tbtc
Veteran Member
At the moment I guess the longest service in the UK is South Shields to St James on the Tyne'n'Wear Metro (running, as it does, via Whitley Bay) - if you discount the Metro as being "heavy rail" then the longest is maybe Rochdale - East DIdsbury on Metrolink?
But how do these compare to historic services (when many cities had their own extensive networks)? Were there examples of tram services running comparable distances? Did they even interwork between different "networks"?
Conversely, there are some relatively short tram services at the moment (e.g. Herdings Park to Sheffield Cathederal on Supertram, or Elmers End to the Croydon loop on Tramlink) - if anyone wants to play that game too?
For the avoidance of doubt, let's say we are talking about regular scheduled off-peak Monday to Friday services, so any "placing journeys" or emergency engineering workings etc can be ignored - "longest" and "shortest" can be by distance that the service travels by rail or duration in time - whilst some services may interwork I'd say that a journey "finishes" when it serves the same station a second time - e.g. if a Tramlink service from east of Croydon passes through East Croydon stop, runs round the loop and heads back to a different destination east of Croydon then I'm saying that this journey "finishes" when it passes East Croydon after doing the loop - however I'm happy to treat Monument in central Newcastle as being two separate stations, since the "east west" and "north south" lines serve different pairs of platforms
But how do these compare to historic services (when many cities had their own extensive networks)? Were there examples of tram services running comparable distances? Did they even interwork between different "networks"?
Conversely, there are some relatively short tram services at the moment (e.g. Herdings Park to Sheffield Cathederal on Supertram, or Elmers End to the Croydon loop on Tramlink) - if anyone wants to play that game too?
For the avoidance of doubt, let's say we are talking about regular scheduled off-peak Monday to Friday services, so any "placing journeys" or emergency engineering workings etc can be ignored - "longest" and "shortest" can be by distance that the service travels by rail or duration in time - whilst some services may interwork I'd say that a journey "finishes" when it serves the same station a second time - e.g. if a Tramlink service from east of Croydon passes through East Croydon stop, runs round the loop and heads back to a different destination east of Croydon then I'm saying that this journey "finishes" when it passes East Croydon after doing the loop - however I'm happy to treat Monument in central Newcastle as being two separate stations, since the "east west" and "north south" lines serve different pairs of platforms