Brighton society finalises tram restoration before council proposal

The Brighton Tram 53 Society has been restoring Brighton's single remaining inter-war tram for a proposal to run it through Stanmer Park.

Current look at Tram 53 in restoration, inside a shed in West Sussex. Credit: own.

It has been over 15 years since Guy Hall, the founder and chairman of the Society, was pointed to the location of a very old tram. Now, the society is nearing completion of tram 53, as well as working separately on a maintenance vehicle, works car 1.

Brighton’s tram services operated under Brighton Corporation Tramways since 1901, with the full 8-route network operating since 1904. Unfortunately, most of the network was starting to get replaced in the 1930s, as increasing suburban development meant trolleybuses were more flexible for the city’s transport system.

Old photo of Brighton's trams; shown here car 72.

Then, at the commencement of World War II, all trams and most of the rails were removed from operation, and either have their materials used for the war effort or scrapped completely. Sometime in the early 1940s, three trams were converted into a shed.

One of those three trams was the now famous tram 53, built in 1937 to the latest Brighton design. The other two were lost to time, but the 53 was sold to a farm near Partridge Green, in West Sussex, in the 1970s, where it stayed until around December 2009, when Hall had stumbled upon its story.

Cited as "first work party on 53", 2010. Credit: brightontram53.org.uk.

Hall mentioned how he had found its location, "I was after material to make a model of a Brighton tram car, and I remember seeing a picture in a book. To cut a long story short, I got in contact with a local historian who guided me to the site of where the tram was."

Hall, along with a group of enthusiastic volunteers around Brighton, started the society. Keeping it and restoring it at a pig farm, however, proved to be very difficult. A community farm in West Sussex offered to house the tram in a large barn, and so the society moved the 53 to its new location, where they’ve been working on it ever since.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/8b41ce_6c0e59ebed2d46ae8ee3d6b0ee8c3137/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

Watch: snippet of Transitopia's Heritage Transit on Brighton's tram 53 project.

Restoration of something so old and so niche does show its difficulties quite quickly. Simon Brown, who’s been with the society since 2018, has worked on a lot of the interior woodwork.

He spoke of the challenges that the society has faced in their time, "There’s two revolving seats that go in the corners; we have absolutely no information apart from [that] we know there’s two revolving seats. So, we’ve got to try and work out from scratch how these seats revolve. […] A lot of it has been imagination and guesswork."

Current photo of the inside cabin with benches and windows. Credit: own.

Hall says that tram 53 is about eight months from completion, with parts on the open-top upper deck to be mounted once Brighton & Hove City Council, along with the South Downs National Park Authority, approve of transporting it to a larger shed on the north side of Stanmer Park.

The society’s proposal to run a half-mile train track through Stanmer Park intended for a heritage tram ride is only out as an idea so far, but Hall notes that a few people within the Council are aware of the idea and plans to put through a formal proposal by the end of the year if everything goes smoothly.

Parts of Works Car 1 covered from rain. Credit: own.

Visit brightontram53.org.uk for more information and feel free to donate to the project.

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