Tramway Museum Society of Victoria Incorporated

38 Piccadilly Crescent, Keysborough,  VIC  3173


Tramway Heritage Centre

330 Union Lane, Bylands, VIC  3762


Content copyright © Tramway Museum Society of Victoria Inc.  Reproduced with permission.

ABN 12 739 015 600  Victorian Registration A1864E

A while back I was given the map above of the MMTB system in 1934 by Ron Scholten. It was part of a booklet advertising tourist services – mostly on MMTB buses – in what are now the suburbs of Melbourne. The map shows the system about half way through the process of conversion from cable to electric operation. Flinders, Collins and Swanston Streets are converted, but not Bourke, Lonsdale or Elizabeth. In the expanded map of the inner city area, the single track electric connection that connected the electric lines at the Haymarket corner to the siding in Victoria St is clearly visible. That was the connection laid in 1927 to connect the Essendon lines to the rest of the system. With the job half done, there was a global financial crisis. So changes were needed to cut costs and to improve the type of trams to be brought into service.


The Background


In 1934, Australia was in the early stages of recovery from the Depression, but money was short. One immediate method of cutting costs had been to reduce all wages by 10% at the beginning of 1931. Another approach was to recycle as many parts as possible in building new rolling stock. More troubling was that some of the cable services were converted to bus operation.


The W2s The MMTB took over a very mixed collection of trams from the various Trusts and the NMET&L Company, plus a fleet of cable trams that all had to be replaced.


Their initial effort had been to build some of the trams that they could build most simply and quickly – the Q and R class straight sill cars like our 199. They were most unpopular and the Board rapidly moved on to the highly successful W – W1 – W2 design, building over 400 of these in the short period from 1923 to 1931.  Yappers in the early 1930s the MMTB realised that they needed a better design and initially built the four Y1 trams, introducing a wider body with front and centre entrances.


They were a modern design reflecting the “Peter Witt” design from the USA, but without the passenger flow principles of that design.


Two of these had the first No 9 trucks – a hornless design with leaf springs as used in automotive applications. They also had large diameter wheels requiring a complicated frame to get reasonable step heights. We have car number 612. The Y1s were very expensive to build with these complicated frames. The Union hated them because they were designed for the option of one-man operation. After the first four were built, the rest were cancelled. It’s likely that the partially-built frames from some of the cancelled order were used to build X2 single truck tramcars.


Our No. 680 is an example. Fiddling with tram design – and doing it on the cheap. The board still needed an improved design and started with a bigger W2 – the W3. Narrow-bodied like a W2 but with larger Y1-like wheels and slightly different  versions of the no 9 leaf spring trucks. Simpler in design than the Y1, the W3 step heights were very high and only 16 were built. To cut costs, wheels from withdrawn single truck cars were used on the W3s. (Destination City suggests that they came from Melbourne Brunswick and Coburg Tramways Trust S and T cars, but that’s unlikely as the S and T trams were scrapped later.) Perhaps they were from the old Trust cars – and especially the original P&MTT cars, withdrawn in the early 1930s. It’s interesting to note that the cycle is now complete with old No9 trucks ex scrapped W3 cars very much in demand for 33” wheel and axle sets to build replica trucks for museum trams. Car 667 is our example of a W3.


Next try was the W4 Same mechanical design as a W3, same narrow body frame, but with a body wider than the frame to allow cross seats in the saloons and a reasonable passageway between the seats. The height problem was solved by placing the seats in the saloon over the wheels so that the wheels could be above floor level. It's what our Combino and Citadis designs do now … and how cable grip cars gave Melbourne its lowest-floored tram ever. We have no. 673. W5: false start, then success A new design was under development. The first attempt was an example of compromised engineering design based on shortage of money. The MMTB built the CW5 design – a wide body tram that looked much the same as the W cars in service today, but sitting on recycled two motor maximum traction trucks from scrapped trams from the Municipal Trusts. They were underpowered and were shifted from one location  to another, finally ending up on the Moonee Ponds to Footscray route – haven for odd trams for many years! It’s worth noting that had this design not failed, the maximum traction cars would not have been available for sale to the SEC Provincial Tramways and we would probably have had

none in preservation.


There’s little doubt that MMTB engineers would have been appalled at this compromise CW5 tram. Their failure allowed the MMTB finally to build what was probably their best design aside from the Y1. The W5 trams had a better version of the No 9 truck – the No 15. It was basically the same design as the No 9 but with 28” wheels and had the same power of 4 x 40HP (4 x 30KW). This design was the stable tramcar design for the next 20 years – from the W5s that started appearing in 1935 to the W7s of the mid 1950s. Changes were made to controllers and sliding doors became standard, but the body design was unaltered for that whole period. There were 120 W5s built, and the five CW5s were eventually converted to W5. The SW5, SW6, W6 and W7 account for another 200 trams, giving a total of 325 trams of this design. A big change in body design did not come until the mid-1970s: the Z tram, with a body layout not a lot different to the 1930 Y1 trams, but much improved electrics!


A Watershed Year So we have seen that 1934 was a transition year – at the halfway mark in the conversion of the cable system to electric operation a significant new design of tram was in process. After some false starts Melbourne ended up with what is arguably its most successful design and the design that is now simply known as the “W tram”.

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