Reading's Lost Tramways скачать в хорошем качестве

Reading's Lost Tramways

Yes I know it's a week late sorry 0:00 Growth of the Tramways 0:33 Decline of the Tramways 1:19 What remains today? 1:39 Pole talk 2:11 Mill Lane/Oracle Plaque 2:20 Will the Tramways make a comeback? 3:06 Outro Transcript: In 1878 Reading decided that they needed horse trams, and by May of 1879 they had a tram line from Oxford Road to Cemetery Junction. In 1901, the council bought the private company that had owned and run the horse-trams and by 1903, electric trams were running on the tracks. The new company built a new north-south Whitley to Caversham route, a Castle Hill branch, an extension to Wokingham Road and an Erleigh Road branch. There were plans to extend it over Caversham Bridge, but the First World War prevented this, and any future extensions, from happening. Of course, Reading doesn’t have any trams of any sort at all now. What happened to the once extensive network of electric trams, and what remains of the system today? Its decline began in 1919, after the First World War had ended. The trams and the tracks were in poor condition, and in 1920 the tramways made a loss, for the first time since it opened. In 1930 the Castle Hill line was abandoned because it was so short that walking was more convenient for a lot of its riders. The tram line also couldn’t compete with the new buses, which could serve the new suburbs further out in the east of Reading. By 1932, the Erleigh Road branch was in bad enough condition that the tram line was shut down and replaced with buses. In 1936, the Caversham to Whitley route was replaced by trolleybuses and the last tram ran in May of 1939. The final line was replaced by trolleybuses. So… what’s left of them today? It’s pretty difficult to find any traces of the network today. This is the western terminus of the main line on Oxford Road today, and there’s no evidence that trams ever ran here. This is the eastern terminus of the main line on Wokingham Road today, and there’s nothing here either. This is the intersection between Broad Street and Oxford Road today, and here it is in 1903. The pattern on the poles match up so it looks like these street lights were actually former tram poles! There are quite a lot on Broad Street, which makes sense as trams ran down Broad Street. But if you look at pictures of Broad Street from the 60s, before the street was pedestrianised, there are no tram poles to be seen, so these are either fake and were put in look nice or to pay homage to the trams, or they could be the actual tram poles that were put into storage when they were removed before being put back in. The only real evidence is this plaque on Mill Lane, where the Tramway’s Power Station used to be before it was demolished in 1998 to make way for the Oracle shopping centre. Will the tramways ever make a comeback? The answer is probably yes. In recent years, trams have become trendy again. Cities across the UK have been rebuilding their tram networks, and there’s a decent chance that Reading could become one of them. In some of Reading Borough Council’s overly unwieldy documents they say that the bus lanes and traffic light priority on the A33 “have the potential to become a tram system”. Here they say that the bus lanes were designed in such a way that you could put trams or even light rail on them. This is the most ambitious or maybe far-fetched one I’ve seen so far. These solid grey lines are supposed to be “new or future rail infrastructure”, which could be trams, and it seems to propose multiple lines akin to the original tramways network. I hope you enjoyed this video, if you watched this far then you might as well like and subscribe. I have a bunch of other videos that I’ve got planned, so I’ll see you all in a few weeks. bye :)