About the collection - History and highlights

There are more than 80 road and rail vehicles in the Museum's collection. They span over 200 years of London's public transport history, from a sedan chair made in about 1780 to an experimental hydrogen fuel cell bus built in 2001. The collection has been built up since the 1920s and includes buses, trams, trolleybuses, taxis and underground railway rolling stock. It is one of the most comprehensive collections of urban transport vehicles in the world.

Photos and further information on the vehicles will be added to this website in 2008.

There are 25 vehicles in the new London Transport Museum displays at Covent Garden. The rest of the collection is normally kept at the Museum Depot at Acton Town and can be seen there on Depot Open Weekends and Tours. Some vehicles may be on loan to other museums or stored elsewhere while under restoration or repair.

Four vehicles highlighted, each with a set of detail images:

Metropolitan Railway A class steam locomotive, 1866

The Museum's oldest railway engine is the only surviving locomotive from the world's first underground railway. When the Metropolitan Railway opened on 10 January 1863 it used trains provided by the Great Western Railway. The two companies quickly fell out and the Met ordered its own locomotives and carriages the following year. The first 18 engines were delivered in 1864 from the workshops of Beyer, Peacock & Co. of Gorton, Manchester.

Sixty-six of these powerful tank engines were supplied and used on all Metropolitan and District Railway services. They were specially adapted for use underground by having condensing apparatus. This consisted of a long pipe along each side of the boiler which took exhaust steam from the cylinders for condensing in large tanks of cold water. In practice this did not reduce emissions very effectively. Both stations and tunnels had a permanent sulphurous atmosphere.

No.23 was built in 1866 for passenger trains. After electrification of the sub-surface lines in 1905 it was used on goods trains and on the Brill branch in rural Buckinghamshire. It was finally withdrawn in 1948 and restored to its 1903 condition for the Underground centenary celebrations in 1963.

Stephenson horse tram, 1884

Two horses can pull a much heavier passenger vehicle over smooth metal tracks than they can manage on a rough road surface. The first street railway with horse drawn trams opened in New York in the 1830s. Tramways were not established in London until 1870, when three companies opened routes along main roads to the suburbs. Each tram was twice the size and capacity of a horse bus. Operators were able to offer much cheaper fares than the buses and still make a profit. For the first time working class Londoners could afford to ride rather than walk.

The Museum's horse tram, South London Tramways (SLT) no. 284, was originally ordered and imported from the United States in 1884. It was constructed by the long established New York tram builder John Stephenson & Co. and used on the SLT's Waterloo to Greenwich services.

The tram would have been sold off around 1905 when services were electrified by the London County Council. No.284 was discovered nearly seventy years later on a farm in Kent being used as a hen house. It was fully restored by the Museum in the early 1990s.

B-type motor bus, 1911

The B-type was London's first reliable, mass-produced motor bus. It was designed in 1910 by Frank Searle, Chief Engineer of the London General Omnibus Company (LGOC). Searle cheerfully admitted that he had 'cribbed shamelessly' and created a bus incorporating the best features of all the other types around. His B-type was the bus equivalent of Henry Ford's Model T automobile. Nearly 3000 engines and chassis units were turned out at the LGOC's Walthamstow factory at the rate of 20 per week. Hand built 34-seat wooden bodies were fitted at the LGOC's three coachworks.

B340 was built in 1911, the year the LGOC replaced the last of its horse buses with the successful new motors. It entered service from New Row (Victoria) garage. Many B-types were used as troop transport on the Western Front during the First World War (1914-18), but B340 was used on Home Defence work. It became one of the first buses to be preserved by the LGOC when it was taken out of regular service in 1925. In 2006 B340 successfully completed the London to Brighton historic commercial vehicle run, its first return to the road in fifty years.

Leyland K2 class trolleybus, 1939

London once had the world's largest trolleybus fleet. Electric trolleybuses were first introduced in 1931 at a time when trams had fallen out of favour. Trams were seen as inflexible and were becoming expensive to modernise. Trolleybuses could use the same electrical distribution system as the trams, but needed twin overhead wiring for the current return. Unlike trams they could be steered like a motor bus round obstructions or into the kerb to pick up passengers. The track was no longer needed, so maintenance costs were reduced considerably.

A full tram to trolleybus conversion programme began in 1935. By 1940, when work was suspended because of the war, 70% of London's huge tram system had gone. No. 1253 is typical of the standard 70-seat trolleybuses built for London Transport in the 1930s. It ran from 1939 to 1961 on routes in north London from Hackney depot.

By the 1950s trolleybus running costs were about the same as diesel buses, and London Transport decided to standardise on buses only for its road services. A brand new bus design, the Routemaster, was used to replace London's trolleybus fleet between 1959 and 1962.