January 1886: Blackpool’s electric trams

Trams used to be a feature of pretty much every British city, transporting the populace around via tracks embedded in the road and forming a spiderweb of cables over the streets. Dying out in the 1960s, they are now starting to make a comeback with new networks in cities such as Sheffield and Croydon (although it’s advisable not to mention them to anyone from Edinburgh — the chaos caused by the Scottish capital’s delayed tranway project is a continual sore point).

The first electric tram system in Britain was in the country’s most archetypal seaside resort, Blackpool, and it survived as the country’s only tramway through the 1960s and up to today. The Engineer was there at the very beginning, commenting that development of electric locomotion had been slow to catch on in Britain, compared with Germany and Austria, and speculating that this may have been owing to delays in installing electric lighting systems in British cities (municipal infrastructure beset with delays — just goes to show there’s nothing new under the streetlights).