It also had to do with the Forrest City signalling being an up and down direction running wire so the system could identify which direction a tram was travelling by the wire it was using. The SEC had some very complex frog arrangements in places where the double wire branched and it worked extremely well.

Greg

-----Original Message-----
From: 'Richard Youl' via TramsDownUnder [mailto:tramsdownunder@googlegroups..com]
Sent: Tuesday, June 18, 2019 10:06 AM
To:tramsdownunder@...
Subject: Re: [TramsDownUnder] Re: Bendigo in 1968, Birney

Besides avoiding the potential unreliability of frogs in the overhead, the second wire would have been relied upon also as a power feeder cable. I could be wrong but suspect that there was only 500 volts in the overhead anyway, so it would be a bit weak at the outer ends of lines. I think that he depot had the only substation.

Regards,

On 18 Jun 2019, at 10:00 am, Ronald Besdansky shrdlu.junction@...> wrote:

How much more copper was suspended in the provincial tramways by having double trolley wire over the single-track sections - would sprung frogs at the loops etc have been cheaper?