Trams in the Black Country – the first time around
WITH all the talk of the Metro expanding into hitherto unreached corners of the Black Country, it’s worth remembering that trams aren’t really anything new in these parts.
And we doubt it took anything like as long to get them up and running the first time round.
The hand-coloured postcard at the top of the page shows one trundling through West Bromwich’s Dartmouth Square, around the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth centuries. The only other traffic it had to share the roads with was pedestrians and horse-drawn vehicles.
Below is a later, singledecker tram which ran between Dudley and Stourbridge. According to the notes on the back, this was taken in 1930, and shows the last tram to run the route. If only they hadn’t ripped up the tracks back then, they could have saved a lot of