All-electric vehicles are clearly one of the flavours of 2017, but as DAVID JENKINS reports, they have been around for 110 years and were subject of several experiments from the 1970s onwards
It looks as though this may finally be the year of the battery bus. With more than 50 having entered service in the closing months of 2016 and at least 30 others on order at the time, chancellor Philip Hammond’s autumn statement promise of £150million for electric and hydrogen buses will surely add further to their numbers.
But the claim that Metroline’s five doubledeckers running on London route 98 are ‘a global first – a completely emissions free pure electric double decker’ (as the BYD press release put it) is stretching the truth somewhat — stretching it, in fact, by over a century. Indeed The Times reported the demonstration of an electric bus in Glasgow and London as long ago as 1893.
But for fleet operation, we turn the clock back to 1907, the year that the London Electrobus Company introduced the first of 20 open-top double-deckers on a route between Victoria and Liverpool Street. Recharging between journeys took place at premises near Liverpool Street, while depleted batteries could be swapped over rapid…
