My Belgian friend has reminded me that before pantographs replaced trolley poles in Brussels in the 1970s, that system also use swivel head poles.

What astonished me in 1975 was seeing trams reversing into a tram depot (actually the one which now houses the Museum), with the trolley pole sticking out the front and spearing through the depot fan into the allocated road.

This was achieved by having a shedman change the track points with a point bar as well as setting up the overhead frogs by means of a little lever attached to a wall or span pole.

The attached video clip shows it good enough.

Regards,

On 24 May 2018, at 5:09 pm, Mal Rowe mal.rowe@... mailto:mal.rowe@gmail.com> wrote:

On 22/05/2018 12:46 PM, Roger Greenwood wrote:
>

> A downside of swivel-head trolley poles was the necessity to employ switchable overhead frogs to guide the pole to the desired route. These were generally spring-loaded to favour the most-used route but for the lesser-used direction a pole-mounted lever was held by the conductor who had to make it back on board after his tram had cleared the frog.

>

The only place I have seen swivel heads in use on trams is in Hong Kong.

A couple of pics show, firstly, the swivel head approaching a switch and secondly, the metrhod of operation of the switch - via a bit of bike chain no doubt controlled by the same circuitry as the points in the tramway.

Mal Rowe - who reckons non-swivel heads work just fine for trams