In the early 1900s, Brighton, England, was synonymous with the electric tram. A fleet of trolleys carried thousands of people from home to work every day, helping the quiet British town grow into the city that it is today.
But on Sept. 3, 1939, everything changed. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced from 10 Downing Street that Britain was at war with Germany. The announcement sent shockwaves throughout the world and marked the end of the Brighton tram era.
“They were burned for the war effort and scrapped,” said Guy Hall, a longtime Brighton resident who said that he had always been fascinated with the city’s forgotten trams.
Like so many others, he spent decades assuming they were all destroyed. But in 2009, Hall tracked down an old pig farm where he’d seen a picture taken of a trolley car that was eerily similar to Brighton’s from the 1930s. There, he discovered a tram car with the number 53 painted on it.
“When I first got there, I thought it would be a heap of wood, to be very frank,” he said. “But it was actually in saveable condition.”
The tram was legitimate — a real, double-decker car produced in 1937 that ran through the city — and Hall, along with a group of volunteers around Brighton, launched what they call the Brighton Tram 53 Society. They began working on the restoration multiple days a week, spending every spare minute rebuilding what had been lost to time.
Now, they’re virtually finished with the project, and they hope to get it running again. They’ve proposed a short track be laid in a community park and plan to make their pitch to Brighton’s City Council later this year.
Hall and his crew of locals spent 15 years on the tram. They didn’t make any money from it and relied entirely on donations to fund supplies.
Hall said it’s no surprise that the larger community was enthusiastic about the project. He pointed to a vibrant community of UK-based trolley lovers on YouTube who show off their restoration efforts.
“It’s a British obsession, you know,” he said. “We like our industrial past, and I think, to be very honest, people think the past was better.”
Though, he admitted that the massive undertaking took a toll on things with his wife.
“I was going out there one day [to work on it], and my wife said, ‘Where are you going?’ And I said the tram. She was like, ‘Oh, that bloody tram.’”