Interurban interlude

Out for a walk today and, in the extraordinarily beautiful sunshine, I was confronted by this scene:


Which reminded me of America's interurban electric railways. Which, in fairness to me, I haven't banged-on about for ages, so now it's that time.


Built mostly in a few short years as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, at their greatest extent the USA and Canada were covered by a network of more than 15,000 miles of these lightweight electric railways.


Offering a frequent interval service which was much more convenient than the heavy, steam railway, some of them were fairly fast, too -- but the majority provided 20-25mph average timings.


They were killed off by the rise of the car after the First World War: most died in the 1920s, while a handful survived into the 1950s (with the routes of just one or two still in use today, such as the Chicago South Shore Line).


The English interurban I stumbled across today was, in fact, part of the Tramlink system, 17 miles of tramway which stretch across parts of suburban south London.


Constructed using a mixture of existing suburban heavy rail track, new street tracks and short connecting links, Tramlink serves part of London with no Underground lines and with relatively poor rail links.


Despite the tourist image of a high-density city, London is a sprawling place, the majority of it made up of what were smaller settlements which were gradually swallowed up into the city: but large areas of open ground, parkland and greenery remain.


This stretch of Tramlink -- mostly between Harrington Road and Arena -- is particularly rural in appearance.


Even the more heavily-engineered double-track sections can look more rural than urban:


For me there's something very strange about British trams. From the very beginning of the railways in the 1820s, every single stretch of line had to be securely fenced-in.


So finding yourself on a pathway right alongside the tracks with no fencing is a very strange experience. Almost wrong, somehow (I'm so young that I wasn't born when the last trams disappeared. And Blackpool doesn't count, what with it being an armpit and all).


Back to Tramlink and my idle musings.


With no aircraft at all for several days now, it struck me how swiftly everything can change. Electric trams -- and interurbans -- were crushed by petrol-powered cars.


With peak oil not so far away, and who knows what political and energy crises to come, even though I suspect that we may never be so casually mobile again, maybe electric public transport might be on its way back.


How strange, if those interurban pioneers were right all along -- they just got their timing wrong by a century or so.