Saturday 12th February 2022 – mark that date in your diaries as that was the date that passenger services between Bull Street and Library in Birmingham City Centre finally started running again. There were 202 days between the last day of service on 25th July and the first day of the resumption on 12th February with trackworks and then tram shortages causing the suspension of services.
In case you weren’t aware there had been no passenger services between Bull Street and Library since Sunday 25th July when from 1900 works on installing the junction to the Eastside extension at Bull Street and relaying tracks along Corporation Street got underway. This was expected to be a three-month closure but the end of October came and went.
Testing on the newly relaid sections did get underway during early November but there was still no sign of passenger services when in mid-November came the news that not only would services not be running beyond Bull Street they wouldn’t be running at all because of the discovery of cracks on some of the trams. Whilst services resumed to Bull Street from mid-December there was still no sign of them running to Library.
Enter January and it was announced that they would sufficient numbers of trams to operate a service to Library by the end of the month. But with repairs and commissioning of extra trams taking longer than expected this date was missed and replaced by 6th February. That was another missed date though with confirmation two days previously that it wouldn’t be happening and at this stage no new date was announced except to say testing would be taking place to Library and services would start as soon as they can.
And as soon as they can has ended up being Saturday 12th February – and confirmation this would happen only came on the previous evening. Its not yet a full service as trams are only running every 12 minutes for most of the day and then every 15 minutes in the evening seven days a week but at least it’s a start to what will hopefully be normality and a period of boring nothing really to report operation.
The first day saw nine trams in service with 19, 21, 22, 23, 29, 34, 36, 39 and 42 all allocated for use.
- We will have more photos from the return of trams to Library in a future main site update of British Trams Online.