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Ghost Trams / Streetcars / Trolleys

I do enjoy reading these accounts, but do get a bit sceptical when I read things like "the tram swerved"!
But it didn’t (as we know trams can’t) it went through the car. I’m not sure why she said it. It sounds to me like it was oblivious to the car. A tram would toot at something in its way and no mention of that.
 
Good point, I agree. The two witnesses in present time saw the slip but the tram driver didn't. If true, a very interesting case, but as we know we can't always rely on Tom Slemen's accounts.
I get the feeling Tom is like my own local favourite The Flashing Blade Alan Robson.
 
Ghosts and trams two of my favourite things.

‘The Ghost Trams of Dublin

Thomas Sheridan

Sep 20


Following the closure of the once vast network of the Dublin United Tramway system in July 1949, the last tram through the city centre was followed by thousands of people wanting to experience the farewell rattle of the metal and wooden CIE double-decker tram No. 252 as it made its last midnight run to the depot at Blackrock in the south of the city. The scenes of near euphoria created by the Dublin public as they said good bye to a tram service - which had operated in and throughout the city all during the years of uprising and revolution - as if they were pouring the collective soul of the city's residents into the farewell to the 'deh trams' experience. Then, under police escort, the final tram was placed inside the running shed at Blackrock, and with the closing of the doors to the depot, an era had come to an end. Dubliners never developed the same sense of affection for the replacement buses they once reserved for the rattling electric trams which sparked, trundled and rang their bells during the late hours through the city's ancient and historic streetscapes.

Within no time, the tracks were paved over, and the trams, along with the overhead electrical wires which had powered them with 600 volts of DC current, were all removed and scrapped. The rattle of the old electric trams could no longer be heard echoing through the city late at night.

In the 1960's, years after the last tram was out of service, older people in the Rialto neighbourhood of the city began to report on the sound of trams and their distinctive bell sounding in the early morning hours. A nurse at a hospital at Glasnevin, on the north of the city - while waiting for the last bus to take her back home to her flat - claims that a tram filled with people in Victorian attire passed by the bus stop she was waiting at, and then vanished into a 'mist' at the end of the street. The stories of late night ghost trams moving through the city streets went on for decades afterwards. In many cases, we can assume that too much indulgence of libation by some of the city's residents coming home from the pubs may have created this ghostly public transport. However, the stories were far too common and reported by people of all walks of life to be completely shunned off.

If was almost as if the personal and collective human experiences of over a century of the city's residents - often during times of war and conflict - had been so emotionally poured into the tram system raising the idea that the tracks of the tram network still buried under the streets became a kind of magnetic recording device which under certain circumstances, are 'played back'. When one considers the thoughts and feelings of the people inside the trams; with their broken hearts, elations, fears and dreams all captured by the electric current surrounding them, and then recorded into the iron rails embedded into the roadway below, is such an idea really so far fetched?

So next time you are wandering through the old streets of Dublin late at night, you might be surprised to behold a dark blue, double decker tram rattling through the night festooned with advertisements for Fry's Cocoa and Shaw's Sausages coming into sight, while a young lady in an Edwardian dress ascends to the upper deck, as the conductor closes the 'Modesty Shutter' so her ankles are not visible to the young 'gurriers' on the lower deck.’

https://thomassheridan.substack.com/p/the-ghost-trams-of-dublin
 
Ghosts and trams two of my favourite things.

‘The Ghost Trams of Dublin

Thomas Sheridan

Sep 20



raising the idea that the tracks of the tram network still buried under the streets became a kind of magnetic recording device which under certain circumstances, are 'played back'. When one considers the thoughts and feelings of the people inside the trams; with their broken hearts, elations, fears and dreams all captured by the electric current surrounding them, and then recorded into the iron rails embedded into the roadway below,
à la Bold Street (and other places too) perhaps.
 
I remember being younger and walking through the main streets of Exeter (my home town), seeing the old tram tracks that had been inadequately covered over by new road surfaces. My mum told me how they used to have trams, running up Queen Street and through the High Street, I think as far as out to St Sidwell, although I don't know the actual extent of the network. I was always fascinated by these 'ghost' tracks, still just sitting there under the new roads.

I wonder if they are still there, or whether subsequent road surfacing works removed them? And whether there are any 'ghost tram' stories from Exeter. I have never heard of any, yet there must have been hundreds of trams up and down those roads!
 
...whether there are any 'ghost tram' stories from Exeter. I have never heard of any...

Write one yourself:

"The gruesome tragedy which changed Exeter forever

On the morning of March 7, 1917, Mary Findlay boarded the 9am tram from Heavitree to Dunsford Hill and settled down for the journey.

Aged 54, Mary was a married mother of one originally from Swindon who had only lived in Exeter for a few years.

She lived at 3 Leighton Terrace, York Road, and expected to be on the tram for just a few minutes as it trundled along Fore Street towards the west of Exeter.

It was to be the last journey she ever took.

0_2.jpg


What happened was a gruesome tragedy which left Mary crushed between the tram and road.

The incident shocked the city and led to an inquest and major review of trams throughout Exeter."

https://www.devonlive.com/news/devon-news/gruesome-tragedy-changed-exeter-forever-3944859

maximus otter
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Write one yourself:

"The gruesome tragedy which changed Exeter forever

On the morning of March 7, 1917, Mary Findlay boarded the 9am tram from Heavitree to Dunsford Hill and settled down for the journey.

Aged 54, Mary was a married mother of one originally from Swindon who had only lived in Exeter for a few years.

She lived at 3 Leighton Terrace, York Road, and expected to be on the tram for just a few minutes as it trundled along Fore Street towards the west of Exeter.

It was to be the last journey she ever took.

View attachment 59306

What happened was a gruesome tragedy which left Mary crushed between the tram and road.

The incident shocked the city and led to an inquest and major review of trams throughout Exeter."

https://www.devonlive.com/news/devon-news/gruesome-tragedy-changed-exeter-forever-3944859

maximus otter
Thanks for that, Max, that was a fascinating read! And some wonderful old photos too.

Strange that the trams were over and done by 1931. The way my mum spoke about them made it sound as though she'd seen them running, but she only came in Exeter when she married my dad in the mid '50's, and she wasn't even BORN until 1932! So maybe I was just assuming that her telling me about the old tram tracks meant that she'd seen them.
 
Thanks for that, Max, that was a fascinating read! And some wonderful old photos too.

Strange that the trams were over and done by 1931. The way my mum spoke about them made it sound as though she'd seen them running, but she only came in Exeter when she married my dad in the mid '50's, and she wasn't even BORN until 1932! So maybe I was just assuming that her telling me about the old tram tracks meant that she'd seen them.

C952DC30-1496-4146-94B1-B979195B085B.png


Unfortunately, it looks as though any fictional ghost / hunter would be getting his or her feet wet…

maximus otter
 
If was almost as if the personal and collective human experiences of over a century of the city's residents - often during times of war and conflict - had been so emotionally poured into the tram system
I find this a fascinating thought--I think we are so focused on perceiving each person as a separate individual that we don't even think of how we may be linked on a psychic level, and I don't mean psychic as in woo woo stuff, but in psychological terms. A stone tape type mechanism seem far less likely to me than the possibility we instinctively tap into and sense a past collective trauma, or deep rooted emotions of a pleasanter kind, associated with a particular location, and that as a collective set of beings living our individual lives, we collectively create the genius loci, interpreted by our minds as visual things.
 
I find this a fascinating thought--I think we are so focused on perceiving each person as a separate individual that we don't even think of how we may be linked on a psychic level, and I don't mean psychic as in woo woo stuff, but in psychological terms. A stone tape type mechanism seem far less likely to me than the possibility we instinctively tap into and sense a past collective trauma, or deep rooted emotions of a pleasanter kind, associated with a particular location, and that as a collective set of beings living our individual lives, we collectively create the genius loci, interpreted by our minds as visual things.
I wonder if this 'collective emotional response' might go some way towards explaining why some people are drawn towards steam trains? Some of us are old enough to remember these being the only way to travel (I can - just - remember my father standing my brother and I on a bridge over a railway to be enveloped in the steam from the passing engine and telling us that was the last steam train to be running on that line (Dawlish, if I remember rightly) but many who don't still have an almost sentimental regard for them.
 
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