It would be hard to overestimate the historical significance among British tramcars of the London County Council’s 1931 prototype double-decker which became known as Bluebird No 1.

Among a number of smaller London municipalities, the LCC was the largest tramway operator in the capital.  Their great rivals were the Underground Group, which owned three separate tramways and the mighty London General Omnibus Company. 

One of the Underground company’s tram subsidiaries, the Metropolitan Electric Tramways, built its own “Bluebird” prototype, no: 318, one of the precursors of their large-capacity Feltham design, of which 331 survives at the National Tramway Museum.

The LCC Bluebird was powerful, capable of speeds up to 30mph and fitted with air brakes.  Its interior offered standards of comfort that were rarely found in contemporary public transport vehicles.  It was handsome, in a distinctive blue livery, and might have transformed London’s street transport. There are detailed descriptions at London County Council No. 1 – National Tramway Museum and LCC 1 – Restoration Par Excellence.

It remained unique because in 1933 all London’s tramways were absorbed into the London Passenger Transport Board, which quickly resolved to replace all its street tramways with trolleybuses and motor buses.

No: 1’s distinctive livery, part of an energetic publicity campaign to encourage passenger ridership, was replaced by the London Transport red and cream livery and during and after the war its non-standard specification meant it was little used.

When the LPTB sold the bulk of its fleet of Feltham trams to Leeds Corporation in 1951, Bluebird was included in the deal as a make-weight to replace two trams destroyed in a depot fire.  In Leeds it was given the fleet number 301.

In 1957 Leeds City Council donated it to the British Transport Museum in London, which passed it on to the Tramway Museum at Crich, where it was repainted in London Transport livery.

I wrote a blog-article about Bluebird No 1 in 2015 [Bluebird no 1 | Mike Higginbottom Interesting Times] when it became apparent that its bodywork was deteriorating.

The subsequent protracted and expensive restoration is a fine achievement and an object-lesson in the principle that preservation of vehicles, like buildings and gardens, is a continuing process.

A sumptuous book, edited by Lynn Wagstaff, Bluebird Reborn: The History and Restoration of LCC No. 1 [Bluebird Reborn: The History & Restoration of LCC No. 1 (LRTA) – Platform 5] (LRTA 2023) gives a detailed account of the difficulties and dilemmas that beset returning a historic tramcar to its original condition.

Bluebird No 1 returned to service in September 2024 and gives visitors a chance to experience as new, a vehicle that’s nearly a century old.

That’s because, though as much as possible of the original has been incorporated in the restoration, it’s been stripped back to its component parts and built again.

Most of the trams in the operating fleet at Crich and other working transport museums have been substantially renewed, primarily to restore their appearance at a specific historic period, but also so they can safely carry passengers and provide enjoyment for decades to come.   After all, the Flying Scotsman has had numerous modifications to its design, as well as eighteen different boilers, since it was built in 1923. 

The alternative, as with Leeds 602 at Crich and Mallard in the National Railway Museum collection, is conservation rather than preservation, so museum pieces become relics rather than exhibits.

If we want to feel, see and hear what it’s like to ride in a 1932 modern tramcar, or a vintage car, bus or railway carriage, we can’t afford to be squeamish about provenance.  Otherwise we’d be looking at a collection of garden sheds, chicken houses and cricket pavilions.

Sir Edward Watkin (1819-1901) was a visionary as well as a highly successful Manchester businessman.  He was involved in at least ten railway companies, and was chairman of the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway which, as its title implies, ran cross-country from Lancashire to the south bank of the Humber.

Its east-west main line limited its importance and earning-capacity.  The Midland Railway had turned itself from a provincial operator to a national main line by building extensions from Derby to London, Manchester and Carlisle in the 1860s and 1870s.  Watkin determined to do much more than that, and had the opportunity to make his ideas practical.

As well as the MS&LR, Watkin was a director of the Metropolitan Railway, which reached out from central London to the north-eastern suburbs that eventually became known as Metroland, the East London Railway which controlled the vital cross-river tunnel that Marc and Isambard Brunel had built between 1825 and 1843, the South Eastern Railway which connected London with Folkestone and Dover and – crucially – the Submarine Continental Railway, promoted in 1881 with £250,000 to build the Channel Tunnel.  If the Channel Tunnel project had proceeded, Watkin was ready to assist it as a director of the Chemins de fer du Nord company, which connected Calais and Dunkirk with Paris.

To stitch together these separate but connected lines, Watkin resolved to link the MS&LR with the Metropolitan Railway on the outskirts of London.  He obtained Parliamentary approval for 94 miles of high-speed track from Annesley Junction in Nottinghamshire, via Nottingham, Loughborough, Leicester and Rugby, and renamed the MS&LR the Great Central Railway.

This undertaking involved engineering construction of the highest contemporary standards.  There was only one level crossing on the whole of the new extension.  The maximum gradients were 1 in 130 between Annesley and Nottingham, and 1 in 176 south of Nottingham, and no curve was sharper than a one-mile radius. 

All the stations were built on island platforms within a formation wide enough for future quadrupling of tracks, and the Marylebone terminus included spare land for additional platforms. 

Overbridges and tunnels were designed to accept continental rolling stock, and station-platform copings were removable to allow through running of continental trains if the Victorian Channel Tunnel had ever been built.

The approach to its London terminus at Marylebone was fraught with controversy because the covered-way tunnel had to clip the purlieus of Lord’s cricket ground.  The company dug up the Lord’s Nursery Ground and reinstated it on top of the cut-and-cover cutting.

The London Extension was built at a cost of £11,500,000 and opened to traffic in 1899, five years after Sir Edward suffered a stroke which restricted his business activities.  The Great Central was well served by its managers and engineers until it was absorbed into the London & North Eastern Railway in 1922, but it never rivalled its competitors as a London main line.  Its selling points to passengers were speed – three hours non-stop between London and Sheffield – and luxury, indicated by the publicity strap-line “Rapid Travel in Luxury”.  It also made money from coal traffic.

After nationalisation in 1948 the Great Central gradually became surplus to requirements.  Express services between Marylebone and Manchester were withdrawn in 1961;  ordinary passenger services were finally discontinued in January 1970.  Electrically-hauled goods trains between Sheffield, Wath and Manchester finally ended in 1981 and the tracks over Woodhead were lifted. 

Though passenger services continue to run east of Manchester, over stretches of the MS&L east of Sheffield and on the approaches to Marylebone, most of the Great Central route is derelict or redeveloped. 

Does all this sound familiar?  High-speed rail from Manchester to Paris?  A race-track of a railway running through open countryside?  Over-ambitious redevelopment to make space for a London terminus?

The conversation about High Speed Two dates back to 2009.  The arguments about its value have over-emphasised the desirability of shaving journey-times on its route, ignoring the potential benefit of relieving overcrowding on existing Victorian railway routes. A May 2026 report supports this view: HS2 failings blamed on high-speed focus and political pressure – BBC News. (There are, of course, other issues, not least the amount of taxpayers’ money that has gone down the pan.)

Perhaps it would have been more useful to have safeguarded the Great Central trackbed in the 1960s, so that it could be revived as a diversionary route relieving the East and West Coast main lines with fast, but not very fast, passenger and freight services.

Just saying…