The electric tramways of Australia and New Zealand were as diverse as the railways, with influences from Europe and America, and much local development. But most were abandoned before I got to them, and even then, I was saving my precious film for steam locomotives. So I have no pictures of Sydney trams, although I traveled on the last remaining line, or the Brisbane system, which was a fixture during most of my visits. That’s a pity, as Brisbane had some memorable trams, and even more memorable Conductors, in their French Foreign Legion hats. But I rode Melbourne’s huge fleet of W class trams many times a week (and still see them frequently), and it never occurred to me that even in Melbourne, things would one day change. What attention I afforded trams was limited to the uncommon, especially the Victorian provincial cities of Ballarat and Bendigo, which were refuges for some delightful ex-Melbourne single truckers and maximum traction bogie cars. These were so rare that photographs were definitely warranted! The sole remaining tram in Adelaide was Australia’s only Interurban, running for most of its length on the old South Terrace Railway, so it warranted some film also.
By the end of the decade, as steam was getting hard to find, I made an effort to photograph the few “uncommon” trams still to be found, and soon after that caught the last of the prop-liners and flying boats, but that is another story. So as an addendum to Sixties Steam in Australasia, these are the trams that briefly caught my attention by the way.
Examples of almost every class of tram ever run in Australia have been preserved, especially in Victoria, which has no less than five operational tram museums, with over one hundred cars, most of them operational.
To save space in the captions, I have used the following acronyms: Hawthorn Tramway Trust (HTT), and Prahran & Malvern Tramway Trust (P&MTT), which with some others were the precursors of the Melbourne & Metropolitan Tramways Board (M&MTB). Ex-Melbourne cars were sold to the State Electricity Commission of Victoria (SECV), which from 1930 took over the provincial tramways in Geelong, Ballarat and Bendigo. Adelaide was a great tram building city in the early years. Its tramway was the Municipal Tramway Trust (MTT).
|
