Re: Brisbane newspaper tram clippings from 1963
  Tony Galloway

Really, the rot in NSW started after WW1. Unregulated buses were cherry picking the cream of the tram traffic and nearly every postwar tramway extension proposal was first delayed and then discarded. The flu pandemic and postwar recession meant the economy was weak and money, for various reasons was short. Reliable motor transport and increasing car ownership among the political and business classes made road transport look modern and versatile, like aviation, seen as the way of the future. This was also recognised by treasury bureaucrats as a way of shifting cost - and debt - from the state, as the provider of rail transport, including tramways, to businesses and individuals operating their own vehicles on state provided roads on payment of a registration fee.

And in the 20s the pirate buses were shiny and new, with padded seats and everything, while the trams were already labelled boneshakers, rattletraps etc, and once the bus had cleaned up enough of a paying load, comfortably seated, the trams could pack in the rest as the most remunerative traffic from the outer end of the route got a fast run to town. Hard for the mostly pre WW1 tram fleet, and wooden seated P class, to look flash alongside that, something that the tramways grudgingly recognised by running “first class” services to Randwick racetrack using P cars fitted with seat cushions. Trams were old, passé, rattly relics, while the future rolled smoothly on rubber tyres over paved roads.

That’s why none of the peri-urban steam tramways in Sydney were electrified, and only Newcastle partly electrified out of the regional steam tramways there and in Maitland and Broken Hill. Most of those steam operations ended in 1926, coincidentally when suburban electric trains started running in Sydney.

All through the 20s and 30s the emphasis was on the city railway, suburban rail electrification, road bridges and extensive road widening and paving rather than tramway expansion and improvement, and despite some brief periods of apparent reprieve the trajectory from around 1920 to the final demise in 1961 is pretty much downward, aided and abetted by a relentlessly hostile print media - with honourable exception of Ezra Norton’s Daily Mirror, and Packer’s Telegraph being the worst anti-tram shills - and an aggressive anti-tram, pro-motoring lobby in the National Roads and Motorists Association and the Motor Traders Association.

This Trolley Wire issue covers it well :

https://www.sydneytramwaymuseum.com.au/members.old/Trolley_Wire/132%20-%20Trolley%20Wire%20-%20Feb%201971.pdf

Tony


> On 22 Nov 2020, at 1:50 pm, Mal Rowe mal.rowe@...> wrote:

>

> According to the Daily Mirror in the war years, the rot set in early in Sydney.

>

> Here's an article from the Mirror quoted with obvious relish by the MMTB in their staff magazine.

>

> Mal Rowe - in a nation where inter city rivalry is alive and active

>

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