The opening few weeks of 2025 have seemingly seen the West Midlands Metro being used for target practice by various other road vehicles with a number of collisions having been reported. Most of these have been relatively minor but still cause service disruption and then the inevitable tram repairs.
Two trams which have recently been involved in incidents have been 54 and 56. The collision which involved 56 is not known but it has recently been seen sporting a new side panel. This is one of the named trams (Amman Ahmed in recognition of a local volunteer who won the 50for50WM contest) and so it is currently without this name on one corner.
For 54 its collision saw a truck involved and led to the tram getting a scratch on its bodywork all the way from the end door to just short of the far end of the tram. Obviously not a major collision but still another issue caused by the interactions the trams have with other road users.
56 sporting its new panel at Pipers Row on the way to Wolverhampton Station. (Photograph by Andy Walters)
Off-topic but that’s a poor destination display in my opinion. It looks like “U’ton” to me, not brilliant for strangers to the area. Surely it would’ve been better to use Stn for Station, allowing space for a more meaningful abbreviation of Wolverhampton.
The only problem with that would be when St Georges reopens – If they used a longer abbreviation for Wolverhampton, Stn would be fine for Station, but St Georges probably wouldn’t fit on one line.
The Urbos 3’s use Aerial as their display font, not sure what the Urbos 100’s font is.