Volunteer Trip to the Museum of Transport, Greater Manchester

Posted
8th May 2025
in blog, Blogs & News, Volunteering

Manchester’s HiDDEN network includes not only Elizabeth Gaskell’s House but many other fascinating little gems in and around Manchester. One of these is the Museum of Transport, Greater Manchester (MoTGM). A group of Elizabeth Gaskell’s House volunteers had a brilliant trip there one Saturday in May. Being taken there and back in a vintage 1968 double decker bus, driven by MoTGM volunteer George, was only one of many highlights of the morning.

The museum is in one of Greater Manchester’s earliest bus garages, opened in 1901. The Upper Hall is the original Queen’s Road motorbus garage, added to the main tram depot in 1928. The Lower Hall is a fill-in building, constructed on the tram depot’s rear yard and used as the washing shed for the motorbus fleet in the 1930s and 1940s. The entire building is Grade II-listed, and the Museum frontage is on Boyle Street, named after Councillor Daniel Boyle. He was the Chairman of the Manchester Corporation Tramways Committee, which was responsible for electrifying the newly acquired tramway system, previously run by private companies.

Volunteer Paul gave us a fascinating and informative tour of the collection. The first horse-drawn tram appeared in 1824. The tram in their collection dates from 1891, and would have had the option of a seat inside on cushions or, for half the price, outside on wooden benches. Given that you’d be travelling over cobbles with no tracks to run on, I think I’d have opted for a seat inside. The reversible horse tramcar on tracks from the 1880s involved unhitching the horse from one end and walking it round to the other – horses did two-hour shifts, and a lot of them were needed to cover the fifteen routes each day. Those of us of a certain age were also very excited to see the displays of ticket machines through the ages plus the piles of old pennies, ha’pennies, farthings, sixpences, thrupenny bits et cetera.

The display of 1950s double decker buses all in their individual livery depending on borough was impressive. There was a display highlighting World War II, which included a 1941 fire engine with turntable ladder, and touching examples of labels attached to evacuee children who were sent into the countryside to escape the bombs – often to a grim life on farms far away from their parents. With many bus drivers and conductors serving in the forces, the call out for ‘strong healthy women, about twenty-five to thirty-five years of age, to act as tramcar conductors’ was issued. However, as another poster stated, ‘conductresses are not allowed to enter the men’s dining room’.

We had a fantastic time on this trip. Thank you to Paul, George and the rest of the team at the MoTGM for welcoming us and making the visit so special!