Lockwood Stephen - A-Z of British Trolleybuses

AZ OF BRITISH
TROLLEYBUSES

This 1956 view shows 1930 vintage Guy BTX trolleybus of South Lancashire Transport being overtaken by a St Helens Corporation 1951 built Sunbeam F4. (Roy Brook, Travel Lens Photographic)

Bradford no. 521, the worlds first covered-top, double-deck trackless, undergoes a rather precarious tilt test in 1920.

AZ OF BRITISH
TROLLEYBUSES

STEPHEN LOCKWOOD

THE CROWOOD PRESS

First published in 2017 by

The Crowood Press Ltd

Ramsbury, Marlborough

Wiltshire SN8 2HR

www.crowood.com

This e-book first published in 2017

Stephen Lockwood 2017

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 78500 2892

CONTENTS

AUTHORS NOTE

During the past twenty years or so there has been a plethora of books published about British trolleybuses. All except one of these have been based on a particular trolleybus system, or a review of all fifty or so trolleybus systems in the United Kingdom. In 1996, a fellow Huddersfield native, Geoff Lumb, published a work on trolleybus chassis, but since then there has not been a comprehensive written account of trolleybus chassis makers.

The layout of the book is as follows:

gives a background to the British trolleybus and how it developed.

is an AZ list of chassis manufacturers, each entry giving a potted history of the company, details of the trolleybus types it sold, and a table showing production figures. The photographs in this section concentrate on chassis views, prototypes and demonstration vehicles.

is another AZ list of chassis manufacturers, giving details of where each manufacturers product operated, together with chassis numbers, fleet numbers and other data. The photographs here are of trolleybus types in the fleets that ran them, and consist of official views taken by a manufacturer or operator, and less formal views of the vehicles in the streets.

There were many places in the London area where trolleybuses provided an intensive service. Four Leyland LTB70 vehicles (London Transport type F1) in Uxbridge Road. (D.A. Thompson)

The intention is to provide a readable book that is not too technical and to be enjoyed by all those impressed by the British trolleybus.

Readers should be aware that this work is about trolleybuses that operated in Britain; any home-built chassis for operators abroad are not included, although they are sometimes referred to where relevant.

Therefore this is a record of trolleybuses that operated in Britain between 1909 and 1972 (with a brief resurgence in the 1980s).

SOURCES

The source of material is largely from my own large collection of trolleybus-related books, photographs and archive material, which has been amassed over the past fifty-six years. Sources consulted can be summarized as follows:

Books

The Electric Trolleybus, R.A. Bishop, 1931

Early Development of the Railless Electric Trolleybus, A.S. Crosley, 1960

Londons Trolleybuses, a Fleet History, The PSV Circle and The Omnibus Society, 1962

Keighley Corporation Transport, J.S. King, 1964

Glasgow Trolleybuses, B.T. Deans, 1966

Trolleybus Classics, a series of thirty-three pictorial studies published by Middleton Press from the 1990s to the present.

Reading Trolleybuses, D. Hall, 1991

Bradford Corporation Trolleybuses, J.S. King, 1994

Kingston upon Hull Trolleybuses, M. Wells, 1996

Leeds Transport vol. 2, J. Soper, 1996

The London Trolleybus Vol. 1 and 2, K. Blacker, 2002/2004

Garrett Wagons-Electrics and Motors, R.A. Whitehead, 1996

Bournemouth Trolleybuses, D. Bowler, 2001

AEC Vehicles: Origins to 1929, B. Thackray 2004

Nottingham Trolleybuses, D. Bowler, 2006

Halifax Passenger Transport, G. Hilditch, 2006

The Manchester Trolleybus, C. Heaps and Mike Eyre, 2008

Trackless to Trolleybus, S. Lockwood, 2011

The AEC Story from the Regent to the Monarch, B. Thackray, 2012

Portsmouth Trolleybuses, D. Bowler, 2014

Pontypridd Trolleybuses, D. Bowler, 2014

PSV Circle chassis histories, Karrier/Guy/Sunbeam and Ransomes/Garrett

PSV Circle fleet histories various editions referring to trolleybus operators

Periodicals

Buses Illustrated/Buses

Tramway Review (Historical tramway journal)

Trolleybus (Journal of the British Trolleybus Society)

Trolleybus Magazine (Journal of the National Trolleybus Association)

Trade catalogues relevant to most trolleybus manufacturers.

Other

Commercial Motor magazine archive website.

PEOPLE

Philip Jenkinson and Hugh Taylor read through my text and made useful comments accordingly.

Roger Smith has produced the maps to his usual high standard.

Robin Hannay, formally of Guy Motors, answered some queries about trolleybus production in the 1950s, and made available several items on loan. Paul Fox contributed some material on early AEC trolleybus chassis, and also data on Rotherhams early trackless fleet. My thanks go to all these gentlemen.

The photographs are credited at the end of each caption. Those not credited are from my own collection, whose provenance has not been possible to establish. Any information on the origin of these images would be welcome.

Photographic assistance has come from David Bowler, David Bielby, Ashley Bruce, Dave Hall, Ipswich Transport Museum, Roger Monk, Hugh Taylor, Paul Watson and Francis Whitehead.

Paul Harman of Maple Leaf Images, Skipton, scanned most of the photographs. Please note that Roy Marshalls images are now held by The Omnibus Society.

Thanks go to all.

Any errors and omissions in this work are entirely my responsibility.

Lastly, thanks go to my wife Eileen, who gamely waded through all the tables and statistics, checking each addition as well as checking the overall text.

INTRODUCTION

Trolleybuses ran in Britain for seventy-one years. During that time, 6,000 examples were constructed, ranging from small tram-like single-deckers (trackless trams or railless), to full size sixty- to seventy-seat trolleybuses with four or six wheels.

This type of vehicle is often described as a cross between a tram and a bus. In fact, for the first fifteen years it was very much derived from a tram (most having tram-type hand controllers), but afterwards it developed into a trolleybus, adopting the size and styling of contemporary motorbuses. By the outbreak of war in 1939, there were 3,000 on the road.

Of the twenty-four British trolleybus chassis manufacturers, the earliest were relatively small companies that dealt with trackless products only, and the very earliest, Railless Ltd, did not even have the capacity to build its own products, having to contract out this function. By the late 1920s the large motorbus manufacturers began to design trolleybus chassis, and often these small companies ceased production. After 1930, when London began its operation, the trolleybus became a mainstream transport provider.