details received from LTT:

LTT are holding two open days this year, Sunday 30 Mar and Sunday 26
Oct - the Oct event should feature a display on the Promenade as per
last year but hopefully with more vehicles. The fourth
totallyTransport event takes place on Sunday 22 June.

On 30 March our depot (Brinwell Road, Marton) will be open from 1200-
1600 with a free bus service to/from Blackpool Town Hall (Market St)
every 30 mins. At the depot itself progress on the restoration of
Standard 143 will be visible and you should be able to see OMO 8 and
Coronation 663 too. Bus wise the situation is somewhat fluid
presently as we are in the process of relocating our commercial
Busworks business from our depot to its own premises and can
therefore bring some vehicles back from our secondary storage depot
to fill the vacated spaces. We just haven’t decided which ones yet!
Our trade stall and that of the Ribble Enthusiast Club will be open
for business.

On February 1st 2008 it was announced that the Blackpool tramway will receive £85 million (with £60 million coming from central government) to upgrade the line to a modern “Stadtbahn” (light rail) type line. Details of the funding for the tramroad upgrade can be found here and here. 

16 low floor trams will be purchased and some of the best of the old cars will be kept.

Welcome to my new blog. If you are looking for the FTS website (which I used to run for them until the end of 2007) please use this link: www.fyldetramwaysociety.co.uk

Over the next few weeks I’ll transfer most of the interesting pages (fleet lists, history, stories…) from my old site to this new location. In the future this blog will be used mainly to present photos of the Blackpool trams. Why? Well, the Blackpool tramway will be modernised and become a light rail system over the next few years and the tramway we have known for all these years will be gone forever. Instead of lovely 1930s trams in various guises (double deck or single deck) it will become just like any of the other modern tramway (light rail) systems in this world: uniform articulated low floor cars with plenty of standing room. No more wooden interiors or comfortable upholstered swing-over seats, no more climbing upstairs and waiting for the conductor to open the door for you.OK, we should really rather wait and see what is going to happen, specially as a few of the old warhorses are supposed to be kept. Yes, I do find modern trams boring, sorry! But we will use this site to keep the memories of the old Blackpool tramway alive. Your webmaster has thousands of slides in his collection and we will try to show you as many of them here as possible.  And we will of course also record the future tramroad.As a first step we are importing most of the content from the old FTS website. Please note that some articles and most of the fleet lists have not been updated for a number of months. All the content will be brought up-to-date during 2008!

click here to download a zipped TIF-file showing the front & back of a 1950s BCT transport map (one day we may scan the map as well…)

We have scanned a 1950 LSA timetable and made a pdf file out of it.

• click here to download the file

We offer you two zipped TIF-files that contain reduced scans (slightly restored) of an original sales brochure/leaflet advertising the new EE luxury tramcars. The original is folded twice.

• click here to download the file containing the inside pages
• click here to download the file containing the outside pages

Advertising is a prominent feature of the Blackpool trams. Tramcars with all over advertising were introduced in 1975. Most of those liveries are quite nice to look at and they do generate additional income for the company. More recent contracts use so-called “contra vision” adhesive film that covers everything including the passenger windows (there are small holes in the film that allow a restricted view out when you sit by the window). We usually list the dates of the contract/operating season (this means some cars may run around in the “expired” livery for some more weeks/months awaiting a repaint).

Select a page below to see the various liveries carried by the trams:

• Fleet Liveries
• Advertising Trams - Balloon Cars
• Advertising Trams - Centenary Cars
• Advertising Trams - Railcoaches
• Advertising Trams - all other cars

This list does not aim to be complete (to be honest, we don’t think records like that exist). We try to list all the current service vehicles (i.e. the rubber-tired fleet) and those that were used over the last few years. Any additions/corrections gladly welcome! The fleets of Blackpool Transport Services and Blackpool Council/OSD (Track Services only) are covered. The Council’s fleet is much larger but we can include only those vehicles that are (or have been) used for track maintenance. Driver Training vehicles are listed on our two bus pages.click here for the fleetlist

Not on the Fylde Coast but for a time operated by Blackpool Transport this standard gauge (1435mm) Birkenhead Heritage Tramway museum line was opened at the end of 1994. Two brand new trams were purchased from Hong Kong to run from Woodside Ferry through the old dock estate along Shore Road to Pacific Road where the first depot and a small transport museum was located (now closed and under conversion into offices). The line was extended from Pacific Road to Egerton Bridge in 1996 and later further to the new depot in Taylor Street. The Hong Kong cars and the line are owned by the Metropolitan Borough of Wirral. The track and the two HK trams were leased by Blackpool Transport Services Ltd. for 7 years. This lease expired in April 2002 but was extended and in September the licence and the staff transferred to Wirral Borough Council. We will continue to report about this little tramway, even though the Blackpool connection no longer exists. Visit the Merseyside Tramway Preservation Society website for further details & operating hours. 

• click here for the fleetlist