Trams and Buses

About This Group

Please do not supply photos that do not fit into this catagory. We will accept cable cars but no chair lifts or ski lifts. They must be either a tram or bus that transports (or used to transport) people from one place to another.

PLEASE ONLY TWO ENTRIES PER DAY

The very FIRST Tram
The very first tram (streetcar) was the on the Swansea and Mumbles Railway in south Wales, UK; it was horse drawn at first, later by steam power and then electric. The Mumbles Railway Act was passed by the British Parliament in 1804, and the first passenger railway (which acted like streetcars did in the US some 30 years later) started operating in 1807.

A bit of a HISTORY of trams in Melbourne Australia
Electric trams operated between Box Hill and Doncaster in the late 1800s, but this service was abandoned. From 1906 electric trams were here to stay.
The Victorian Railways operated an electric tram service from St Kilda to Brighton from May 1906 until February 1959.
The private North Melbourne Electric Tramway and Lighting Company opened in October 1906. Part of this system remains as the backbone of Yarra Trams Route 59 Airport West-City.

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The very First BUS (Public Transport)
While there are indications of experiments with public transport in Paris as early as 1662, the first public transport system for general use apparently originated in Nantes, France in 1826. Stanislas Baudry, a retired army officer who had built public baths using the surplus heat from his flour mill on the city’s edge, set up a short route between the center of town and his baths.

A bit of HISTORY of Buses in Melbourne
Ventura was founded in 1924 by a war veteran named Harry Cornwall. Cornwall had been an employee of Track & Kintrack, an operator based in St Kilda, but decided to form his own bus company when his employer refused to let him run a bus service along dirt roads through what was then Melbourne’s outer east. Cornwall began operating a bus route between Box Hill and the city, and later running buses along dirt tracks between Box Hill and Mentone, which roughly equates to the modern 700 bus route. Its first depot was the petrol station on the corner of Station Street and Canterbury Road, in Box Hill South.
1925 saw the introduction of the first tramways buses, by the Melbourne and Metropolitan Tramways Board (MMTB). Their first bus routes ran down Swanston Street from La Trobe Street, and along Glen Huntly Road to Elsternwick Station.

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