Friends Meeting – It Could Only Happen in Belgium: Part 4

Andrew Braddock returns to discuss 150 Years of Trams in Antwerp.

Broadcast live from the London Transport Museum.

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Right well good evening and welcome everybody um before we actually find out what did happen in Belgium um we’ve just got the usual trailers to announce first of all if you haven’t already done so can you please make sure your mobile is Switched Off or in silent mode thank you

And if the fire alarm should go then again please leave quickly as you can either by the fire exit at the back which will be lit up or this one here by me at the front okay we’ve got quite a few trips and talks coming up over the next few

Weeks the first one um which was just over a week’s time on the 26th of October with Andrew Johnson there’s good news and bad news good news is it’s fully booked so the bad news is if you haven’t booked I’m afraid you’ve missed it this time round um but for those who

Have booked it’s 2:00 in the Holden room at Acton on 26th of October shortly after that on the 29th of October we have a trip the green line experience where you can ride on Route 715 from Hartford to Guilford on cl4 um the trip departs from Harford East at

9:30 or if you can’t get there for that time of the morning it will go from woodgreen underground Southside bus stop at 1040 we then have an additional event which isn’t on our website at the moment but on Tuesday the 31st of October we’ve been kindly invited to attend an omnius

Society meeting and the subject is the trick of making of making London buses feel more like a treat now I think that’s going to be some trick actually actually but um there we go the speaker is Tom cunning cunnington and Tom is the head of Business Development at

Transport for London and he tackles a challenge for all bus operators on how to make bus services more attractive the venue is the Allan Baxter Gallery which is downstairs at 70 cowcross Street London ec1 m6j which is close to fing station and it’s uh 6:00 for 6:30 what

I’ll do actually is I’ll ask Jim Jones to put the details up on our website as well so if you wanted to go you you can refer to it back then then four weeks tonight here at coven Garden at 6:15 Leon Daniels will be along to speak

To us um he’s had to cancel a couple of times so it’s really great that he can come and talk to us and he’s going to do um a presentation on his preservation interest and also his world transport link so I think that’s going to be a fascinating event and I will commend

Early booking if you wanted to come along to that one and so to the main event our speaker tonight Andrew bradic I don’t think really needs any introduction he’s known to many of us through his involvement with the friends and also his organized trips Andrew had a distinguished career

At tfl where amongst other jobs he was the head of the unit for his disabled passengers and I know B in quite a lot of innovation in that area and took it Forward he’s also held a number of directorships relating to transport Mobility Light Rail and one that I

Didn’t know about that came up he were on the uh UK bus driver of the Year Association for many years but his long life interest is in trams and tonight he’s going to entertain us with It could only happen in Belgium part four 150 years of trams

In ANW so can we give Andrew a warm welcome [Applause] please thank you Graham and it’s just changed to lady and gentlemen thank you um you stole my thunder Graham because I was going to hold up this and say if you’ve got one of these and it rings

Within the next hour or so you’ll be paying for my next trip to Belgium and the really good news is if the two of them rang you could split the cost 50/50 so uh welcome I hope that you’ll find this interesting and if you don’t you must complain because I do like

Complaints here we are 150 years of TRS in antp this one of the more modern cars was running around for some months beforehand uh in an all over advertising strep some of the windows covered unfortunately I wouldn’t allow that uh to let everyone know what was happening

On Sunday the 28th of May this year uh it’s the fourth such event that I’ve given presentations on and in case you’re confused the other three were firstly the unia anational de transport public the worldwide public transport Association based in Brussels which marked its 125th anniversary in 2010

Where there was a fabulous event largely between the tram Museum if you know it in Vol and the Terminus at tan with an Eclectic mix of trams old and new I think the oldest there was a Paris car which last operated in 1937 so there it was in 2012 10 running

For the first time it resistance boxes on the roof got very very hot smoke was coming out of them so every hour this Old Paris tra was shunted into the uh Museum siding to have a rest and then it went round again but it did keep going

But it was a superb event I think in many ways encouraged by that um the TR Museum people especially working with the undertakings in Brussels and the other cities has gone nap as it were on continuing these sorts of great shows with lots of historic cars running with

People able to travel on them so we had 150 years of Brussels trams and therefore Belgian trams in 2019 fortunately it missed the pandemic by Year and that was extremely well attended I think they reckon there were about 300,000 people attended probably 25 maybe 30,000 of which could be class

As tram nuts and the rest was the ordinary people coming out for a fabulous event the third such event which I presented on last year was the 40th anniversary celebration of the tra Museum in Brussels m M transport which was another great event with many of you I’m sure would have

Been there with a great mix of trams old and new so tonight we’re talking about antp and I can put you on notice that there’ll be another presentation if the friends will have me sometime next year because gent is marking 120 years of its tramways word About Belgium um one of my

Favorite countries holds a number of Records uh I think the best record is having gone 17 months without a government whilst talks of former Coalition were going on and in those 17 months the economy improved so why do we need governments you could ask yourself that question

Pretty seriously in the UK um here on the left of course you see the little green spot let’s see if this fancy thing works yes look here we go here’s Belgium uh on the scale of Europe the lighter green of course of course is the EU

Sadly without uh one part of the British Isles involved in it anymore which is a tragedy this is the flag of course and this is the flag of the EU because of course the headquarters of the EU is in Brussels Belgium although a small country with a population of about 11.3

Million is complex um and it’s always been complex it was created allegedly in a barber shop in 1830 when the uh Spanish were quite Keen to get rid of the their interests in the low countries and the Dutch didn’t really want the Dutch speaking part of Belgium and the French didn’t really

Want the French speaking part of Belgium so they made it into a country and it became a constitutional monarchy uh and of course a standard European style democracy um what’s interesting about it is that it’s always had this split more or less across the middle between the Flemish and the woon Parts um

I think it’s also interesting that if you go back to the time of the Balkan Wars and the crisis in Yugoslavia there were many many belgians and I have probably two or three hundred Belgian friends who were beginning to worry that perhaps this would eventually lead as the idea of these separatist

Nations came across the continent to Belgium dividing I personally don’t think it will ever happen for a number of reasons um but they are quite different the Flemish part is generally the more developed uh there’s much more in the way of Countryside and farming in the in the southern part and of course

This beautiful countryside if you’ve been to the Arden it’s a fabulous region with some great sausages I can recommend those um from 1830 literally until 1991 the country existed on a kind of federal handouts basis so that if the federal government gave one Belgian Frank to FL it had to give one Belgian

Frank to wona and Brussels got one or 150 at the same time it was only in 1991 with regional government that they created these much more powerful authorities obviously flandin in the north and wellone in the South um that really ceased the way in which public transport investment had

Always gone later on in the presentation I’ll talk to you about anp’s premetro system and how that began and that was literally a child of this a Frank for you and a Frank for the South a Frank for you and a Frank for the South interestingly it might not have happened

Under the newer system from 91 and we’ll come back to that too so at that stage what’s known as Brussels Capital Region the brown blob here capital city the city population is actually smaller than Anor it’s only about 400,000 where antp is well over 500 but of course it’s not

Just the city of Brussels it’s all the communes around it so what’s known as the capital region is about 2 million so it’s a a pretty substantial City by European standards um the the places which still have trams Brussels itself antp gent the coastline from NOA through osten to d uh

Shalwa the so-called light Metro which we’ll say a word or two about later and down here in the Arden there is a little it was diesel It’s Now battery operated tramline for the caves at gr danan um the age is building slowly a modern Tramway having lost all its um

Lines in the past that’s due to open underline the word due next spring I think I’ll believe it when I see it it’s been slow in the making but it will happen um interestingly in the Far East of the country you have these two patches of German speaking in Belgium

Just to add to the complications it’s a great place drams in antp um just a few words on the history the very first uh Horse Tram service kicked off in May 1873 that was a private company but with some backing from the municipality the city council and eventually it was made

Into a larger company the cgta at the start of the last century and the first electric TR ran in 1902 cgta became the Tao tranan van anpin and om gaving in 46 still technically a private company but with a fair amount of the shareholding in the hands both of the city and the

Region uh in 1961 we’ll come back to this later a very historic moment because arguably this was the turning point in trams in antp they might have gone the way that most of ours had gone by the six and certainly a lot more in France were

Still going at that stage but it was rescued 63 ta became MVA this was a um combination of region and city as a publicly owned undertaking with more Public Funding and quite a lot of political direction that hadn’t previously applied 1970 the construction of the premetro began we’ll talk about

That more later and the first line opened in 75 in 1983 they completed the premetro tunnel under the river which opened up um a lot more uh passenger traffic on the west side of the shelter in 91 with regionalization of the government uh miva merged with other

Undertakings in the Flemish region to be part of deline as the trading name the flam of matai as its legal title that made a lot of difference of course because mea in uh antp and mg in Gent had different colors ANP was largely red gent was largely blue uh the coastal

Line had always been part of the visile the sncv an amazing Network probably the densest network of secondary Rail lines anywhere in the world I’d be happy to be challenged on that but I think it was literally you’d find the visile everywhere meate standard gauge some so-called Cape gauge

1067 uh millim steam diesel electric massive electrification program that was still being completed in the 1960s and then almost all of it was swept away save for the coastal line the light Metro around shawa and so on um the penultimate premetro tunnel entered service in 2015 it is said that the whole network

Will be completed in 202 26 but the remaining section which is built and has been built for about 30 years I think may not open because it’s controversial uh in terms of the impact it would have on services so here we have 150 years uh to celebrate of trams in antp the

Parties who put all this together the tram Museum which has wonderful premises at gron and hook a former tram Depo on the east side of the city center uh was the um leading um participant deline obviously the Transport company you have to have their authority to run around in

Lots of old trams with all kinds of strange people driving them the mea is another public body which is effectively the conduit through which funding by the regional government largely but some federal money as well goes to preservation of Heritage assets including transport deul tram the guys

On the coast who did the superb restoration of triple 94 we’ll see that later and tram 2000 if any of you know it is an excellent little tram French language tram and bus magazine comes out 10 times a year you can buy it from me

If you want to uh and they are big supporters of these events and obviously they cover them in detail the event was centered around the newer parts of the antp network this line here number one there was always a number one historically but it finished in the 60s and was reopened in about

2015 all the way up to a new park and ride at lbal uh and as part of that development there was a new line built here to havenhouse where there’s the old shipping company’s headquarters now turned into an amazing Museum and Islander which as the name implies is an

Island that was formerly dockland so it’s a bit like parts of the East End of London converted for commercial year used um in principle these lines were used because as you’ll see in a moment there was a bit of spare space to park up a line of trams as an exhibition

Fixed exhibition during the day as well as facilities to turn them when they were running in passenger traffic around the network so here you can see uh from the leaflet you’ll see the cover of that in a moment what they were up to so the exhibition was on this section of track

Just in here which in principle is only service tracking there is a plan to run a regular service along that connection but it hasn’t happened because the city council’s run out of money so conveniently track there probably about 3/4 of a kilometer maybe even a kilometer was available both sides to

Line up all the exhibition Fleet the tram parade started at the Terminus at Haren house and operated down and into the Island urning Circuit which is tracked both ways so plenty of flexibility there then this yellow box which is effectively from uh Island you down through the city to National Bank and

Back up was operating every 15 minutes with historic cars and modern cars for the public to use for the first time I think in all the history of these great events in Belgium they actually charge fairs up to now everything’s been free which I’ve always said to the organizers most of whom I

Know you’re mad you could make pots of money doing this and they did so it was 25 for an all day ticket covering everything Horse bus Horse Tram electric trams as many riders you want or five just for a single uh journey and as you

Can see there was a service with a horse bus service with a horse truck tram just looping around this area of the island you circuit here and that was all great fun this is a in larger scale obviously so this gray track is not normally used in service line number seven was

Continuing to turn as it always does around that Loop in and among all the historic stuff which was spread out along the tracks in London Strat two pieces of publicity were very widely distributed a leaflet that gave basic information on what was going on and the second one was a very useful booklet

With pictures of all the cars in the parade and historical information on them and there was a really good website that had all this in English as well so things kicked off with um an amazing Contraption I think you have to call it that really uh a horse bus and

These these horses come from a charity that looks after former industrial horses so these technically are horses in retirement they used to pull Brewery drays uh and they I’m told that these four house horses had never met each other because they came from different parts of the organization that funds

Them but they seem to get on quite well and they did a tolerably good job of pulling the horse bus along so this was shunted into position on the tram track south of the Haren house turning Loop to lead the parade it’s interesting in that it’s a

Replica of a car actually built in London by Alexander Dodson and it was one of half a dozen or so for the very first horse bus lines in antp uh and the replica was made not for this event but for other historical functions that were going on in and

Around Anor at the time so obviously it was very handy to have in this parade beautifully produced machine very comfortable to ride on and the horses seem to enjoy it next in line was a A Horse Tram not a genuine one Unfortunately they were all lost to scrp Merchants uh towards the

First world war but this is very very similar to the first horse cars that ran in the city and it’s actually built out of a a Brussels trailer car um with lots of cutting and shutting to make it look the part it’s quite flexible because in

Addition to the ability to be drawn by horses notice you only need two horses for a tram on Rails but four for a bus it’s all about friction and uh it can be towed by a towing tram and it was bought to and from the site by one of the work cars

Rather than the horses who got into a horse box and went home for tea so a fabulous pair these two um we were talking to the guy you can just see here who is an expert horse driver not necessarily tram or bus but anything to do with horse drawn traction he’s

Someone who gets involved uh because he has all the expertise of treating the horses and I guess feeding them lots of sugar lumps next in line was the first uh electric tram more or less in original condition it was a Works car from the’ 40s but from 74 onwards it was given to

The apprentices in the then tram workshops in antp um to make it more or less original you can be picky about some of the things the motors aren’t original the wheels aren’t original original but the look of it is as it would have been when the first electric car service started in

1901 here it is coming everything came from different parts of the city the TR museum at gronen hook probably produced about half uh others came from the workshops around the corner at pun andeline and others from the other depos Hoboken um so everything was assembled with military Precision in the right

Order at this point heading north towards the starting point so that uh the event could be run as planned 305 was the second series of electric cars originally with open balconies but rebuilt later um also converted to a works works car and again set aside in the I think 60s probably

Earlier than 200 and in a very long project eventually came to be as it is there in pretty much wartime condition and you can see it’s got the typical masked headlight of a wartime operation then we have 5351 um there was a big batch of cars built in 1903 some

But not all of which were mod ized twice 48 and 67 some of these when I first went to anwp in about 1969 I think practically half the fleet looked like this they were they were still running and still running quite well similar uh type a little bit later

Build built themselves in their own workshops they had the skills to build complete cars uh originally this was for one of the Regional visile lines although built by the city tram company and eventually for some reason transferred to the city in 1920 and finished up as a onean car the

Rebuilding at that stage turned it into a single ended vehicle by the 60s antor had become a network entirely with terminal Loops so you didn’t need double- ended cars lots of interesting discussions in the traway fraternity about the advisor ility of single-ended cars terminal Loops etc etc

I would be heavily in favor of single-ended cars and terminal Loops the more doors you have the fewer seats you have the more things you have to go wrong Etc plus of course the what I call the Zurich mentality in Zurich they’re always loving to talk to London bus

People to find out why every bus in London never seems to get to the Terminus they’re cut short for some reason or another and my friends in uich say with considerable wisdom of course we do not do that here in Zurich because we do not have the facilities to turn

Short of the Terminus and the passengers do not want us to turn short before the Terminus so single-ended Loop terminals please uh this is a motor trailer set again a rebuild from 1903 modernized some some of them were actually modernized three times and this was in the final condition still running

Uh till about 1966 notice the trailer almost but not quite low floor very low slung with small wheels um and it was originally experiment experimental to find out the impact on boarding times and stop dwell times another of my favorite subjects uh with fewer steps not necessarily no

Steps so this the front car would have had four steps into the saloon this one only had two and it did make a difference 181 um there was a big program in the mid to late 30s to modernize the network by having um better cars with enclosed balconies with

Heaters something we didn’t have on buses in London till the late 50s and more I suppose looking the part but you can see that it’s pretty much the innards of a much older car with modern bits and pieces stuck either end I mentioned um earlier the impact

That PCC cars had in the 1960s I’m sure you know the story the president’s conference committee of the street railroads of the United States in the 1920s got together to create a new kind of street car tram to us that could compete with the motorc car streamlined fast efficient automation as far as

Possible um very fast acceleration etc etc that was the PCC some 5,000 were built in the United States some of which still run in San Francisco and Philadelphia and Boston um but that number was eclipsed by the quantities built in Europe and indeed in Russia under licens the Russians didn’t pay the

License fee but they copied the PCC technology um the belgians theirs were built and the Dutch pccs were built by BN in Bru la bruel which eventually became part of Bombardier and they dutifully paid the license fee I’m sure if you’ve been to my presentations before you will know the

Story that the United States government in the 1990s maybe the the early 2000s was closing down what was called the transit research corporation which was the body to which license fees were paid and they were horrified to discover some millions of dollars sitting in the accounts and even more horrified when they discovered

That most of it had come from communist countries bit of a scandal uh that was tatra of course the Czech tram Builders with their tseries PCC type cars were exactly the same as the and the same as the American ones and they paid all the

License fees so uh 2000 was the first of what became an ultimate total of 166 very much European style Bodywork compared to an American PCC they had American lookalikes in the ha as you will know and some on the visile that ended up in Belgrade when it was still

Yugoslavia but a very um Epoch making moment in Anor tram history because we could have lost the whole network if it hadn’t been modernized in this way with some decent tackle to run after the first I think 50 they realized that passenger numbers were growing unlike the UK where they were falling and

They’re still growing in Belgium and they’re still falling here um there was a need to put out two cars together so they went in for multiple unit operation only ever with two cars not three like Dresden and some other these German cities so a big success and uh something

To celebrate the people loved them it saved them money on maintenance but it cost them money on running costs because these things drink the juice like there’s no tomorrow when they finished with pccc’s in HTM in the hag they were pleasantly surprised that the electricity bill went down by a third uh

Why because they have in between the two sets of Bogies there’s a circular drum like Contraption in the middle of the car which is the acceleration unit and it is phenomenally powerful and very very effective so this is a shot from uh the operation of the special service around

The city for those who wanted it shared between old and new so here you have the first of the pccs uh and the newest type so-called stats liner car built by C the Spanish manufacturer who are pretty big in Trum car production these days there’s a couped set um the typical

Antwork configuration very few running single units the vast majority coupled in all day service uh very fast and very good people movers this is an odd ball it’s actually a PCC from gent where there were no well there were some Loop Loops but most terminals were stub ends so they had

Double-ended pccs from the 1970s on 54 cars compared to 166 in uh antp uh these are running at the moment in antp because they have a line which is temporarily terminated short of the regular destination where there’s no Loop so these have been borrowed from gent to operate probably until next

Summer in Anor on line 12 so here we are back with the all over advert tram for the festival they like with modern cars to give them names so this is the hermeline they also exist in Gent and they both the Gent ones and the antp ones run

During the summer on the coast to make up the numbers for very high loadings in summer weather so this antp type is single-ended the Gent ones are double-ended 31 m long built by zans but with parts from both alstom and Bombardier so it’s a bit of a mixed bag a type not quite

Unique to Belgium because there are similar cars in Dresden but they’re about the only place where these exist pretty successful um has obviously bought lowf flow technology to the city for the first time and that’s helped with stop dwell times if you’re accidents etc etc

Uh so there are 65 of this type uh all in the same length configuration the next batch to come along from Bombardier these are arguably similar to the cars in um Nottingham and one or two other places so-called Flex City 2 type not quite the

Same as the flex City 1 which is the cuden cologne Stockholm type 62 of these some of them are 32 M long some of them 43 the 43s are largely confined to the newish main north south uh route to the park and ride at lbal so 62 of these and then mines are

Changed obviously in the modern world of competitive tendering you don’t perhaps just look at the price but it’s very influential you also look at build quality aspects the things that want in your own personal specification and bearing in mind that both this new type the stat liner from calf and the two

Predecessor Albatross and hermeline were not just for antp hermalin is also for gent uh the albatross also forgent and this type is also for the coast traway and in fact the coast line no longer the longest traway in the world gosh it’s been beaten by a combination of lines in

Los Angeles but only by about 3 km so it’s still pretty long and this type in double-ended configuration is now running along the coast and it’s replaced all the previous BN Types on the coast in the last few weeks so the design is a kind of a compromise between

What they want on the coast what they want in Gent what they want in antp so you never get 100% of what you really want but these at the moment there’s 58 of them are single-ended and 30 4 M long but next year there’s a batch I

Think it’s 28 coming which will be 44 meters long so they like the idea of longer cars uh incidentally um in the background there the I’m going to forget the name of the architect haja abib female architect great design sadly she died of a heart attack not so long ago but she literally

Plonked this amazing structure on top of the old I thought I’d got a picture of it but I couldn’t find it the um shipping companies offices which are a beautiful old almost Gothic style building but it kind of works it looks looks stunning architecture in antp is quite interesting we’ll come back to

That last but not least I mentioned poer tram this is the visal type of car that ran the lines largely to the north and west of antp up until 1978 so this car was finished on the antp network in 78 and restored by the polr group it lives

At NOA on the coast but it travels extensively it’s been running in Gent it’s here in um in Anor and it went to Brussels on a low loader because Brussels is standard gauge for the 150th anniversary there a really nice tram very solid very heavy but the so-call

Standard uh was the biggest type of electric car at least running on the vast visile network works cars there were a few Works cars in the parade this one is actually a towing vehicle uh the darker yellow at the front 8826 and it towed the replica Horse Tram

Trailer to and from the event so it had a useful function as well as looking pretty in the parade inside the museum there’s a trolley bus antp had one trolley bus line the six that started in 1937 I think and ran until 66 this isn’t actually one of the antwork trolley

Buses it’s a leage one but it’s pretty similar uh so it’s painted in antwork colors to show what it would have been like on the number six here’s the interior of the museum gron and Hook was opened in 1903 uh for some of the first elect

Elect tram lines in anwp slightly to the east of beram station on the way into the city from the south Southeast um it’s an amazing structure because as you see there are no uprights so unlike Stockwell where you have no uprights and mass concrete for the

Pillars uh this was a a massive string of Steel to make sure no uprights were needed this is now uh no longer in use as a service um facility so it was given over to the museum and this was part of the creation of flatham the flam tramin

Autobus Museum so that it could have the funding from meta to take over the depot uh and have the roof rebuilt incidentally that was funded by the regional government because it was very leaky and this is a fabulous um arrangement to have connected to the tracks of a big city Network a Depot

Full of old cars with facilities to maintain them lots and lots of volunteers to show people around and drive them and conduct them so it’s a it’s a model Arrangement also inside just out of interest is a gyro bus a weird idea uh in this box on the roof there were three

Prongs that came up to connect with a kind of overhead structure they haven’t got one of those sadly you can just see one of the three here so this had a massive flywheel under the floor uh and the idea was that collecting current from these pods energized the flywheel that then

Ran the bus to the other side of the city not a great success this was actually used on a visile line to the east of antp not for very long uh there was one small Network in evedon in Switzerland that lasted from about 1950 56 till 64 I think but the biggest

Number of them even then it was still in in the 10 was in the Belgian Congo leopoldville was blessed with gyro buses for a period quite a short one I think um during the latter days of the Belgian Empire I mentioned architecture and the um main station in an ANP and Central is

Just a fabulous structure it’s like a real way Cathedral um I did try and find some interior pictures for you but they’re on another file somewhere we’ll do that another time but it’s a stunning um piece of architecture and amazingly about 15 years ago they tunneled completely below this structure to make

A new connection because this was always a Terminal Station from the south and although there was a line going north it avoided Central Station so we had the crazy thing that the so-called Benelux trains from Brussels to Amsterdam didn’t serve antwork because there were there

Was no facility to do so now they do and there’s actually three levels you’ve got the original level uh here with terminal platforms then there’s a through level for local services and at the very bottom they through platforms for the high-speed line it’s absolutely incredible mention of architecture um

This structure on the left is the so-called mass m as Museum andom a very new facility in antp uh very close to the island terminal point and in fact on the right is a view down here you see the Horse Tram which is going around the

Loop this way and here you see the horse bus which was going around the loop that way coming back each ride taking about 10 minutes um absolutely stacked out all day long very enjoyable experience so mass is uh great because if you go to the very top you get a fantastic view

All over the city there’s an excellent Cafe and it’s very accessible every every floor is linked by escalators so it takes you no more than three or four minutes to get from the bottom to the top no queuing for a lift you just keep going up on the escalator well worth a

Visit if you are in the fine city of antp the local newspaper uh The Gazette Anin produced a very nice supplement they have a weekly supplement called DNA and this one was dedicated to 150 years of tra in anpin um I laughed at the tingling because I was one of the

Tingling twins in 1980 when I was learning to drive trams in Amsterdam uh my instructor Jim schy and I were rolling around the city constantly being monitored by the control room who were looking and we could hear on the radio all the talk of oh where are the

Tingling twins ah they are at mol station no no they are at Herra and they were tracking us everywhere the tingling twins so great fun and you can see in this lovely black and white picture uh up until the 1960s almost all antp trams and indeed Belgian trams had seated conductors we

Never did that we always had conductors roving around but with a big platform um by The Doors the idea was everybody piles on then they pass the conductor and they buy a ticket and he just sits there he controlled the doors nearest to his position of course so it was a great

Supplement uh and actually The Gazette also produced a book about 6064 pages I think called tingling which celebrated the 150th anniversary celebrations very good so a word about um antp today developed over 150 years this is one of the best networks in Europe it is a fantastic model example for what the

British should have been doing and should still do but I have little confidence that either Tor or labor governments will ever get this right this network is bigger than it was in the 1940s it’s been modernized uh and the core change is the So-Cal called Petro Network which I’ll

Talk about in a minute these stations with stars are interchanges on that premetro Network so with Federal money in the 1960s and70s antp started to tunnel and they tunneled and they tunneled and they tunneled and although this first section from diamar to grun Platz was opened in

1975 it was another 12 years before the the second section opened even though the tunnels had been built and left empty the federal money provided for basic Tunnel construction not for tracks not for overhead lines not for platforms not for the vehicles to run in them that all came separately so quite sensibly

When there was a Belgian Frank for the Flemish and a Belgian Frank for the walloons Anor made sure it got plenty of Franks and dug lots and lots of tunnels um the most significant piece of tunneling of course was under the river here is the shelter you probably know

Antp is a huge Port up here I think it’s the third largest port in Europe Rotterdam 1 Hamburg 2 antp 3 laav 4 I’m prepared to be challenged on that I’m not a port expert but it’s bloody big um so all this area is port with the

Shelter serving it so this this tunnel was significant because it effectively reopened part of a visile line that went way out to the west and although this area was green fields and Villages it’s all been developed so our problem with housing is interesting compared to the belgians I

Live in Northeast Hampshire where almost all the land being used for new housing is exmilitary so you have the problem that it’s full of Munitions and that has to be cleared first then they discover it’s full of all kinds of stuff the Army used but never told anybody

About that has to be cleared as well and then of course you’ve got 30 50 100 200 houses built in the middle of nowhere no hope under British uh practice of a bus service being run because unless stage coat can make a profit they’re not going

To do it local authorities got no money to fund it so for every hundred houses there’ll be 100 cars and probably in the model World there’ll be 120 cars we are St staring Bonkers what happened here is that lots of new development went in after the Tramway had been built common

Practice in the Netherlands when I was uh learning to drive in Amsterdam it amazed me that we went every four minutes to a place called new Schon which was the extension of tram line 2 in Amsterdam and for five years five years there were no houses but the rails

Were there and the trams ran empty because it’s a message that you need to convey when the first people got the keys to move in they didn’t buy a car they didn’t need a car CU they saw the every time they came to see the house under construction to discuss what shape

They wanted the kitchen to be and where they wanted the bathroom lights to be there was a tra going past every four minutes you it’s fabulous isn’t it we are Bonkers so all of this but the second um fantastically successful feature in this city is park and ride

You have a huge Park ride at lbal at Maxum at vam at vam at bout at Olympiad at hhof and at well there are three now here there’s one at Riata linkova and Mel now it’s fascinating I think Steve was with me when we did this we were uh

Dining at a nice restaurant I know out this end here actually hofan in the village of direct and we went to get a tram back into Central antp at about4 11: at night and all the trams coming the other way every 10 minutes 44 M long were absolutely full

And standing going back to the park and ride people do not drive anymore in and around this city and it’s it’s wonderful in fact most European cities you walk around and you don’t see traffic you don’t see white Vans delivering Amazon is it you know you don’t see congestion

In the way that we do we’re Bonkers we followed the American model drive everywhere you know why not it’s free it’s cheap yeah so this is a great place in having uh virtually no traffic but everybody gets around public transport use has grown consistently practically exactly the same proportions that it’s

Fallen in the UK so this move to Big Park and rides has been a great success there’s another one being built here now at Z and there’s a plan for a ring line which will come from olympiada around here with another park and ride here go

Up to relink vom gam and then go off into new Housing Development land in the Northeast suburbs so um I strongly recommend it the other bits of fancy color on here simply mean tracks are being rebuilt here into the heart of the old city and a beautiful Street here

With some of the finest architecture in the world leave alone Belgium and Europe along planted in marus uh this is I think scheduled to reopen in the spring so a lot of development is going on premetro uh as I say it started with digging from diamon to coron plats

Before they went under the river the second piece of tunneling was around this corner from uh Nash place called National Park Round to Astrid the third piece was out here and this only started to be used in about 2011 I think uh and this part was built in the late 80s and

Eventually opened in the late ’90s this yellow section is tunnels uh and the station connections to and from Street at Stenberg and C bis are there but there’s no track and there’s no red wire it’s cont controversial because the plan had always been to take one of the lines

That follows this axis to go along this axis and then to swap the route they travel at the end and it’s apparently not popular with the public I’m not 100% sure why so it’s it’s on hold and this is what they’re talking about the last section to complete in

2026 there will definitely be no more premetro and there will definitely be no conver verion to full Metro as happened with some of the premetro lines in Brussels um this is because European public transport people learned a fantastic lesson in the 60s they thought if they were going to

Certainly if they were going to retain trams and modernize them it made sense to go underground to leave the streets for cars bunkers uh they’ve now realized the best thing to do is leave the streets for a tram and get rid of the cars and that’s not been at all controversial in

Most places they’ve done it by stealth in Amsterdam there was a wonderful campaign where the Press were full of stories that they were going to have toll roads the whole of Amsterdam would be ringed with toll booths and you’d only be able to drive into City if you

Paid a toll and the people rose up as only the Dutch can and they’re very tall as you know and they shouted loud that if the city council did this they would blow up the toll booths so the city council said okay that’s fine well we

Won’t do that and they the second plan which was always plan a so you introduce something far more controversial to get through what ought to be controversial and in the end wasn’t which was increasing parking charges to the point where they are double the tram fair and

The road Network in and around the city of Amsterdam is such that if you drive from point A in the outer suburbs to the city center it will take you three times as long as getting on the tram so so what do people do they go on the tram so

Uh this is it’s it’s interesting but apart from the obvious need for a tunnel under the river and I guess under the main station is literally plunked here between ASD and DMR it’s a bit confusing so when you come out of Central Station right here depending on whether you’re

Going this way or that way or that way you either go to ASD or to DMO neither of which is called Central Station it’s a Bel puzzle um so I guess there would have been some tunneling under the station to make good connections for through routs

But I don’t think any of this would have been would have been built but it’s there it was paid for years ago and it’s now in use and it’s been a massive success and it’s led to more than doubling public transport use um this is interesting because it’s a a very early

Uh map which you can see is kind of familiar with what we’ve just talked about under the river okay the line goes beyond so this was the tunnel mouth as it were this looks familiar this is the one bit scheduled to open in 2026 Etc

But notice this um the plan here was to go on tunneling all the way to literally zout and go tunneling halfway to the harbor area yeah so what we looked at earlier this is Island here hence the expression Haren house is just there and

The park and ride at looked B is way up here so in the end they came to their senses and reopened as it were line one the tracks were already here but some extra bits but these tracks which had been removed in the 60s were put back in

A slightly different place to make the new line one which comes out of the tunnel here and tunnels its way down to the South so common sense prevailed in the end um so an interesting an interesting tale a very successful Network in modern terms that’s

It if there are questions I will try and answer [Applause] them yes can I uh Andrew yes sir I think on your list of tram Services yes on Tram routes in Belgium you missed one yes Tramway to the Lane oh yes okay based every in the

AR yeah I accept that the good old TTA and to be honest I always regard that more as a railway than a Tramway but that’s personal well it’s got Ultra whales on it yes yes the other thing I would like to say is that top the northern Terminus of the

24 was used and you showed lots of pictures of it to line up all the museum Cars For A procession the service cars while they were lining up actually used the non-service track down to Amsterdam St you’re quite right they did yep and thirdly your uh picture there of the

Newspaper yep the tingling yeah I was actually interviewed on amp on ANP local radio radio minurva whilst waiting for a ride on my favorite tram which happened to be visal 9994 Y and what they did they asked me the question in English I gave them an answer in English and then they

Interpreted it for the uh anwp listeners very fine well done Roger and there’s been some recent changes for for deline as well I was only there four weeks ago um it doesn’t look as though line 11 is going to reopen at all um there’s lots of debate within the local

Press about that plus the tunnel under the the scaler is going to possibly close for six months um and they’re just trying to find possible ways around that by just shutting overnight or whatever it will make the works really last two or three years if they do that yeah um

But some of the the actual um structure the like the new opera station is already falling apart y um which is quite worrying that considering the amount of money that has gone into it I suspect there might be some Rack in there we’re not alone in having rack um

It’s a little bit like the Amsterdam toll booth story you have to bear in mind that deline is owned and funded by the regional government and it has a whole series of standoffs with the city council one of which is that the city argued there was enough money in the

Current Regional funding for the line to open the line that was going to come up ital and finish at Island year using those tracks would have been pretty inconvenient for the parade but never mind um but the line say that’s not true deline will um how shall I put this they

Will be quite clever at planting some scare stories like the 11 closing the tunnel for six months or a year in order to get some common sense out of people Belgium politically is a an interesting place as I say not least because it went 17 months and ran quite well without

Government um there are a lot of tensions over City Planning compared to Regional planning they don’t always match up I firmly believe the the 11 will reopen I think the um it’s it’s basically relaying the track in the Skelter tunnel I think that probably will come down to Summer closures for a

Couple of years maybe evenings and weekends you have to do these things you know no no infrastructure last forever you’re right about the uh the state of some of the Metro stations is pretty poor but again it’s a function of how much money is available and with uh the similar

Pressures that our government’s had oil prices inflation Etc there have been cutbacks so it’s fair to say that there’s some pretty um nasty looking setups that need attention but uh the good thing is loads and loads of people use that system so what’s this suddenly putting

Something here for me I don’t want that I don’t want to Wi up no um I was coming back to the just covering the point that Roger made the the 24 obviously couldn’t go up here at the point where the parade was being assembled so it came along

Here and it turned on the Outer Loop of uh uh Island you all good fun no more questions thank you Andrew excellent information given you recall when I was at Kent Tony Francis here um you helped us considerably in planning of Medway Metro a light rail system through the builtup

Aira of mid Kent it was dismissed by steer Davis gleave I think it was somebody from there there was no business case for this and that was the end of it although we had some delightful trips around Belgium Etc looking at what they were doing um what was the business case for these

I mean somehow the numbers didn’t add up to the being counters here um don’t they have bean counters there could you how long you how long have you got Tony um this this is something that fascinates me um take take Nottingham here’s a good example a pretty good Tramway opened in

2004 quite a struggle to get it built in the UK with all the strange rules um does carry nearly enough people because the buses compete with it why because when it was first opened the private Finance initiative um that gave birth to it included Nottingham City Transport with its part owner TR

Dev uh gosh when they went out to Tender as they have to the beauty parade for building the two new lines or line extensions to be strictly correct all that changed Nottingham City ceased to be one of the shareholders it immediately removed the Tramway from its maps and immediately rejigged its

Network to compete with the tram and that’s allowed of course deregulation etc etc um but the really fascinating thing is that the struggle to get funding from hm treasury for Nottingham and any other UK Light Rail scheme was at least partly styed by The treasury’s View that if these things were success

There played up to be fewer people would will drive so there will be less revenue from fuel tax and fewer people might even own a car so there be less money from roadx and you have to factor those two things in in the equation in the Belgian and Dutch system and they’re

Pretty similar French and German are very different but Bel Belgium and Holland are pretty much the same almost the first thing the equivalent of the treasury takes into account is environmental factors if there are more people using tram and buses there will be fewer people driving tick the Box

Yeah tax implications doesn’t matter the environment counts far more than it does here what have we had a prime minister isula the biggest oil field in the North Sea at the point where we have a climate emergency where he’s rolled back the date for electric cars much to the

Annoyance of the people who build them who’d been made a promise and the promisees renaged on you know Bonkers um the the other huge huge difference between the UK and practically everywhere in Continental Europe is that subsidy is seen as a bad thing in the UK

But a good thing over there I.E you make sure the fairs are reasonable so that people will give up using their cars because it’s a cheaper ride um and it’s interesting the extent to which that thinking creates unexpected problems tfl for the last four years has been in a

Massive funding Cris because when the pandemic hit and everybody stopped using the underground buses the whole tfl network still running no passengers you’ve got all the costs and none of the revenue London’s um fabox recovery ratio public transport people talk about this worldwide is about 84% so in other words

84% of income that comes from passengers has gone the equivalent of that figure in Paris is 22% so it’s a much less serious problem and the French government didn’t B an eyelid to fund ratp through the crisis of coid but look at the absolute blood on the- floor mess

Between a labor mayor and a conservative government gosh we’re really good at those things aren’t we I mean politicians become extreme extremely childish they’re like fouryear olds yeah and the thing that amazes me is that Khan has completely failed to tell people don’t complain about ules I was

Going to start it in 2027 but I’ve been forced to start it sooner in order to get funding for tfl that’s what actually happened I don’t know why Khan hasn’t said that it’s a disappointment from an otherwise good mayor damsite better than the previous one so it’s a it’s it’s a

Whole uh it’s Pandora’s Box really but anywhere you go in Europe public transport counts for something in the UK it’s been deregulated privatized marginalized faffed about with put under different owners you know it’s it’s rubbish really the structure is wrong a lot of the operation is pretty poor uh and the funding is

Bunkers be careful now there’s a question from a finance man thank you um I think I saw on one of the maps um a TR stop called Joe English do you know if there’s any story behind that is it the new map no it’s one of the larger Network Maps the whole

Network yes later in the presentation that one no that one there yes under b b where are we looking on the there’s two lines a s and a pale green line the green yes and further up yeah um about 3:00 keep moving keep going keep going keep going north north Northeast Northeast from

There here here further on further on oh Joe English yeah um yes how long have I got to explain the Belgian sense of humor uh Joe English is a it’s a kind of folklore story that I think is unique to antp um I don’t exactly remember the origins but people will say you’ve

You’ve done a Joe English and it was reckoned to have come from this this part here so you know it’s a there’s all kinds of funny names you’ll find that uh sort of don’t belong I can’t remember where they are now uh yeah yeah yeah yeah yes Burg n noof was the least

Popular politician in anp’s history so as tramstop named after him you don’t forget that he was the least popular yeah so yes Joe English it’s fun isn’t it and there’s another one called drink yep which is not liquid it’s it’s just the name of the local area yeah yep

Anymore Mr KS this will be a challenging question I better have a drink cheers um the point you made Andrew about um transport infrastructure going in um prior to development um which you know pure transport planning terms sounds a really good idea I H how do you how do you make

It work in reality though I mean the what the example I can think of in London is the beckon extension of the DLR when when it was opened literally some of the stations there had single figures in terms of Passenger numbers for the first year or so I guess perhaps

Two years you you accept that there’s going to be a cost um because I know it best and I was there throughout it happening line two in Amsterdam the extension from slon to new slon was 26 kilomet um the additional cost of running even at peak hours every four

Minutes through a Patty field to the new terminal Loop was about one it was between 1 and one and a half% extra cost so that was just accepted because it’s the right thing to do the big cost came however when uh you need um a couple of hours to

Explain the way trams are scheduled in Amsterdam but they work on the basis that you get to a point where you have your break and you you have your break at the Terminus and you hand the tram over to another driver who’s just finished his Brak okay so at every

Terminal point there’s a coffee house and because this 1.2 .6 km extension was going nowhere the city didn’t build a coffee house and there was a strike uh and effectively drivers refused to go beyond Schon so there was chaos because of course the timetable wasn’t jigged for turning at the old

Terminus track was still there obviously no problem and there was a coffee house there and so the that I mean two basically went into meltdown and within four days a Coffee House was built un opened and the trams were restored so the uh the people in gbb the Transport

Company in Amsterdam always have the joke that the uh the line to extension there was a a very heavy cost overrun because no one budgeted for the coffee house but they budget it for everything else it’s accepted the hag is another Exemplar there’s lots and lots of new

Housing South of the city in he towards Del um when they built the line to not Dorp they did exactly the same thing and in fact the estate agents who were selling houses in this new area when you got one of their brochers the first

Thing it said was line 15 runs every six minutes you know I mean where would you find that in the UK although there is evidence um there’s evidence from Manchester which has been published that shows the value of housing has increased as a result of Metrolink extensions similarly Nottingham these things will

Happen the best thing of course is to harness that money uh John um my friend from tfl LT uh knows well because he was general manager of the Jubilee line when it was extended went through a place called buray which was a bit of a dump

But there was quite a lot of land right for development in buray and the Reckoning is that property developers collectively made about six billion pounds as a result of the Railway being open to B why wasn’t that money clawed back exactly Toronto is the best example they started building their subway

System Metro underground call it what you will in the 50s and they introduced a new form of tax that as the land values increased some of the money I think it was 20% maybe even 25% rolled into the city coffers to fund the next line yeah so go on the Germans do that

Through a very different system complicated because it’s German um but much the same happens in cities like cologne they progressively extended their tram and they have a a type of premetro um funded from property taxes along the new lines it makes sense you know why don’t we do it we don’t do it

Because I might be a little bit controversial here most of the proper developers fund the conservative party and labor doesn’t really understand what it’s doing yet but it might it might anymore oh yes thank you Andrew for uh your usual Splendid presentation if I can add to your

Anecdotes I remember when the store belt uh bridge and tunnel were being planned in Denmark I happened to be over there with uh a course from woking and we went to talk to the planners of this Crossing and I said to them how is it that you are

Anticipating a tremendously fast by UK standards uh building of this new link to replace the fairies um you know what what does your business case look like what’s your cost benefit rate of return and the planner looked at me and he said why would we need that

Said it’s quite obvious unless we get a modern crossing the island is going to go into economic ruin and as you know the island is is now uh flourishing again I’d like to ask you about uh integration I expect you were expecting that integration in two levels first of all

The the service level how much coordination is there in anwp with the mainline Railway system and the bus services and even uh because I think they’re becoming more widely used now in um in Continental Europe than they are here but uh DRT Services run on Modern principles with strong it

Support but the second and even more inter for important integration if we’re going to defeat climate change or at least make it livable with is bringing together a sensible policy which develops transfer to public transport through coordinated physical planning or spatial planning coordinated highways and parking management and of course public

Transport expansion both at the service level and at the infrastructure level done John you could try and do that that in five minutes um I need to take you back to 1964 a labor government was elected in 1964 and not long afterwards Mrs Barbara Castle became Secretary of State for

Transport if that’s what they were called in those days and it might not have been um and she was on a mission to radically transform Britain’s public transport particularly in urban areas she was concerned even back in those days about the contrast between London and the rest

London of course had had since 1933 the lptb a public body everything coordinated though I would pick holes in quite a bit of that coordination but we’re not here to do that today um and that’s what led to the creation of the ptas and pte in the big cities outside

London Manchester uh Liverpool West Midlands and the Yorkers um the whole effort was based on the mbte MBTA Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority in Boston and I’ve always said that that must have been an easy job for civil servants to send Barbara to Boston where they spoke English they should

Have sent her to Hamburg where they don’t in exactly the same period two things were happening in the USA 90% privately operated transit systems in City largely bused because they’d done away with the street cars in private ownership were collapsing the revenue was gone everybody was driving but cities realized they still needed

Public transport for people that don’t drive poor people need public transport so the MBTA was actually created to municipalization Bus and Rail companies alongside its own publicly owned street car system and some early Subway Lines um as a model it was the wrong thing for the UK why because what was happening in

Hamburg was the creation of the very first VZ vunda literally traffic partnership in Hamburg there were 47 different operators of buses trams trains faeries you name it uh and they were all B together under one ticketing system system the principle from that far off day back in Germany was that if

You’ve got one of these you can go anywhere yeah it’s sitting in your drive and you just in the old days you put something in the door now you just click something or you’ve got you got an app you know whatever uh it’s brilliant isn’t it it’s absolute emancipation you can go

Anywhere if in order to use public transport you have a ticket for the train a ticket for the ferry a ticket for the bus a ticket for the tram and they’re all different and different prices you are never going to compete with a motorc car so what the vun did

Was standardize the Tariff it didn’t matter that there were 48 operators some of them privately owned some of them state owned some of them municipally owned and that did not change they all had a sticker with hvv hamburger V bunder nothing else changed sadly what happened with the creation of the pte

Take SEL neck as the best example Southeast Lancashire Northeast cheser basically all the municipal bus companies were swept together and they all became Manchester City Transport which is a Pity because Manchester wasn’t the best operator Lee Corporation was probably the best operator Stockport was probably the second best but the

Concentration of that merger and it was just seen as a merger of all the transport companies was about unions and rates of pay it had nothing to do with ticketing there were some early Brave attempts at coordination particular with the railways very difficult because the railways sing to a different set of

Tunes so we failed at that early stage to look properly at integration now if you I could send you but it’s massive a very complex map of Germany that shows you every square kilometer of that large country is covered by VZ uh and there is now a thing called the

Deutschland ticket which for €49 a month you can use on any kind of public transport except the really fast inter city train connections anywhere in the land and it’s brilliant and the French are talking about doing something similar we’ll be 100 years arguing about how you share out the revenue which is

All bollocks sorry pardon my French um again it’s a it’s a mentality isn’t it the the philosophy we should have had like Germany in the 60s was my God look at what we’ve done we’ve Unleashed this thing called the motor car and like America we built more and more roads now

The difference in the state anybody driven along Route 66 yeah so about a third of the Mother Road still exists yeah the rest of it is bypassed it’s moved it g because it’s a country with absolutely no land problem so if the road’s not wide enough you just widen it

You know I mean we’ve got they built a newb bypass in 1934 they built a second bypass in the 1960s and they built a third bypass in the 1990s or 2000s you know we’re mad um unless you have a ticketing system that brings everything together it’s not going to work in antp

It’s simple because since 1991 it’s all been one operator in terms of local public transport you’ve still got the state Railway so Del line has a ticketing system that’s valid across the whole of Flanders and so-called Tech to SP on commune in the French speaking part the wonan Transport company has

Something similar they both participate in a Thing Called mobib which is semi oyster but with knobs on um with a Mobic card you can use the Train the bus the tram Etc most people interestingly and Belgian Railways are quite different from ours they are uh much more freestanding in the sense that people

Who commute into say Brussels get the train to Central Station or zad or Nord or one of the other stations because there’s a much bigger span of them and luckily since 1952 they’ve had a railway that goes right through the middle of the city you haven’t got Victoria watero London brri

Houston in a ring where everybody goes oh you know where do I go now you get on a bus or a tram or you take a taxi Etc so that’s helped so um the Dutch system is is better still the of chip cart open bar War chip cart you buy a card you

Load it with money if you’re only going to travel around locally you load it with5 if you’re going to use the railway you have to have a minimum 25 and it bites it off as you go along you tap in and tap out everywhere and you only need

One yep you only need one if you imagined that in Nottingham you want to get from a to be and it means the tram and then the Nottingham City bus and then a Trent Barton bus and then maybe a train you will need four tickets so you know do you have four

Cars in your driveway I’m going to Derby today I’ll use the red car I’m going to Mansfield tomorrow I’ll have to use the blue car yeah I uh one of my oldest friends in Germany um I hope he’s still alive I’ve not heard from him for a while he’s well

Into his 80s helmet Boozer who loved to introduce himself to people as Boozer by name and Boozer by Nature um I used to go and see him a lot in Essen and one time insisted that I should go and stay with the family in their house in Braden

High a nice suburb served by Trump to the south of Essen so I spend an entertaining weekend with family booer in bronheim and there are four cars on the premises three on the drive one in the road outside so you know car ownership big thing people like cars so

Over dinner on the Friday evening we have a very animate discussion about what people are doing the next day helmet has decided he’s going to take me on a tour of the breweries in Dortmund so we definitely weren’t driving his wife was going to visit a friend of hers who’ recently been

Widowed also in Dortmund but well to the south of where we were going she had one question for helmet about the integration between the two tariffs of the Rin Ru region and the Ry SE region y so so all good that’s all sorted she’s not driving the daughter 20 something

Was going to visit a university friend in kence and she said you know Andrew even though our Railway fairs are so high they’re about half what they were then about half what they were in the UK um I will not drive I will take the train to see Liliana in kence and the

Son uh younger not sure what he was doing but he wasn’t using a car either so I said what have you got these bloody cars for you know why what have you got oh they then all get very defensive about how useful a car is to do X or Y

Or Zed you know I’m uh the sun is saying I’ve got a big box of papers I have to pick up from the University in Bon I must drive because I need this you blah blah BL but basically they don’t use their cars Mrs Thatcher made the fous

Mistake of saying the British were underprivileged because they owned fewer Motorcars per head of population than the Germans if however she looked at the use of motorcar she would have been fascinated to discover that the Germans Drive their cars between a third and a half the number of miles a year that we

Do in that period incidentally there was a fabulous some of you would have heard this story before I apologize there was a fabulous advertisement on German TV for the new S Series BMW which had a scene of a nice house probably like helmet’s house in Braden night it’s dark

People gone to bed sun rises everybody wakes up in the morning front door of the house opens out smart out steps smartly suited businessman with keys to Seven Series in his hand walks towards it throws the keys in the air puts them in his pocket walks across the road and

Gets on a tram and the by line that comes up in the advertis from the great Bayan mot BMW is saying the man who is intelligent enough to buy this motorc car is intelligent enough to know when not to use it and I I fell in love with that

Advert and I was determined to find out how the why how why the great BMW had done this and eventually with help from mercedesbenz I track down the marketing director of BMW and I meet him in stutgart in fact I take him to lunch in stutgart at London transports expense we

Sat in a fine restaurant in stutgart and I went through this love of this advert ET and why whatever you know he said yes it’s good it’s an environmental message is very powerful and it’s very important to we Germans the environment you know you I don’t think you’ve heard of it in

The UK through we haven’t heard of it at that time um and I said that’s really really interesting but you sell that car in the UK okay you got steering wheel on the other side but it’s the same car you sell it in the UK why don’t you

Advertise it that way in the UK and he looked at me very thoughtfully and he said I’m so sorry to have to say this Mr Brado we were very formal even though you are from the great city of London it is because your public transport is simply not good enough

Tick the Box tick the next box and the box after it’s true isn’t it it’s true can we ever change it I was 75 um two weeks ago I think I’ve now reached the point of saying no I I don’t think we ever can we’ve had this you know

Wonderful kafuffle about let’s not build hs2 let’s instead spend the 36 billion look through the numbers mainly on roads if in fact I recommend you open up on the Department of Transport website there’s a thing called Network North yeah which tells you where all this

Money is going to be spent some of it’s going to be spent on building a tram extension to Manchester Airport oh hello didn’t that open in 2015 some of it going to be spent on a tram extension in Nottingham to Clifton South didn’t that open in 2011 I mean it’s just eyewash hogwash

The whole thing it’s bollocks my French once again but seriously um it’s promised that leads at long last will get a mass transit system whatever that’s meant to mean you know buses with stripes or something uh I I don’t think it’ll happen we just we don’t

Have we we don’t have the nouse to understand public transport if you’re going to um and I thought about doing this once if you’re going to become a public transport manager in Germany you would have to have certain qualifications you would have to have been to the technicial hook schoa for

The lior B ha whatever um some kind of qualification that doesn’t exist in the UK we have a couple of universities that are averagely good on transport lra Aston there maybe one in Scotland can’t remember but they’re not serious they’re not like the technici H School

In carlsro you go there um to become a qualified public transport person you understand all these important things about coordination integration developing public transport links before you build the houses all it rolls off the tongue you know Ste we’ve never done it and I I fear we never

Will thank you is that good night seriously any more questions no good well no I’d just like to thank you Andrew for a fascinating talk a fascinating question and answer session we learned a lot and the one thing I’m going to take away is that none of what

You said was either the French word or rubbish thank you very [Applause] much e