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A Short History of Public Transport
in Greater Manchester
Organised public transport in Greater
Manchester dates from 1st January 1824, when John
Greenwood, proprietor of the Pendleton Toll Gates,
started a regular horse bus or coach service to
Manchester’s Market Street. This catered for
merchants and the better off, for at first the journey
was made only three times a day, at a fare of 6d (sixpence)(2
½ p) for about three miles, but still cheaper than the
Manchester hackney carriages. Each vehicle carried about
eight or nine passengers, who were picked up or set down
anywhere along the route.
Business prospered, and
soon there was a number of other omnibus proprietors. The
passing of the Stage Coach Act in 1832 officially
recognised that passengers were being set down or taken
up, a distinct change from the accepted conditions of
coach operation before this time.
From 1830 to 1844 a
service of horse omnibuses operated by Henry Charles Lacy,
of the Royal Hotel, Moston Street, ran from the newly
opened Liverpool and Manchester Railway terminus at
Liverpool Road (now part of the Greater Manchester Museum of Science and
Industry) to
Manchester’s Market Street, and also in 1830, a
horse bus service started to connect Manchester and
Stockport at a rate of 2d (1p) per mile.
A new type of vehicle was
introduced by a Mr. McEwan in 1852. It was a much larger,
doorless double deck vehicle, drawn by three horses, and
carried 42 passengers. Fares were reduced from 6d to 3d.
Soon, Mr. McEwan disposed of the business to Mr. Alderman Mackie, who formed the City Omnibus Company.
John Greenwood, the
founder of the original omnibus service of 1824, died in
1851. He had become one of the largest omnibus and coach
proprietors in the North, and had commenced daily
services to Chester, Buxton and Sheffield. Control of the
business now passed to his son, John Greenwood Junior.
In 1850, there were 64
omnibuses running in Manchester, for which 387 horses
were required. A greater degree of control over the
operation of these buses and coaches was secured by the
passing of the 1847 Town Police Clauses Act, which
included elaborate provisions for licensing both vehicles
and drivers.
Under the control of John
Greenwood, Junior, there was an attempt made to introduce
a form of rail traction, and in August 1861, an agreement
was sanctioned for the laying down on
“Haworth’s Patent Perambulating Principle”
of an iron tramway in the Salford area. This had flat
metal rails upon which the tyres of the horse buses would
run. The system included a centre guide rail or groove
into which a fifth wheel could be lowered, which
theoretically kept the vehicle on the running rails. The
system was not extended and soon passed out of use.
In 1865, a powerful
consortium, the Manchester Carriage Company, was formed.
This was a fusion of the interests of John Greenwood,
Junior, who had himself already absorbed several small
proprietors, and who had a working partnership in the
firm of Robert Turner & Company, operating on the
Cheetham Hill and Broughton routes, and the City Omnibus
Company. The new company gradually extended its
operations until its large horse buses, carrying up to 40
passengers, covered most main roads in Manchester itself,
and in many surrounding districts.
The first suggestion for
the construction of tramways in Manchester came from
Henry Osborn O’Hagan, a well-known promoter of such
schemes, whose name figures later in the development of
tramways in the outer districts. His proposals of 1872
were resisted, but by 1875, the introduction of tramways
could not be put off for much longer. The Corporations of
both Manchester and Salford obtained Tramways Orders
under the terms of the 1870 Tramways Act, which empowered
them to construct and lease, but not operate, tramways
within their respective districts.
The Manchester Suburban
Tramways Company was formed in 1877 to build and operate
its own lines and to undertake the operation on lease of
lines constructed by the municipalities. The original
leases were signed in 1877 to run for a period of 21
years, and were later to become very important
determining factors in the introduction of municipal
operations to the Manchester transport scene. On 17th May,
1877, horse tramway operations began with a service
between the Grove Inn on Bury New Road, and Deansgate,
the first tramway in Manchester.
In 1880 a new company was
formed to amalgamate the interests of the Manchester
Carriage Company and the Manchester Suburban Tramways
Company. Called the Manchester Carriage and Tramways
Company, the new organisation began a process of
expansion, which by the 1890s made them the major
transport operator in Greater Manchester. At their
maximum, the tramways of this company extended over 89
miles of route and employed 515 cars and 5,300 horses,
working from 20 depots. Routes stretched as far out as
Oldham, Stalybridge, Stockport and Patricroft. The
company also operated a number of horse omnibuses in the
outer districts, where traffic was light.
Horse drawn tramcars were
also operated in some of the surrounding towns, notably
in Bolton by the locally based firm of E. Holden &
Company, and by the Stockport and Hazel Grove Carriage
Company between those two places.
The other major operator
of transport contemporary with the Manchester Carriage
and Tramways Company was the Manchester, Bury, Rochdale
and Oldham Steam Tramways Company, another company
promoted by Henry O’Hagan. Initial proposals
envisaged a system of tramways serving all the towns on
the eastern side of Manchester, and stretching in a great
sweep from Bacup in the north through Rochdale, Oldham
and Ashton to Denton and Hyde. The first section opened
in 1883, but in 1887 the company went bankrupt. However,
in 1888 a reconstruction scheme was announced, and a new
company formed, dropping “Manchester” from its
title. The reconstructed company put its affairs in order
and operated the steam tramways uneventfully until the
end of the century, when the various local authorities
began to express interest in owning and operating the
lines for themselves.
Steam tramways also ran in
Wigan from 1882, while the Wigan and District Tramways
Company operated tramways in that town from 1880 until
taken over by Wigan Corporation in 1902.
On the west side of
Manchester, the estate of the de Trafford family had been
sold for industrial development after the opening of the
Manchester Ship Canal in 1894, and the Trafford Park
Estates Company laid down a tramway to be operated by the
British Gas Traction Company from 1897. The Trafford Park
Estates Company took over operation from 3rd November
1899, and gas traction was used until 1908. An electric
tramway on the public roads within the Park started on 14th
July 1903.
Bolton and Wigan
Corporations were the first to embark upon municipal
ownership, and initiated this by taking over the lines
from the local firm of E. Holden & Company in 1899,
and the first electric tramways ran in Bolton in December
that year, and in Wigan in 1901. The South Lancashire
Tramways Company was formed in 1900 and operated an
extensive inter-urban tramway system in the smaller towns
and communities from its base at Atherton. Later
reconstituted as Lancashire United Tramways, then
Lancashire United Transport in 1905, the company started
motor buses in 1906.
In Manchester, the leases
of the Corporation lines granted to the Manchester
Carriage and Tramways Company expired between 1898 and
1901, and the Corporation adopted a resolution in 1895 to
take over the tramways and operate them as an electric
system. The first section of the reconstructed tramway,
between Albert Square and Cheetham Hill, was opened for
electric traction on 7th June 1901. Reconstruction and
electrification was completed by 1903, and the last horse
trams within the City ran in that year.
Many small authorities now
owned sections of tramway, and it was agreed that
Manchester would reconstruct these and lease them for
operation. The larger municipalities of Salford, Oldham
and Ashton-under-Lyne operated their own lines and began
electrification schemes. The steam tramways in Bury,
Rochdale and Oldham were also taken over by the
respective Corporations. The last steam tram in the area
ran in Rochdale in May 1905, although electric trams had
commenced operation in 1902.
In 1905 the Trafford Park
Estates Company Electric Tramway of 2.54 miles was taken
over by the Corporations of Manchester and Salford.
The lightly used routes in
southern Manchester from Palatine Road to Cheadle and
Northenden, and Hulme to Chorlton-cum-Hardy, were still
being operated by horse buses in 1905, and in February
the General Manager of the Manchester Corporation
Tramways recommended that an experiment be made with
motor buses on these services. Buses were, accordingly,
first used by Manchester Corporation Tramways in 1906.
In 1913 British Automobile
Traction, which was later to form part of the North
Western Road Car Company commenced motor bus operation in
Macclesfield, and the Mid Cheshire Bus Company began to
open up areas which included Urmston. Both companies were
of local, rather than regional, importance at this time,
the North Western Company not being formed until 1923.
In 1905, four years after
electric tramways were introduced in Manchester, the
Corporation started to develop an extensive parcel
carrying business using the tramway network. Later it
used motor vans as a means of delivery. Retarded at first
by legal opposition from established parcel carrying
firms, the business survived and remained for many years
an essential part of the operations of Manchester
Corporation Transport, and later SELNEC and GMT. Rochdale
Corporation Transport operated a similar service.
The years up to 1914 saw
the consolidation of an extensive system of electric
tramways stretching over the whole of Greater Manchester,
and the surrounding towns were also connected by other
routes, with shorter lines within their own districts. A
joint board, set up in 1904, served Stalybridge, Hyde,
Mossley and Dukinfield, and Glossop was provided with
electric trams by the Glossop Urban District Supply
Company. To the north, Ramsbottom was an early operator
of trolleybuses, from 1913, and in the same year
Stockport also had an early trolleybus service running
from the town centre to Offerton, although it remained
essentially a tramway operator, with routes running out
to Hyde, Hazel Grove, and Cheadle, as well as the
connections with Manchester. In central Manchester the
tramway system had grown, and by 1913 it had been
considered desirable to identify the services by
allocating numbers to them.
The war of 1914-1918
effectively prevented further development of suburban
electrification and after the end of hostilities,
maintenance and wartime neglect had first of all to be
remedied, but it was not long before the tramway system
began to expand again.
The motor bus section of
the Manchester Corporation undertaking grew from 16
vehicles in 1923 to 51 in 1926. To provide the
accommodation needed for this expansion, a new depot was
opened at Parrs Wood in 1926, the first purpose built bus
garage, and an extension for buses was added to the
Queens Road tram depot. This extension is the present Museum of Transport, but the Parrs Wood garage has been
demolished. A Tesco supermarket now stands on the site,
although the clock tower remains as a local landmark.
Similar expansion of motor bus services in the
surrounding towns was slow but steady, usually taking the
form of feeder services to the trams rather than as
replacements, but Leigh introduced motor buses in 1920
without ever operating tramcars.
Further tramways
extensions continued to be opened during the 1920s, until
in 1929 the Manchester Corporation Tramway system itself
reached its maximum of 123 miles of route (292 track
miles), employing 953 cars, and making it the third
largest system in the country. Only London and Birmingham
were bigger. Many independent motor bus operators were
now opening up routes in the area and were endeavouring
to cream off the best of the tramways traffic. A system
of express motor bus services known as “co-ordinated
services” was introduced in Manchester in 1927 as a
joint venture by the operators of tramways in the area,
there eventually being 18 such services. These ran over
the routes of existing tramways in most cases, but were
complementary rather than competitive to the trams.
The first tramway route in
Manchester to be converted to motor bus operation was the
53 service from Cheetham Hill to Stretford Road, in 1930,
and this was quickly followed by other services such as
Bradford Road, and then by the trunk route through Sale
to Altrincham.
In Manchester plans were
made for the replacement of all the trams by motor buses,
but a very determined electric traction “lobby”
in the City Council were successful in getting authority
for the introduction of trolleybuses. The trolleybuses
were eventually introduced on a joint basis with Ashton-under-Lyne
in 1938, although Ashton had had its own trolleybuses,
jointly operated with Oldham, since 1925. A number of
extensions to the Manchester / Ashton system were built
later, some of which were occasioned by the need to
conserve fuel oil during the Second World War.
Ashton-under-Lyne ended
tramcar operation in 1938 with the introduction of the
new trolleybuses, and but for the war Manchester and the
other authorities would have completely abandoned
tramways by the early 1940s. As it was, the remaining
routes were to play an important part in the area’s
transport system throughout the war.
After the war, delivery of
new buses began again, and replacement of the remaining
tramways recommenced. The last S.H.M.D. Joint Board
tramcar ran in 1945, Oldham followed in 1946, and Salford
and Bolton in 1947. With some ceremony, the last
Manchester tramcar operated on the morning of Monday 10th
January 1949, leaving only Bury to close in February 1949
and Stockport in 1951. Electric traction remained, in the
form of the Ashton and Manchester trolleybuses, until
they too closed in December 1966.
There was now an all bus
system operating over what is now the Greater Manchester
area, with 11 municipally controlled operators and two
major company systems, those of the North Western Road
Car Company, and Lancashire United Transport.
The SELNEC (South East
Lancashire and North East Cheshire) Passenger Transport
Executive was created in 1969, combining the municipal
operators (Ashton, Bolton, Bury, Leigh, Manchester,
Oldham, Ramsbottom, Rochdale, Salford, the SHMD Joint
Board, and Stockport), and co-ordinating the local
railway services. For the buses, a new livery of
“Sunglow Orange” and white replaced the variety
of municipal fleet colours. In 1972, the operations,
vehicles and other assets of the North Western Road Car
Company, within the SELNEC area, were taken over. In 1974,
the Greater Manchester Passenger Transport Executive came
in to being, bringing Wigan into the area, in line with
the creation of the new Greater Manchester County. In
1976 a shareholding was acquired in Lancashire United
Transport, leading to a full acquisition and
incorporation into Greater Manchester Transport in 1981.
Also in 1981 the livery was changed to white, orange and
brown.
In 1985 the Government
passed a new Transport Act, bringing about changes as
great as any seen since the 1930s. On 26th October 1986,
bus services were “deregulated”, with the aim
of bringing about more flexibility, competition and
efficiency. Many new bus operators came onto the scene,
whilst other long established names expanded their
operations into Greater Manchester. Ribble and Crosville
both established a greater presence in the area, and even
East Midland of Chesterfield started to run local
services. The Passenger Transport Executive’s bus
fleet was formed into a limited company, GM Buses, and
the Executive’s role became one of co-ordination and
promotion of operations, the provision of bus stops,
shelters and stations, and providing financial support
for socially desirable services. At one time, around 80
operators were providing road passenger transport
services. At the insistence of Government, GM Buses was
divided into two separate companies, and sold to the
private sector, initially as GM Buses North and GM Buses
South; subsequently the North Company became part of the
FirstBus Group, and the South Company became part of the
Stagecoach Group.
Revised May 2004
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