Not only were these lines entirely separated and disconnected, involving tedious changing of cars, but two of the five were actually of different gauge from the rest, making through communication impossible. It was no system, merely a conglomeration of disjecta membra. The tramway condition of the district became thoroughly unsatisfactory, utterly inadequate to the needs of the travelling public. Matters gradually went from bad to worse, and a financial Lord Kitchener was urgently needed to remodel everything.
He appeared in the form of a powerful organisation, the British Electric Traction Company, with a share capital of £4,000,000, which entered into negotiations with the various companies and with the local authorities controlling no fewer than twenty-two districts, into which the Black Country area is divided. The proposition was to combine all the Black Country tramways into one great system to be worked by electricity in the most up-to-date manner, to give frequent service, to ensure rapid and comfortable communication between all parts, to straighten things out well, and to adopt this motto, “One management, one method, one gauge,” provided the local authorities would for some years suspend their rights under the Acts of 1870 and 1896 to buy the tramways for practically the worth of old iron.
Some of the local authorities thought well of it. Others did not, contending that they, and not the Company, ought to undertake the reform; while the rest saddled their adherence to the scheme with such impossible conditions, that the negotiations dragged wearily on, and it was some time before the great scheme was finally carried through at the cost of much trouble with the local authorities in the matter of routes selected for the requisite extensions. In one instance the line, instead
FIG. 21. VIEW AT CASTLE HILL, DUDLEY, SOUTH STAFFORDSHIRE. SHOWING AN ELECTRIC TRAM-CAR
By permission of the Manual of Electrical Undertakings, Ltd., London.
of being carried in the natural way direct to the urban boundaries of a large town, was compelled by the authorities of the area involved to turn off at an angle and to gain access to the town in an utterly roundabout fashion, much as if in London, one was obliged in approaching St. Paul’s by Ludgate Hill to deflect up the Old Bailey, and to reach the cathedral by way of Newgate Street.
One thing only is still wanted to make this Light Railway scheme (typical of other similar ones) perfect, and this is that its cars should have running powers right into Birmingham and other large towns, and it is to be hoped that before this book is published they will be granted. Travellers do not want to change cars when they arrive at the municipal boundary. They want to move from one centre of population to the other, to get in at the Birmingham starting-point, and to get out in the centre of Walsall, West Bromwich, or Wolverhampton, as the case may be, or even to go without changing as far as Kinver, on the edge of the Black Country, a favourite holiday resort hitherto inaccessible to the manufacturing population.