December 15 1998 saw the launch of 'Trams for Bath' at the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution. Under the chairmanship of Derrick Hunt, it was agreed to form a properly constituted society to " ..support the installation of a modern electric tramway network as the core of an integrated public transport solution to Bath's traffic problems". The minutes of that meeting are enclosed with this newsletter.
The first committee meeting was held in January 1999 and the minutes for that will be available shortly.

In future we plan to have meetings on the second Wednesday of each month; these will be alternately a committee meeting and an 'event'.
At the time of our inaugural meeting we had received sketchy news that our next proposed event might clash with the BRLSI Transport Group meeting and there was talk of combining the two. The situation has since been resolved: As B"NES council has announced one of its own transport meetings during the same week, the BRLSI meeting has had to be moved. The final arrangements are given in 'Dates for your Diary' on the back page.

Looking back at the 'Trams for Bath' conference at Green Park last April, it all seems a very long time ago. Those were anxious weeks for Derrick and myself as we checked and re-checked the arrangements. Had the hall booking been confirmed? Was there someone ready to meet our guests from the station? Had all our guests confirmed? Worst of all, was anybody going to turn up at all?
On the day, things went smoothly, only one guest, Colin Robinson, was unable to turn up because of a broken leg and Professor Lewis Lesley did a 'double turn' to take his place.

What did our guests talk about? The day touched on every aspect of 'trams' and 'Bath', from Mike Finch, describing the peculiar geography which makes so many of the usual traffic control measures impossible to implement in Bath, to Jonathan Digby-Rogers, coolly telling us how to borrow £70 million (he's done it before). If anyone was in any doubt that a pollution-free city should be our aim, Professor Geoff Allen had enough evidence to give permanent nightmares to anyone who thought we could ignore traffic pollution. Not only is the next centimetre of apparently clean Bath Stone set to peel off, but the rate of damage is increasing despite reductions in airborne sulphur.

Brian Lomas showed many examples of small continental towns which had solved their transport problems with tramways. and we were left wondering what on earth we have been doing, continually re-inventing square wheels here in Bath when the answer had been there in the rest of Europe all the time.

Finally the hardware itself, in particular the rails on which so much will depend in Bath. The under-road cellars in the central area would be very expensive indeed to reinforce to the requirements of a modern 'Light' rail system. Fortunately the new Pullman TPL tram has a wheel loading far less than a heavy lorry and Professor Lewis Lesley's LR55 track is capable of spanning wide gaps to keep the load off any vulnerable parts of the structure. When he described the tracklaying process:- Cut slots in the road - bed-in concrete lintels - glue the rails down - re-open the road to traffic; we could see this was the sort of system we needed for Bath.

Philip Sutcliffe of Edgar Allen Engineering told us how the track was being developed.

Colin Maggs brought along his photographs of the previous Bath trams, so no-one could say trams wouldn't work in Bath, and his anecdotes of the way the system ran were most enjoyable. In particular, through-ticketing is no new thing - you could buy a ticket to Australia from the Bath Electric Tramway Company before the war.

A special word of thanks was given to Martin Willey, chief executive of the Western Development Partnership, who, as chairman, held the whole thing together and contributed much searching enquiry to the debates. He is a very busy man and the support he gave us is a measure of the interest industry and commerce is showing in trams.

One of the first problems to be tackled in planning the tram routes for Bath was the question of how to cross the City Centre. A series of direct routes through the commercial streets would benefit no-one; not only would the tram be held-up by pedestrians but it would also interfere with deliveries and collections from shops and businesses.

By identifying a circular route which passes the end of almost every important central street but which avoids shop frontages and delivery areas, the problem can be solved.

This could only work with electric trams because the streets concerned are narrow and only suited to the predictability of rail-guided vehicles. The complete absence of fumes from a tram is another important factor in narrow streets.

The converging routes from the suburbs all loop around the city centre before returning. Anyone wishing to cross the city, alights wherever they want on the circle and waits for the next tram for their destination to come along.

Hopefully they won't have to wait long either, because the fast service of a tramway makes a seven-minute (or even shorter) interval quite achieveable. Where two routes share track, such as the Western Riverside, a three-and-a-half minute service would result.

Does this all seem like fantasy? Come along to the B.R.L.S.I. on Feb 10 at 7.30 pm to hear how it can be done