Kilmarnock Corporation Tramway: 100 Years Since Closure

Monday 3rd May 1926 marked the beginning of Britain’s first ever General Strike, which resulted in three million workers downing tools in support of miners who had been locked out of work by their coal-mining bosses for refusing to accept lower pay and longer hours.

One group of workers who joined the strike were the employees of Kilmarnock Corporation Tramway. This action hastened the premature closure of the first municipally owned electric tramway in Scotland, after just over 21 years of operation.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the small town of Kilmarnock was chiefly famous for building steam locomotives, with other industries including whisky and carpet making. It was also home to Dick, Kerr & Co., manufacturers of railway and tramway equipment and tramcars.

In 1898 its enterprising town council decided to build an electric power station to augment the gas undertaking that it also operated. This prompted the London-based British Electric Traction Company to offer to build and run a tramway in the town with the council receiving one-third of the annual revenue from the undertaking. This was rejected by the council, however, which preferred to add a municipally run tramway to its existing business portfolio. This was perhaps spurred on by the apparent success of a similar undertaking in the neighbouring county town of Ayr, but possibly also in pursuit of local prestige.

This course of action was vigorously opposed by a majority of the town’s ratepayers in a local poll, but the council pressed ahead regardless, even in the face of doubts about its financial viability in the feasibility study that it had commissioned.

The 4.25-mile standard-gauge tramway was formally opened on 10th December 1904 and was initially serviced by a fleet of 11 four-wheel, open-topped, unvestibuled three-window tramcars. These were built by Motherwell-based Hurst, Nelson & Co. to a conventional design favoured by most small British operators at the time. They were turned out in a lined-out green and cream livery featuring the Burgh coat-of-arms and the words “Corporation Tramways” on each side.

The initial response to the new “skoosh” cars, as they were called by the locals, was so favourable that another three trams were ordered from the same suppliers, in preference to the local firm of Dick, Kerr. However, the latter’s nearby Britannia works supplied and installed the track and point-work that accounted for just over half (£22,784) of the £40,800 projected cost of the completed tramway. Two of the new cars (Nos. 13 and 214) were top covered.

The first year’s takings recorded a profit of £2,343 on a turnover of £8,543, but after taking account of interest and loan-repayments this left a more modest surplus of £86, and even this turned out to be a one-off achievement.

One problem stemmed from Kilmarnock’s relatively small size and compact layout, which meant that neither of the two main routes was more than 2¼ miles in length. As the topography was mainly flat, walking was often more convenient – at least in decent weather – as well as being cheaper. Another problem was subsidence caused by old mine workings, which resulted in frequent track repairs. This was later aggravated by war-time neglect and ageing infrastructure. So, even though the tramway hit a record number of 3.1 million passengers in 1919, it was also facing an accumulating deficit that eventually reached £50,000, which was clearly unsustainable.

By January 1926, the Tramways Committee had already agreed that the remaining part of the system should also be abandoned after an earlier section had been closed in 1923. Even so, the tramway’s demise came sooner than expected when the walk-out by tramway employees at the start of the General Strike provided the council with an opportunity to bring its closure forward by deciding not to restart operations after the strike was over.

This was not quite the end of the line for Kilmarnock’s involvement in tramway history. In 1927-8, the Kilmarnock Engineering Company (successor company to the Dick, Kerr’s Britannia Works) manufactured fifty sets of maximum traction trucks for Glasgow Corporation Transport’s latest class of tramcars (nos. 1091-1140), known to enthusiasts as “Kilmarnock Bogies”. Other trucks were made for Liverpool trams in the 1920’s but the firm went into receivership in 1933.

Two of the Glasgow Kilmarnock bogie tramcars – nos. 1100 and 1115 – survived into preservation and now form part of the National Tramway Museum collection at Crich.

With thanks to Museum Volunteer Jim Dignan for producing this article.

Image references:
Images 1, 2, 4: Future Museum South West Scotland website: https://www.futuremuseum.co.uk/collections
Image 3: Tramway & Railway World, vol. 18, 10th August 1905.
Image 5: National Tramway Museum collection.
Image 6: Jim Dignan