10 ‘green’ vehicles at our Depot
Introduction
We are all increasingly aware of the importance of the environment and wide-ranging issues around pollution, emissions, climate change and sustainability. This is closely connected to public transport, which aims to encourage people to use communal and sustainable ways of getting around.
Over the last 200 years, London’s public transport has evolved in ways that have impacted the environment. Read more about the changes to transport in our Steam to Green story.
Here we highlight ten vehicles that visitors can see at the Museum Depot with some kind of ‘green’ story to tell. They date from 1896 to the present day and reflect the technology and knowledge available at the time.
While some ultimately were polluting, in encouraging people to travel together efficiently and affordably, they were often greener than the private alternatives.
1. Feltham tram
London’s first tram service, powered by horses and running on rails along the streets, opened in 1870. By the early twentieth century, the network was extensive and was powered by electricity, through overhead cables or a conduit underneath. This Feltham tram, built in 1931 as the last tram design of that period, could carry 64 passengers. However, the electricity that powered trams came via fossil fuel-fired power stations.
Even so, they were an environmentally friendly mode of transport with large capacity, which hugely reduced the vast resources that horse power relied upon. The downside to trams was that they were fairly expensive to maintain. Ultimately it was issues around cost and logistics that led to their replacement in the 1950s. Today, other than in a small part of south London in the Croydon area, trams no longer run on London’s streets.
2. Q1 trolleybus
From the 1930s until the 1960s, London’s streets were also served by trolleybuses. These were powered by overhead electrical cables but ran on tyres, meaning they produced no emissions and could drive to the kerbside, reducing accidents.
This Q1 trolleybus was a later model designed after the Second World War to update the fleet and replace vehicles that had been damaged during air raids. It could carry 70 passengers, so represented a very practical form of mass public transit.
Like trams, the electrical network needed to run trolleybuses was expensive to maintain. In the tough economic situation of the post-war years, a need to cut costs dominated the decision to move towards a standardised bus fleet. The environmental value of trolleybuses was not fully realised at the time.
3. Fordson tractor
While this tractor, despite its paint colour, is not ‘green’ in that it is powered by a petrol engine, it was used by London Transport (LT) for manoeuvring trams. It is one of thirteen industrial tractors bought by LT between 1925 and 1937 and adapted for use as shunters. This example moved trams at the Central Repair Works in Charlton, the facility where all heavy maintenance work on LT trams was carried out. It therefore provided valuable support to one of London’s greener forms of mass transport.
4. Tower Wagon
Like the Fordson tractor, this unusual petrol-engine vehicle was a vital part of the support of the electric-powered tram and trolleybus network. The cab and body of the tower wagon could accommodate LT crews and equipment, with the telescopic tower enabling the crew to work on the overhead electrical wires.
It was partly the cost of this kind of maintenance that contributed to the end of the tram and trolleybus network. Trolleybuses were withdrawn from service in 1962, after which this vehicle was repurposed as a breakdown lorry. It was restored as a tower wagon by the Museum in the 1980s.
5. Routemaster RM1
The most iconic London bus is the Routemaster and RM1 is the first prototype Routemaster ever produced in 1954. The new bus was economical to run and easy to maintain, specifically designed to have interchangeable parts.
The Routemaster was also diesel-powered. As part of a wider drive by LT to standardise its bus fleet for efficiency, this new generation of buses effectively led to the end of the tram and trolleybus network in London. While this meant the removal of overhead electrical cabling and rails from London’s streets, it also resulted in a more polluting fleet of vehicles.
If LT had possessed the weight of research on emissions we have now in the 1950s, perhaps a different decision would have been made. Though it is important to remember that LT was also competing with the rise in private car ownership – a fleet of economical buses was greener than thousands upon thousands of cars.
6. B type motorbus
The B type was the first mass-produced motorbus in the world. In the years before the First World War, it completely transformed public road transport in London. Such was its impact that all horse buses – such as the ‘garden seat’ horse bus next to this B type – and many other types of early motorbus had been replaced by B types by August 1914.
The B type was powered by a 30-horsepower petrol engine. Its new dominance of London’s streets coincided with the rise of motoring generally, and a subsequent increase of fuel emissions through the twentieth century. However, in late Victorian London, horse-drawn public transport resulted in 1,000 tonnes of manure on the streets every day!
7. Tilling Stevens petrol-electric bus
While petrol-engine motorbuses quickly came to dominate London’s road transport in the early twentieth century, it was a time of experimentation with sources of power. Today we are increasingly becoming used to hybrid and electric buses, but as early as 1906 a company called London Electrobus ran battery-electric bus services for a short period.
This Tilling Stevens petrol-electric bus, without its double-deck body, was the second generation of a system first devised by Percy Frost Smith of the Thomas Tilling bus company and engineer W A Stevens in 1908. It combined a petrol engine connected to a generator with an electric motor driving the wheels - the first ‘hybrid’ bus. There was no clutch or gearbox, which made it quieter. As the petrol engine was not directly connected to the road wheels, it was subject to less stress and was more reliable. Acceleration was smooth and noise and vibration were reduced. However, it still ultimately used fossil fuel.
8. 1972 Tube stock car
When the very first portion of the Underground was opened in 1863, the technology of the time dictated that it used steam-powered trains. But from 1890 onwards, the Underground increasingly moved towards electric traction.
Such was the London transport system’s need for electricity that it even had its own power station at Lots Road in Chelsea. This opened in 1905 and finally closed in 2002, with the Tube since supplied by the National Grid. While electric power creates no emissions, Lots Road was powered by fossil fuels.
This 1972 stock Underground driving car was in service between 1972 and 1999. Trains of this kind operated on the Northern, Bakerloo, Jubilee and Victoria lines. It is a sustainable vehicle in that it was one of a generation of Underground trains, first developed in the 1950s, that was made of aluminium alloy left unpainted as it was resistant to corrosion, and lighter than steel, making them more efficient. Some components were recycled from earlier models and upcycled again for subsequent ones – a common theme with London Underground’s trains.
9. Raleigh bicycle
This Raleigh bicycle was manufactured at a time when cycling in London was at the height of its popularity.
Cycling first took off following the development of the ‘safety bicycle’ in the 1880s. The essential elements of the safety bicycle – two equal-sized wheels and chain-driven gear trains – have remained fundamentally the same ever since and are evident in this Raleigh bike.
Over the first half of the twentieth century, cycling represented a practical and affordable means of getting around London that was also extremely green. However, the increased availability of more affordable motor cars from the 1950s onwards led to many of the challenges we still face today, in terms of air quality, road safety and congestion.
Since 2000, Transport for London (TfL) has contributed to a resurgence in cycling, with the Cycle Hire scheme introduced in 2010 and the creation of cycleways. The introduction and expansion of the Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) has aimed to discourage motor vehicle use.
10. Metropolitan Railway milk van
Today there is an increasing awareness of sustainability in our everyday lives, from how we travel to what we eat and drink. For example, recent years have seen a revival in milk deliveries in reusable glass bottles.
While sustainability was not necessarily a hot topic in 1896, this vehicle demonstrates how sustainable methods could sometimes go hand in hand with London’s transport. This attractive train car was designed to deliver churns of milk from the dairy farms of Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire to central London. Milk vans were attached to fast passenger trains, making use of journeys already being made. Special suspension stopped the milk from churning into butter and louvres in the wooden body kept it cool. The teak exterior even matched the appearance of the passenger carriages.
These vehicles were used on the Metropolitan for forty years, but like many other kinds of rolling stock it was re-purposed and had a second life as a tool van in breakdown trains until 1960.
