Railway & Transport Club

We meet at 7:45 pm on the 3^rd Tuesday of each month, except August.  Contact: John Soer.

The Club has over 40 members and enables men and women of all ages to share their common interest.

We meet in the Bradbury Community Centre of the Methodist Church, in Rose Street, where members enjoy a wide range of good quality presentations on transport related subjects, with the opportunity for refreshments and time for a chat.

Currently meetings are being held via Zoom:

On 20^th April we were treated to a most interesting talk by Graham Bilbe on ‘Trams and Trolleybuses I Have Known’.  Graham began by looking at the history of London Trolleybus No. 1812 which entered service with London Transport in 1952.  In 1961 it was shipped to Spain to form part of the trolleybus fleet in Santander where it ran until 1977 when it was returned to England.  Graham was involved with its restoration to running order.

Then came visits to a number of transport museums in this country including the trolleybus museum at Sandtoft near Doncaster where Reading trolleybus 113 is to be seen, Beamish Museum, the East Anglia Transport Museum at Carlton Colville where a London tram showing route 38 caught the Chairman’s eye, and the Tramway Museum at Crich in Derbyshire.

We then sent off on a tour of the world.  To describe all that we saw would take many pages, so it will have to be sufficient to say that among the places we visited were San Francisco, New Zealand, Australia where the tramway system in Melbourne is one of the largest, if not the largest, in the world, Hong Kong, Prague where fifteen new tram routes are being introduced, the coastal line in Belgium, and Portugal.

Graham showed slides of museums, old trams in public service, horse trams and modern sleek designs.

Those watching showed by their comments how much they had enjoyed a most enjoyable presentation.  Again, our thanks to David Morgan for hosting the meeting; it is much appreciated.

John Soer

Despite Covid-19 we did manage to hold five meetings in 2020 – January, February, and the last three months of the year.  Special thanks are due to David Morgan for hosting the last three of these on Zoom.  These did provide a small outlet for those finding the lockdowns difficult.  Despite the small number of meetings, we were able to raise £100 for the Railway Children Charity.   

John Soer