Weymouth Quay Tramway, 1996 Parry People Mover trial 16 mins.
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- Опубликовано: 30 окт 2017
- A trial run of the revolutionary Parry People Mover tram in September 1996, on the famous Weymouth Quay tramway railway line to the harbour quay. It is powered by a fast-spinning flywheel, 'wound up. by electricity. The trial was a success - as far as it went, but it was curtailed when the wheels hit hard detritus and chips in the rail slots.
Very sadly the council ripped up the entire length of this historic railway track in 2020. 
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Really interesting, I live near Stourbridge where two Parry People Movers provide a shuttle service on the town branch line. Used to be a class 153 before the class 139 PPMs replaced it.
I was on the harbour side that day... 8 years old...I remember this fondly.
This tramway could have been a great tourist attraction for Weymouth. Just look at how popular the trams are in Lisbon - and the rails in the road there don't seem to cause problems with other road users. Such a lack of foresight on behalf of the council who seem to prefer clogging up the roads with cars and lorries and motorbikes rather than adopt a more environmentally friendly transport solution.
That is so true.
Agreed. Blackpool is extending their tramway from the North pier up Talbot Rd to adjacent to Blackpool North train station. Weymouth missed an opportunity and have ripped up the rails I believe.
Yup - instead the Council ripped it all out. A tram from the train station to the beach/pavilion (theatre) could have existed very easily and would have been super, super popular
@@heinzer69 Well done Blackpool, I say. They clearly have more foresight up there than they do in Weymouth!
@@liamdeeney I totally agree with you, it would have been a fantastic tourist attraction. I very rarely go to Weymouth nowadays but would definitely be a regular visitor if I knew I could go for a tram ride.
Excellent video! I am very interested in the weymouth tram way. Lived hear for a long time and all ways liked the fort of a tram running.
It's that much larger than a car, that it takes 3 traffic wardens to write it a ticket 😂
This is good solution for abandoned heavy rail lines or ex freight lines. Back in 1994 Swansea council looked into running them but putting the infrastructure back is prohibited. The best use of a Parry People Mover at the moment is the Stourbridge town to junction trains. So Weymouth quay would be good apart from mixing them with cars and bad parking of vehicles (including boats) means it's a bit of a no go. They should look at Burton on Trent to Leicester via Coalville.
About 50 years ago at a CIT meeting I suggested to the then Chief Inspecting Officer of Railways that SR emus should be retro fitted with flywheels to conserve energy. He rubbished the idea because of the risk of the flywheel disintegrating at speed and injuring people. Apparently it's OK now.
Not really, the number of flywheeled powered vehicles in the world remains extremely low. The risk of fragmentation is taken care of by essentially using a great big reel of tape instead of a monolithic block (if it grenades, then all the kinetic energy gets wasted in the tape unspooling and snarling up inside), but that's still a hell of a mess to clean up and creates quite a bit of heat, and there's issues over the gyroscopic effects on vehicle handling (so only really good for rail vehicles) and the amount of energy that can be stored per unit weight (another black mark against use in road, and even lighter rail vehicles like the PPM). Fifty years ago, and even twenty, flywheels seemed like a viable alternative to battery storage, but lithium polymer cells and the like have rather leapfrogged them and are now the more practical option.
That is really a strange story, because the Southern Railway CC1 class electric locos (BR Class 70) built 1941-45 used a flywheel for energy storage to keep them going over short non-electrified sections like gaps at crossovers. If this guy was Chief Inspector of Railways he seems to have been remarkably unaware of this historical precedent.
They used a motor-generator set to convert third rail electric to traction current, and the flywheel kept the generator going over the gap.
1990's equivalent to an HV jacket. A black leather!
We were just as careful in those days!
A bit of track prep work wouldn't have gone a miss
Yes, that was acknowledged at the time.
So why were the tracks not cleaned out beforehand?
They were cleaned out, but not enough. The big trains used to crush and displace the detritus with their weight, but this tram was too light for that. We wanted them to come back but hey never did.
Parry and the Weymouth Line - two things that were never destined to survive.
Not so. Parry trams are very active, and Weymouth Quay tramway would have survived were it not for official short sightedness.
@@StuartMorris7 Whatever you might think might have been is really irrelevant. The Weymouth Quay Line is gone. It never had a chance. Parry People Movers no longer have a web site, and there was a move to force closure at Company's House this month. The third PPM unit is as stuffed as it has been for the last several years, flywheel technology has now been made obsolete by improved battery technology - and the new VLRT units seems to be smoother, better equipped and generally all-round upgrades on the old PPM ones - with the evidence on the new company's website strongly suggesting that the PPM units are not going to be about for much longer.
59.9p for a litre of unleaded..........
Where were the people being moved by the perpetual motion machine?
Fred Stiening still waiting for a perpetual motion engine to be invented!
The laws of physics need to be changed drastically so that a perpetual motion machine can be exempt from thermodynamics and hysteresis, which render it impossible in our universe.
Hmm, I expect its top speed was rather more than 2mph, but what was it? Also the flywheel sounded like it spun down rather readily just when manouevring back and forth a few tens of metres at low speed.
Plus if the tram tracks are simply laid along normal roads, here, with all the typical issues of them getting filled up with debris, and they don't go off anywhere that a typical road vehicle can't, ie the tram never truly becomes a light rail vehicle running along narrow offroad alignments (like those of Wolverhampton/Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield, Nottingham, Edinburgh, Croydon...), PLUS it's a dinky little thing like this which can't even hold as much as a regular single-decker bus (when most modern trams beat double-deckers for capacity)...
...I can't help thinking, what really is the point? Why not instead have a low speed, town centre shuttle minibus that uses the same flywheel technology instead? Just needs a slightly more sophisticated setup for charging at each stop, but after that it sees all the benefits that saw the old-world trams lose out to buses in the first place, as well as being zero emission and not having to bother with batteries... And it would probably be able to carry more people too. Probably weigh less and so go further on each boost-up to boot.
ruclips.net/video/CY6pEVFrWEk/видео.html if you want to see them in use. 20mph is the in service speed. Class 139
So just the same as the PPMs that actually went into use at Stourbridge? I kind of got the impression they were capped at 20 because that was the speed limit of that branch line itself, and they could almost reach that even in the (reasonably steep) uphill direction. Would they have still been limited to that on the flat, running around the Weymouth tramlines, or might they have been cleared for 25~30 at least?
Shame this never worked out a lot of towns could do with tram networks save on pollution
Those wheels are too small
I have no connection with the company, but this was a prototype back in 1996. See the latest versions here: friendlycreatives.co.uk/ppm/
Sorry to say the council are ripping up the rails !!
goddam tracks, nearly wiped out on my little motorbike every day going to work in one of the charter fishing boats
Sorry about that, but every day? Did you forget about them?
nope, i had a little 125cc bike with skinny wheels and trying to get across at the harbor you are mostly running parallel to the track ans it felt like my wheel would get stuck crossing them. also they were incredibly slippery when wet
Erm if you decide to ride a bike on roads with railway lines then complain about them it’s a bit stupid, the lines were there many years before you
An interesting video of another lost opportunity by another narrow and short minded council. Thanks for posting
They are in service elsewhere, Look up the Class 139 used at Stourbridge
For those with busy lives, you can skip the first five minutes and miss nothing of interest
Or, you may wish to see the preparations.
No camera phones! Miss those times.
I don't see the point of running something like this on the line, then or now. As I see it, the only value the line could have now is as a heritage tourist thing. Imagine running top+tail steam tank engines and, say, four coaches in a back 'n' forth shuttle during the summer season. That's be a winner for the town, surely? Maybe there could be room for the occasional excursion from elsewhere, but a small steam tramway would be massively popular I suspect.
I imagine the costs - replacing the track (because it's in such a poor state now), studies, health & safety measures, acquiring the loco+coach, somewhere to store said loco+coach, maintenance - would by far outweigh any possible benefit from doing it. This line is at best a curiosity, nobody is going to want to go for a short journey around some buildings to nowhere when there's a very scenic heritage line not too far away, which goes to a very nice seaside resort.
well that was 16 minutes of my life I will never get back
Please expand . .
Mark Parsons paint drying?
I could speed it up 4x if you like, for anyone who's impatient. I just put it up 'as was', I can't change what they were doing!
A solution looking for a problem!
Not at all. With investment it could have been a winner. Weymouth is a big tourist destination.
@@StuartMorris7 Sorry, I missed your reply. How could it be a winner with a single track? The Stourbridge shuttle works because the journey time is only three minuites. The last video I saw of a Weymouth train took over 20 mins to get between the Quay and town stations - with no stops on the way. Meaning the minimum schedule would be a 1 hour or so service. Would tourists really wait that long between services? The investment for an alternative circular routing would be prohibitive!
LesD9 it looks like it is about 2km so 20min trip is 6kph. Surely, even with street running, the Parry People Mover could have done 20kph or 30kph.
(Didn’t a full sized train have to travel at a much slower speed because its momentum due to its weight increased its stopping distance and the damage it could do?)
@@tjejojyj You could be right. The limit to the video was the need for staff walking in front to check if any parked objects would foul the train! Another bylaw that would need to be changed I guess!! I'm still not convinced of the economics.