Swansea Improvements and Tramway Company - Tramcars

Tramcars

Some privately owned tramways, such as The Bristol Tramways & Carriage Co., lived under the specter of a possible compulsory take-over by the municipality (town or city Council). This deterred them from investing in their tramcars, such that when the Bristol system closed in 1945, it was essentially still running the original tramcars of 1895. Swansea Corporation did try to take over the horse tramway in a scheme that coupled building an electric tramway with electric lighting and refuse destruction but its Bill was refused by the Parliamentary Committee who considered it too speculative. The Corporation and Company could not agree on further expansion of the system until the Corporation achieved two Acts of Parliament to build four further lines. As the Corporation did not seek to run these themselves, this provided the SITC with sufficient security to invest in their tramcars and infrastructure.

The SITC built and re-built many of their tramcars, recycling the tram numbers as they did. This made for at least two tramcar incarnations per car number: the original single deck bogie cars (Nos.16-30) had their bodies scrapped where Nos.16-21 were rebuilt to a more robust single deck design on refurbished bogies from 1916 onwards. Nos 22-30, however, became new lowbridge double deck, four axle cars, so nothing like the previous holders of these numbers. Car No.35 was delivered as a batch of 11 cars originally destined for Leeds but sold to Swansea in 1899, arriving as single deck cars. An upstairs was added in 1900, balcony top covers in 1907/08 but 35 was then scrapped and replaced in 1933 as a new lowbridge double deck car, one of the last to be built. Other cars remained to the end with minor modifications: the four ex-Weston-super-Mare open-top double deck cars (Nos.46-49) first had balcony top-covers added in 1913 and then were totally enclosed upstairs in 1922.

New trams were also bought to supplement the ones built in-house, mostly 23 Brush single deck cars around 1906-21 and later 13 lowbridge double deck cars for the Morriston route from 1923-25. The variety and different incarnations of tramcars made for an interesting system for the enthusiast even if it did lack the prestige of the modern streamlined models being introduced in the 1930s by (mostly) larger cities such as Sheffield, Liverpool, Glasgow and Belfast.