Early Trams

 The Let’s Get Wellington Moving website features ”a History of Wellington Transport planning”,  This seems to imply LGWM does not want the public to think too hard about Wellington planners discarding Trams 60 years ago. Instead, their document makes it seem that transport planning began only “from the 1960s”.

In truth, that was when  transport planners finally rejected Trams! Knowledge of history can protect us from reliving its mistakes.

A deeper dive into Papers Past (Papers Past (natlib.govt.nz) ) as well as Google, probably only scratched the surface. Yet it still revealed 60 years of problems arising from Wellington’s hilly nature, narrow streets with trams sharing with cars (fewer in those days).

Most important was the difficulty stopping a heavy tram in emergency and particularly in wet weather. That has not significantly changed. Most inconvenient to LGWM is that in those days they were more plainly called “TRAMS” rather than  employing the euphemism  “Light Rail”...  Here is a photo carousel of trams from Wellington’s past.

[hover mouse over photo’s side, & click, to reverse or advance]

 

Most of these pictures had sparse accompanying text from which to discern injuries (except when fatal). Only two stories are well-covered on the Internet. -

  1. An inquest into one fatal tram accident in Brooklyn (1907) was attributable to rainy weather and a steep slope;
  2. One of the TWO fatal crashes in Mt Victoria in 1920), - though clearly initiated by the driver’s sudden collapse - was then complicated by the steep terrain and came close to disaster, almost careering down Pirie St..

CAUSES: The front-end damage in some photos implies a head-on vehicle collision. Cause of capsize is less clearcut, and might be from collision or cornering too fast (as clearly happened from the 1920 driver incapacitation and the 1907 Brooklyn hill crash.