On Tue, 23 Nov 2004 10:16:49 +0000, Ian Jelf
wrote:

In message , David Bradley
writes
A recent visit to the Nottingham system showed that the trams were
spacious and have comfortable seats. They have completely level flat
floors. On the negative side, the ride is awful, particularly on
curves where the vehicles seem to go round in crab fashion on a series
of straights rather than in an elegant curve. This jolts standing
passengers quite badly. The ride is far worse than Croydon, Machester,
Sheffield or Birmingham.
I felt the Nottingham ride to be fine. It's certainly better than that
on the street running section of the "Birmingham" system (actually in
Wolverhampton), which is quite poor with a lot of rail corrugation. Of
the other systems you mentioned, all of which I've ridden on in the
past, I would only have singled out Manchester as being poor overall and
that was quite some time ago so things might have changed.

(I've also not done the whole of the Nottingham system, so maybe the
jolting you describe is in a particular position?)


Probably fair to say the ride isn't too bad on the straight, it's
mainly on the sharp curves, of which there are quite a few on the
street running section and just north of it, but the ride is
definitely truly awful on those bits and has been independently
experienced by a couple of my friends, and it really is, for all of
us, a ride quality that is very much below par.

Like many enthusiasts, my group of friends visit those few trams
systems in operation in the UK only on an infrequent basis and
therefore our tram riding experiences are limited for in depth
comparisons to be made. However we have had in recent years all too
much experience of London diesel bus travel, in clapped-out vehicles
with shot suspension on poor road surfaces driven by unskilled and/or
or bloody-minded drivers, and the ride on the Nottingham curves
reminds us of that (minus the fumes and the engine vibration).

All these ills or so easily solved with trolleybus technology which is
explained at this URL: http://www.tbus.org.uk/faq.htm. The interest is
there for trolleybuses, judging by the number of requests for our
detailed analysis on the West London scheme which can be found at:
http://www.cyberpictures.net/wlt.pdf. This PDF has just been reloaded
and is now based on a conversion from the Word document using CutePDF
which has made a better job of the tables than the previous version.

David Bradley


David Bradley