largely forgotten, probably because it didn't work.

Cable trams showed more promise. In 1884, London installed the first cable tramway in Europe on Highgate Hill. A second line followed on Brixton Hill, hauling cars up the steep grade to Streatham. But cable systems were mechanically complex and expensive to maintain. Both would be replaced within fifteen years by the technology that would ultimately win: electricity.

The Electric Revolution

The electric tram took decades to establish itself in London. After the storage battery was invented, someone tested an electric tram between Acton and Kew in 1883, but the technology wasn't ready for prime time.

It wasn't until 1901 that Croydon Corporation—then separate from London—introduced the first fully operational electric tram services in the greater London area. These trams drew power from overhead wires, a system that would become standard across most of the world. Meanwhile, the London United Tramways Company renovated the worn-out horse tram network in West London, extending it from Shepherd's Bush to Acton, Ealing, Chiswick, and Uxbridge, with ornate power stations built to supply electricity.

The London County Council, which operated the largest tram network, used a different system called conduit current collection. Instead of overhead wires, power came from an electrified rail buried beneath the street surface. The conduit system was more expensive to build but had one crucial advantage: no overhead wires cluttered the streetscape. This mattered enormously in a city obsessed with appearances.

The result was a patchwork. Many London trams had to be equipped with both systems, switching between conduit and overhead power at designated change points. The overhead wires themselves were made of copper, weighing half a pound per foot—valuable enough that they would eventually be sold as scrap when the system was dismantled.

Tunnels Underground

London almost got an underground tram line between South Kensington and the Albert Hall. The plan was withdrawn in 1891, and instead the city built a pedestrian-only tunnel called the South Kensington subway, which still exists today.

The Kingsway tramway subway actually was built, starting construction in 1902. It ran from Theobalds Road to the Victoria Embankment, allowing trams to travel between north and south London without fighting through surface traffic. In the 1930s, the arched tunnels were enlarged to accommodate double-decker trams.

This tunnel enabled the longest tram route entirely within the County of London: a weekend service from Archway (then part of Highgate) all the way to Downham via Brockley—sixteen miles of continuous tram travel. The last tram through the Kingsway subway ran on the night of April 5-6, 1952, just three months before the entire system shut down.

The Electric Boom

Once electric trams caught on, they caught on fast. By 1903, London had 300 electric tramcars. Over the Whitsun weekend that year—a public holiday—they carried 800,000 passengers.

The London County Council saw trams as tools of social reform, not just transportation. Cheap, fast service could encourage workers to leave the overcrowded inner city and live healthier lives in the suburbs. The LCC sold 3.3 million tickets in just its third year of operation—five times the traffic its horse trams had carried.

Other boroughs rushed to build their own electric systems: West Ham, Leyton, Dartford, Bexley. By 1914, London's tram operators had assembled the largest tram network in Europe.

But two areas remained tram-free: the City of London (the ancient financial district) and the West End (the wealthy shopping and theater district). These powerful jurisdictions simply refused to give permission for tram lines. Trams were allowed to use the Victoria Embankment and cross the Thames over Westminster and Blackfriars Bridges, but they could never penetrate the commercial heart of the metropolis.

This wasn't snobbery—or rather, it wasn't only snobbery. The terms of the 1870 Act meant that new tramways had to be negotiated individually with each local authority, which could impose prohibitively expensive improvement works as a condition of approval. The City and the West End simply priced the trams out.

The War Changes Everything

World War One halted the expansion of London's trams. Thousands of male conductors left to join the armed forces. Their replacements were women, called "conductorettes" in the patronizing language of the era.

Women were only allowed to work as conductors, never as drivers. The official reasons sound absurd today: driving a tram was deemed a "reserved occupation" because women supposedly lacked the physical capability to operate the heavy electrical controller or the brakes. There was also the exposure problem—tram drivers sat in an open position at the front of the car. The Metropolitan Police had banned windscreens, believing they were dangerous, so drivers faced the weather unprotected.

Why were windscreens considered dangerous? The police worried that glass windscreens would shatter in accidents, injuring drivers. It was a reasonable concern for 1914 safety glass technology, but it meant drivers spent their shifts exposed to rain, wind, and freezing temperatures. This was considered too harsh for women.

The Slow Decline

After the war, money for investment and maintenance became harder to find. Passengers began migrating to a new competitor: the motor bus. Buses didn't require expensive tracks or power systems. They could go anywhere there was a road. They could adapt to changing neighborhoods and traffic patterns.

In the 1930s, some operators tried to modernize. The London United and Metropolitan Electric companies purchased a fleet of modern double-deck Feltham trams, named after the Union Construction Company factory in Feltham where they were built. These were sleek, comfortable vehicles that could have been the basis for a renewed system.

Instead, London United began replacing some tram routes with trolleybuses—electric buses that drew power from overhead wires but ran on rubber tires instead of rails. Trolleybuses were cheaper to operate than trams: no tracks to maintain, no paving obligations under the 1870 Act.

Meanwhile, Parliamentary bills in 1930 and 1933 created the London Passenger Transport Board to consolidate all of London's buses, underground railways, and tramways under single management. This might have been an opportunity to rationalize and modernize the tram network. Instead, the LPTB invested in everything except trams.

The merged tram services were held back from new, quieter, more comfortable track and vehicles. Money went to trolleybuses and tube extensions under the New Works Programme. The trams still returned gross annual revenues of £850,000 (equivalent to about £68 million today), but most of the surplus went to repay the £18 million debt from the merger.

The Political Dimension

South London, which was poorly served by Underground trains, relied heavily on trams. The maintenance of tram services became a hot political issue in local elections. But the political power lay elsewhere.

Lord Ashfield, chairman of the London Passenger Transport Board, was a constant opponent of trams. Alexander Valentine, one of five full-time members of the London Transport Executive, saw trams as a major cause of road congestion. He believed buses would relieve the problem while offering the aesthetic benefit of eliminating overhead wires and their noisy operation.

Starting around 1935, London began systematically replacing trams with buses or trolleybuses. By this point, a large proportion of the trams, tracks, and equipment were nearing the end of their useful life. The conversion program continued until June 1940, when the war stopped it, leaving only the South London routes and the services through the Kingsway subway.

The Final Years

After World War Two, shortages of steel and electrical machinery were cited as reasons for not investing in maintenance. The London County Council reported that the tram service ran at a loss. On November 15, 1946, the London Passenger Transport Board announced that all remaining trams would be replaced by diesel buses.

The nationalization of electricity suppliers in 1948 removed a hidden subsidy: those tram operators who owned their local power company had enjoyed cheap electricity. Now everyone paid the same rates.

A report in The Economist in 1952 laid out the reasons for the tram's demise:

The 1870 Tramways Act placed a crippling financial burden on operators for road maintenance, even though they weren't responsible for all the wear on the roads they shared with other vehicles.
London's streets were too narrow, unlike those in continental cities that had been rebuilt with trams in mind.
New housing developments had been built too far from tram routes.
Authorities were prejudiced against trams, viewing them as old-fashioned obstructions.

The capital cost of replacing worn-out infrastructure and vehicles was compared unfavorably to the £9 million cost of simply buying buses. Buses had slightly smaller capacity, but they didn't require tracks.

"Operation Tramaway" was announced in July 1950. Retirement started that October. On July 6, 1952, in the early morning hours, London's last first-generation trams made their final runs to a rousing reception at New Cross Depot.

The Verdict

No general improvement in traffic flow was seen after the trams were withdrawn.

This single sentence from the historical record is devastating. The entire justification for eliminating the tram network—that it caused congestion, that buses would be more flexible—turned out to be wrong. Cars simply filled whatever space the trams had vacated.

Nearly 100 of the most modern Feltham trams, dating from 1931, were sold to Leeds, where they continued in service until 1959. Some London tramcars were preserved at the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden and at the National Tramway Museum in Crich, Derbyshire. A working London tram can still be ridden at the East Anglia Transport Museum in Carlton Colville near Lowestoft.

The Return

Croydon, the borough that had operated the first electric trams in Greater London back in 1901, never quite gave up on the idea.

In spring 1950, even as London was announcing the elimination of its tram network, Croydon's Highways Committee received a proposal from the Mayor to run trams between East Croydon station and a new housing estate being built at New Addington. The proposal noted an irony: the modern Feltham cars being withdrawn from London were heading to Leeds specifically to serve new housing estates on reserved tracks. Why couldn't Croydon do the same?

In 1962, a private study showed how easily the West Croydon to Wimbledon rail line could be converted to tram operation. These concepts merged into a vision: New Addington to Wimbledon every fifteen minutes via East and West Croydon and Mitcham, plus additional routes to Tattenham Corner via Sutton.

During the 1970s, British Rail directors and managers became aware of the advantages. Peter Parker knew about the concept even before becoming chairman. Chris Green, upon becoming managing director of Network South East, published plans in 1987 that expanded the concept further.

The scheme was accepted in principle by Croydon Council in February 1990. Working with London Regional Transport, the council proposed Tramlink to Parliament. The Croydon Tramlink Act of 1994 gave legal power to build and run the system.

Tramlink opened on May 11, 2000, with 38 kilometers of track serving South London on three routes. The trams are modern articulated vehicles made by Bombardier, based on a German design used in Cologne. They feature low floors that match low platforms, making the system fully accessible. Much of the track is dedicated tramway, though some sections share space with cars—including some of the same roads that the previous generation of trams had served.

The first vehicle was numbered 2530.

The Lesson of the Streets

The story of London's trams is, in many ways, a story about streets themselves. The 1870 Tramways Act, designed to protect road users from the disruption of elevated rails, ended up crippling the tram companies with maintenance costs for roads they didn't control. The refusal of the City and the West End to permit tram lines created gaps in the network that buses could fill. The narrow streets that worked for horse-drawn traffic proved difficult for modern transit systems of any kind.

Continental cities—Amsterdam, Prague, Vienna—kept their trams and expanded them. These cities had wider streets, often the result of deliberate 19th-century planning. They had less fragmented local governance. Their tram companies weren't burdened with the peculiar British obligation to maintain roads for their competitors.

London made a different choice. For forty-eight years, the city that had built Europe's largest tram network had no trams at all. The diesel buses that replaced them contributed their own noise and pollution to streets that were never less congested.

Now the trams are back, at least in South London. The Croydon system, modest as it is, carries passengers on reserved tracks that no bus could use, connecting neighborhoods that the Underground never reached. The vehicles are quieter and more comfortable than anything that ran in 1952.

Whether London will ever build a proper tram network—connecting boroughs across the city, not just serving one corner of South London—remains an open question. The old obstacles remain: narrow streets, fragmented governance, competing transport modes, the sheer expense of laying track in a built-up metropolis.

But the next time someone tells you that trams are outdated, that buses are more flexible, that fixed-rail transit can't work in a modern city, remember that London tried that experiment. It ran for half a century.

No general improvement in traffic flow was seen.