{"id":14556,"date":"2016-05-11T21:17:18","date_gmt":"2016-05-11T20:17:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/?p=14556"},"modified":"2016-05-11T21:17:18","modified_gmt":"2016-05-11T20:17:18","slug":"the-end-of-san-francisco-trams-in-the-uk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/?p=14556","title":{"rendered":"The end of San Francisco trams in the UK?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the early part of the 21st century two San Francisco Muni trams made the trip across the Atlantic Ocean for a hoped for new life in the UK but that hope now appears extinguished with news reaching us that the last remaining car \u2013 <strong>1226<\/strong> \u2013 has now been scrapped in Derby.<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->It was 2002 that <strong>1226<\/strong> and <strong>1326<\/strong> made the journey to the UK with Manchester Metrolink set to test their suitability to add capacity to the network with, at the time, only a fairly small fleet of T68 and T68A trams available for use. <strong>1326<\/strong> went directly to Manchester &#8211; arriving there on 11th January 2002 \u2013 with <strong>1226<\/strong> being diverted to Derby where it was set to be checked over by the Railway Inspectorate to see whether it would meet UK safety standards.<\/p>\n<p>Sadly it soon became apparent that the Muni cars would not be suitable for either Manchester Metrolink or use in the UK \u2013 some reports suggesting their safety standards were not as good as other vehicles running on the streets. Problems were also experienced with testing 1326 in Manchester with a number of derailments and also the realisation about how much would be needed to bring them up to standard (although <strong>1326<\/strong> did manage to reach Eccles at least once on test \u2013 a photograph of this run exists in Superb \u2013 A Tribute to the Manchester Metrolink T68 &amp; T68A Light Rail Vehicles). <strong>1326<\/strong> was scrapped on site in Manchester once the project had been formally cancelled.<\/p>\n<p>As for <strong>1226<\/strong> this remained in Derby at the premises of Stored Energy Technologies where it could be seen stored and open to the elements for a number of years alongside the Derby to Birmingham railway line. This was until the start of May 2016 when it was reported that the scrapman was on site reducing the tram to a pile of metal and thus bringing an end to San Francisco trams in the UK.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the early part of the 21st century two San Francisco Muni trams made the trip across the Atlantic Ocean for a hoped for new life in the UK but that hope now appears extinguished with news reaching us that &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/?p=14556\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14556"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14556"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14556\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14557,"href":"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14556\/revisions\/14557"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}