Gateshead 10
Wearing typical maroon and cream and with its British Electric Traction company magnet and wheel crest Gateshead & District Tramways 10 is about to pull away from the photographer. Notably among the myriad adverts it carries it one for a car dealer: a besetting sin of public transport is advertising the opposition.
This tram was to return to work at Dunston as an attraction at the 1990 Gateshead Garden Festival but given its long wheelbase it was felt it would not cope with the restrictions of the pointwork on the NGF1990 track. As a result at Gateshead we operated a former Newcastle Corporation double-deck tram, a London United ‘Feltham’ tram that had worked for Sunderland Corporation which wore an overall advertising livery for British Steel (remember them?) and a rather shorter Blackpool Corporation single decker…
A rear-entrance front exit plan made for good passenger flow but also meant that passengers would get off right in the middle of the road. Gateshead used the layout on its single deckers until its closure in 1952 when it was the penultimate BET tramway system, the single deck cars then being sold on to British Railways who had inherited the Grimsby and Immingham Interurban tramway, this one then passed to the National Tramway Museum, Crich, when the G&I was closed. This was just after BET’s South Wales Transport had replaced the Swansea and Mumbles Railway’s 106-seat Brush double-deck cars, normally worked as two-car multiple units, with 70 seat MCW Orion AEC Regent Vs.
Ron Doig Image © Glasgow Vintage Vehicle Trust.
Gateshead 10
Wearing typical maroon and cream and with its British Electric Traction company magnet and wheel crest Gateshead & District Tramways 10 is about to pull away from the photographer. Notably among the myriad adverts it carries it one for a car dealer: a besetting sin of public transport is advertising the opposition.
This tram was to return to work at Dunston as an attraction at the 1990 Gateshead Garden Festival but given its long wheelbase it was felt it would not cope with the restrictions of the pointwork on the NGF1990 track. As a result at Gateshead we operated a former Newcastle Corporation double-deck tram, a London United ‘Feltham’ tram that had worked for Sunderland Corporation which wore an overall advertising livery for British Steel (remember them?) and a rather shorter Blackpool Corporation single decker…
A rear-entrance front exit plan made for good passenger flow but also meant that passengers would get off right in the middle of the road. Gateshead used the layout on its single deckers until its closure in 1952 when it was the penultimate BET tramway system, the single deck cars then being sold on to British Railways who had inherited the Grimsby and Immingham Interurban tramway, this one then passed to the National Tramway Museum, Crich, when the G&I was closed. This was just after BET’s South Wales Transport had replaced the Swansea and Mumbles Railway’s 106-seat Brush double-deck cars, normally worked as two-car multiple units, with 70 seat MCW Orion AEC Regent Vs.
Ron Doig Image © Glasgow Vintage Vehicle Trust.