The 40th anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin making the first Moon landing reminded me I’d completely overlooked another anniversary as close to my heart as that long ago great leap for mankind. Shamefully, it is not being celebrated and indeed has not even been mentioned anywhere except on this blog, belatedly, today .
I am speaking of the 60th anniversary of the opening of Wellington’s trolley bus system, which even I overlooked.
On June 20 1949, trolley buses began gliding through the city and along Oriental Parade then up the Carlton Gore Rd hill to Roseneath. Over the following 28 years, their wires were strung through the streets to Wadestown, Hataitai, Karori, Northland, Aro St, Miramar, Seatoun, Island Bay, Lyall Bay, Newtown Park and Kingston, the latter being the last expansion of the service, in 1987, when the Route 7 wires were extended from Mornington.
Wellington’s first trolley buses were painted silver and became known as the Silver Ghosts, on account of their quietness compared with diesel buses and with the clanking trams that most of the trolley bus routes replaced. The silver trolley pictured above is one of the ghosts from the early 1950s, now preserved by fanatical gunzels (transport enthusiasts) and stored at the Karori bus depot.
Shamefully, there will be no commemoration of what is one of the English speaking world’s longest lived trolley bus systems.
Absolutely nothing marked the June 20 anniversary.
The current owners of the trolleys, Infratil, had no interest and probably didn’t even know there was such an anniversary, despite the little-used trolleys being the main reason for the huge profits the company makes from its Go Wellington operation.
The gunzels who look after the Silver Ghost and other historic trolleys stored at Karori rejected my request earlier this year to stage an anniversary tour that day (there was such a tour on the 50th birthday in 1999, supported by the former owner, Stagecoach), saying they would commemorate it at Labour Weekend.
But last month, the powers that be who hate trolleybuses decided there will be no weekend trolley bus services. The gunzels have been told they will not be allowed to hold a trolley festival at Labour Weekend, or any weekend, as trolley buses have henceforth been forbidden to run at weekends, by decree of Greater Wellington Regional Council (which actually pays out $9 million a year in public money to have trolleys run seven days a week from dawn to midnight, but that’s a story you all know already, and GWRC does not like being reminded).
This is all shameful, as it was an anniversary worth celebrating. Few trolley bus systems in the English speaking world survived for 60 years. In many Anglo places, including all of Britain, all of Australia, all of the US and Canada (barring Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco, Dayton, Boston and Philadelphia, which still have them), and in Auckland, New Plymouth, Christchurch and Dunedin, trolley buses were just a footnote to transport history between the trams they replaced and the diesel buses that replaced the trolleys.
Some 340 cities in Europe, Asia and the Americas still operate trolley buses and they have returned to cities such as Rome that scrapped them many years ago. Currently, the world’s oldest trolley bus system is the one in Shanghai, where the first trolley rolled in 1914. The oldest system in North America is in Philadelphia, which started using trolley buses in 1923. The oldest system in western Europe is the large network of Lausanne in Switzerland, which opened in 1932. Britain’s last trolley buses ran in Bradford in 1972, though nearby Leeds looks set to be the first British city to reinstate them, as trolley buses are gaining a new popularity.
Despite the current costly purchase of some 60 new trolley buses for Wellington, this distinctive transport mode seems out of favour here, again. In 1964, the fleet reached its maximum of 119 vehicles, and though 88 new ones replaced the originals between 1981 and 1986, many of them (including 20 flash Ansaldo trolleys obtained in 1985) were scrapped after less than six years on the road, leaving about 60 of the original 68 familiar Volvos to soldier on from 1990, in a minor role in a network now dominated by diesel buses. Despite the purchase of new trolleys and the wiring of Taranaki St for trolleys in 1985 and the Kingston extension in 1987, several routes were closed, including the Northland line in 1972 and the original Roseneath and Wadestown routes in 1987.
There was a new trolley bus spring during the 1990s, when businessman Ross Martin became manager of the privatised system (bought by Stagecoach from the former owner, Wellington City Council). Ross was something of a gunzel himself. He seemed to have a boyish enthusiasm for trolley buses. During his tenure, night and weekend trolley services resumed after a 20-year absence and, in 2003 and 2005, he bought the three low-floor Designline prototypes, 301, 302 and 303, to demonstrate the abilities of modern trolley buses. I was on one of the demonstration rides provided for doubting regional councillors and he looked as happy as a pig in muck as he showed off the trolley’s features.
But though the new yellow three-axle Designline trolleys were eventually ordered as a result, they are rarely used, with most weeknight, all the weekend, and many of the weekday daytime trolley services being operated by diesel buses, many of them the oldest diesels in the fleet, just to give the fingers to passengers, and to the ratepayers and taxpayers who pay that $9 million a year for trolley buses that are hardly ever on the roads.
I put this lack of enthusiasm for trolleys down to the change of ownership in November 2005, when Stagecoach sold out to Infratil, which is happy to have the exclusive GWRC contracts for the wired routes, but finds it too much bother actually to run trolleys on them, especially as there are no penalties for running diesel buses on the wired routes, and many benefits to the company and its drivers for using diesels, the older the better.
Given Greater Wellington Regional Council’s lack of interest in requiring the use of trolley buses that its contract with Go Wellington legally demands, and given Go Wellington’s preference to run elderly, cheap diesel buses on the trolley routes, and given Wellington City Council’s sabotaging of the overhead wire maintenance contracts (used as the excuse not to run weekend trolleys) I very much doubt there will be a 70th anniversary of Wellington’s remarkable trolley buses.
But hey, as I say, predictions usually turn out to be wrong.