Yep, it’s as it should be. I always thought that particular accident made a better case for air or electrical braking than abandoning trailers..

A bogie cable trailer towed behind an L or W four-motor car would have been a handsome pairing, shame it never happened. A bit of creative trailer shunting at termini would have been entertaining street theatre.

Could have even led to louche, degenerate Sydney stuff, like loops. That sort of thing only happened in Respectable Melbourne at wicked sinful places of pleasure, like St Kilda and Caulfield race track, where the discombobulated didn’t know whether they were coming or going……...

Tony G

> On 10 Oct 2017, at 4:23 pm, Mal Rowemal.rowe@... [TramsDownUnder] TramsDownUnder@...> wrote:

>

>

> On 10/10/2017 3:09 PM, Tony Gallowayarg@... mailto:arg@aapt.net..au [TramsDownUnder] wrote:

>>

>> I suppose as a Sydney person I think there's something about a tram without a proper coupler that looks incomplete. Brisbane cars even more so than pre low floor Melbourne cars, and the Brisbane FM end design is a precursor to the modern smooth cabs with all protrusions faired over. I reckon that raked windshield cab design on the Y1s, with the big anticlimber bumper, begs for a big coupler under it if only for the aesthetics.

> Then this one's for you Tony ... (see attached pic).

>

> A very ordinary quality pic of my local shopping centre over 100 years back - complete with a coupler hanging out beneath the bumper of a 1906 Brill saloon car.

>

> Also visible in the pic is the overhead for the triangular junction that connected the Essendon tram line to Moonee Ponds railway station via Puckle St.

>

> Trailer operation in Melbourne ended abruptly when one of these hand braked saloon cars and trailer got away on the hill city bound from Essendon depot in 1923 with lots of serious injuries when it caught up with another tram and trailer at the bottom of the hill.

>

> Mal Rowe - who found the pic in a 1915 real estate brochure advertising farmlets in what is now Airport West

>

>

> <PuckleSt_c1915.jpg>