Steam trams

September 11, 2013, 06:24:51 am

In the real world, electric trams were strongly preferred to steam trams from quite early on. By the 1890s, any newly-built tram systems would almost certainly have been electric, and existing steam systems were being converted to electric. But in pak128.Britain Exp. as it currently stands, steam trams are strongly competitive with electric, at least until 1899 and arguably right up until they become unavailable in 1902.

So I wondered, where is the error? Should steam trams be more expensive to run? Are they too powerful (the tractive effort does look rather high)? Or should electrification be cheaper?

Answer: none of the above. In the current pak, steam trams have a maximum speed of 40 km/hr. It seems that they were in fact legally required to be governed to a much lower speed, although there is some disagreement about what that speed was (it may have varied with time or even with place). Wikipedia says 12km/hr, this picture caption says 8mph (13km/hr) and The Encyclopaedia of Plymouth History says 10mph (16km/hr).

Of course, that raises a different question. If steam trams are so slow, why bother with them instead of horses? And the answer to that, which opens a completely different can of worms, is that horses were in fact (a) even slower (perhaps only 5mph), and (b) significantly more expensive to run; neither of which are true in the pak at present.

Best wishes,
Matthew