Trolleybuses

More versatile than what came before, cleaner than what came next

- Delwyn Mallett

CONSIDER FOR A moment, as we are pressured into adopting zero-emissions vehicles and the ban on the sale of fossil-fuelled vehicles becomes imminent, that Britain, in public transport at least, was once the world's most electrified nation.

I grew up in West London suburbia, halfway between 'The Smoke' and Uxbridge, that point on the A4020 beyond which as a child I thought civilisation ended, and have to confess to being old enough to remember well the silent and stately progress of the much-missed trolleybuses that used to ply that route.

In the first half of the last century, trolleybuses gradually replaced electric trams as the prime way of moving people around many British cities. In retrospect it seems that then scrapping the emissions-free trolleybuses and replacing them with particulate-belching diesel buses was an error.

In 1807, the Welsh seaside town of Mumbles (from the French mamelles for breasts, due, apparently, to a brace of distinctive offshore features!) was the first in the world to get a passenger tram service.