Monday, November 22, 2010

what's a Lisbon tram doing here?


The passengers in this scene in Birkenhead, England, seem surprised. Even more puzzling may be that the tram track gauge here is standard 1435 mm, while the Lisbon, Portugal, tram track gauge is 900 mm.

That destination of Bangor in Wales seems a reasonable way off for an urban bus too. A picture from the transport-illustrated.blogspot.com site.

1 comment:

Rob McCaffery said...

Hi, I just found this link to my blog. To explain the presence of the Lisbon tram in the UK when both Lisbon and Oporto rationalised their tram systems it released a large amount of British equipment dating from the early 20th century.

Suddenly there was a huge source of vintage equipment and several complete cars were imported to the UK, mainly to provide trucks and electrical equipment for heritage projects.

The Wirral Transport Museum in Birkenhead acquired this Lisbon car and rather than scavenge it for spares re-gauged it and put it into service on their heritage tramway.

In 2012 they're expecting to run an Oporto car on loan from Beamish Museum in the north east to make a Portuguese double!

There are more details here:

http://www.mtps.co.uk/