In a sidestreet in central Coventry, a possible vehicle of the future has been making its first public foray: a 60-seat, battery-powered miniature tram. On smooth, almost silent, test runs, its pioneering wheel system allows it to round the corner without slowing – a small bend for this tram but a sharp turning point for tramkind.
The embryonic Coventry very light rail (CVLR) is riding a bigger wave; suddenly, trams are go again. British cities trail Europe but once led the way, before retiring the hundreds of street trams that once flowered under horse and steam power.
And although the likes of Manchester, Sheffield and Nottingham re-established tram networks, the number of modern revivals were almost matched by the list of cancelled projects, with schemes for Liverpool, Bristol, central London and Leeds dropped.
But now the dreams are back – and funded. In the run-up to next week’s spending review, the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, confirmed £15bn for cities to develop urban transport. That money will be spent partly on new tram lines in the West Midlands and Greater Manchester, as well as developing plans for a possible tram line from Bristol to Bath. Notably, it includes £2.1bn for the biggest city in Europe without a fixed transit system – Leeds.
For the West Yorkshire mayor, who has long campaigned to get the city its tram, the announcement was critical. “This gives us absolute certainty and security that we will have spades in the ground by 2028,” Tracy Brabin says.
While Brabin has championed enhanced bus routes and services, two tram lines – one running from Leeds to Bradford – will be the backbone of an integrated mass transit system.
“There is a reason why European cities have trams,” Brabin says. “They can carry three times as many people. They are often segregated, so they are reliable. And you can time your journey. It’s absolute reliability: you go to the tram stop, and the tram is there in a few minutes. It’s also cleaner and greener.”
Brabin says the Leeds-Bradford line will benefit 675,000 people. “That’s massive – not just for people on the line, but to also unlock areas that have really struggled. The tram connectivity will absolutely unlock housing and development,” she says.
Perhaps the tram, or light rail, has suffered as neither fish nor fowl: never boasting the speed of a train or the solidity of a railway station for the passenger; nor, for the public purse and politicians, the lower infrastructure investment and higher flexibility of a bus network. Yet this halfway house has multiple benefits – and modern innovations may provide the answer.
So why don’t more people want them? David Andrews, the chair of the campaign group Tram Forward, says: “The cost is one thing but mainly the disruption. People don’t want trams because they worry about the disruption, and it’s true that in Edinburgh it went on for years. But if you can just lay it on the surface, you can do it overnight.”
Battery-operated trams are starting to appear around the world, from Florence in Italy to Doha in Qatar, potentially cheaper than installing and maintaining an overhead wire network, although Andrews says that concerns that the lines are unsightly can be overblown: “In Vienna, you’ve got the cables pinned to the side of the Grand Opera House and people don’t notice them.”
The bigger element of the cost and disruption of laying a tram network is what lies beneath the road: the pipelines for gas, electricity, telecoms and water.
Traditionally, for a heavier tram, installing rails has meant digging down several feet and having to divert utilities. It is a slow and costly process that helped push the price of building Edinburgh’s 11-mile tram line to more than £1bn, and drove residents and businesses to distraction over years of construction delays affecting the heart of the city.
Engineers now believe much of that can be avoided, by laying concrete slabs with embedded rails over the roads: excavating only 300mm from the surface and leaving the pipes in place.
The lightest footprint yet may be found in Coventry, where the public can try out a local innovation bringing its automotive tradition and new battery developments into what it terms Very Light Rail.
Using a smaller, composite vehicle – carrying about 60 people but weighing less than half the tonnage of a normal tram – the CVLR team says the cost of installing a track can be halved, down to about £10m a kilometre from typically £25m (costs have reached £100m a kilometre on some projects). Pioneering bogies – the wheel-axle system underneath a tram or train – allow the vehicle to make much tighter turns, permitting routes through narrower city streets.
Riding the prototype, the city councillor, Jim O’Boyle, says: “The vehicle itself can go around 15-metre radii. But the alchemy is the track beneath.”
The concrete slabs and rails were installed with a fraction of the disruption of a traditional tram line. The 220-metre test track here was laid within weeks – not much more disruptive than resurfacing a road, the engineers claim. Running on battery, there are no overhead wires.
Yet for a tram this size, why not simply run a bus? Nicola Small, the CVLR programme director, says: “It’s permanent infrastructure. People can see that the tracks have been laid and that it’s here to stay. They know where the route’s going because they can see it and that gives them confidence – and it also gives businesses confidence to invest in the area, because they know that there’s going to be that connectivity.”
Intriguingly, research shows that while car drivers avoid buses, there is no such stigma about the tram. Small says: “From looking at statistics, most bus users are non-car owners, so they are using the bus because they have to. Whereas when you look at people who travel by train and tram, many of them have left a car at home so they are making a choice.”
The other saving that the CVLR scheme could offer is through autonomy – or driverless vehicles, minimising staffing costs and allowing more trams to run on fixed routes.
The city hopes to license the technology and produce the vehicles, joining the West Midlands’ automotive legacy with plans for a gigafactory, as well as build a better transport network for Coventry.
The publicly funded pilot project is being delivered by a consortium of partners, including local industry and academia. The tram will run at a maximum of 19-25mph (30-40km/h) – though O’Boyle claims to have got it up to 37mph when allowed to drive on another test track.
For now, the vehicle of the future is doing little more than 12mph on its brief foray down Greyfriars Road. A couple of seconds around the corner, the brakes are applied and we are at the end of the track. And the 50-second ride is over? O’Boyle shakes his head: “The ride is only just beginning.”
