Electrification

In 1883 when the track was opened the whole operation was run by steam trams. Late in 1887 almost the whole of the tram operation was run on electricity. It took these four years for the Traills to experiment and make it run on electricity. The first idea the Traills tried was to use the running rails as the contacts, to take the electricity from the power station to the Tram motors. This meant that the live rail had to have each section of the railway line joined up with copper bonds. They gave this a trial run but the leakage was too excessive to be of any use.

Next they tried to make the tram work sufficiently by having a third rail that was raised about 43 cm off the ground. This worked quite well until they came up with the problem of "how do you get the rails across a field entrance?".

Next they came up with a solution for that! The only way they could do it was by attaching copper cables unto one end of the 3rd rail and bring them past the field entrance by putting them underground and then up again attaching it to the third rail. Between the gap that the field entrance left the tram just had to use its own momentum to run past it.