Friday 24th July – Monday 31st August (Open daily)
10am -5.30pm (last admissions 4pm)
10am – 4.30pm (last admissions 3pm)
Tuesday 1st September – Sunday 1st November (Closed Fridays except for 30th October)
10am -5.30pm (last admissions 4pm)
10am – 4.30pm (last admissions 3pm)
Saturday 14th March – Thursday 23rd July (Closed Fridays except for Derbyshire school holidays).
10am -5.30pm (last admissions 4pm)
10am – 4.30pm (last admissions 3pm)
This year marks the 150th anniversary of Bristol’s first horse-drawn tramway operations, provided by the newly formed Bristol Tramways Company Ltd. The event attracted huge crowds and the double deck tramcar, seating 16 inside and a similar number on the top deck, was described in glowing terms by the Bristol Mercury: “’The interior of the car is lofty, well-ventilated and very commodious…The cushions of the seats are stuffed with hair and covered with Utrecht velvet”.
The initial 2-mile single track tramway from Colston Street to Redland had been built two years earlier by Bristol Corporation. It had then lain dormant as the city’s hilly topography, with its punishing gradients, put off potential operators until a group of local entrepreneurs rose to the challenge. The venture quickly paid off and, after doubling the Redland line to cope with the demand, further extensions were added to the rapidly expanding network.
By 1887, the company – now operating as the Bristol Tramways and Carriage Company Limited – owned 20 miles of horse tramway with 103 trams and a sizeable stud of horses. Each car was pulled by two horses, and fifty additional trace horses were also required to assist with the multiple steeper gradients, some of them up to 1:12.
The cost of feeding, maintaining and continually restocking the motive power for the tramway literally ate into its profits and soon prompted a quest for alternative, more economical forms of traction. For a short period between 1880 and 1881, the company experimented with steam locomotives on the Redland route, converting four of the original horse trams to serve as trailers, but this was not a success.
The use of cable traction was also contemplated, but in the end the company opted for electrification and its first trams – powered by overhead electric traction – were introduced in October 1895.
The last horse tram ran on 21st December 1900, and the electric tramway was brought to a premature end by enemy bombing in 1941.
Remarkably, two Bristol horse tramcar bodies have survived, both dating back to the transitional era around 1895 when the Birkenhead company of Milnes was supplying similar looking three-windowed horse-drawn and also electric powered tramcars to Bristol at the same time. Some of the former were later converted into trailers for use with the newly introduced electric tramcars.
One of these ended up in the Bristol Industrial Museum (now known as M-shed) in 1962, having been withdrawn in 1899. It was subsequently used as a bus shelter, and later as a summer house in Almondsbury in Gloucestershire.
The second, also thought to have been an open-topped horse car from the same batch, ended up as a garden shed in Westbury-on-Trym. It was later moved to the Bristol Aerospace Museum at Filton, Bristol, where it has imaginatively been partially cosmetically restored.
With thanks to Museum volunteer Jim Dignan for producing this article.
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