Title: Around Derby by Trolleybus
Authors: Colin Barker
Publisher: Adam Gordon
ISBN: 978-1-910654-21-7
Specification: 305mm x 210mm, 192pp, hardback
Price: £45
Derby Corporation replaced its trams with trolleybuses between 1932 and 1934, undertook some further extension of the system and bought its last eight new vehicles in 1960. Just three years later, it decided on complete closure and the final service ran in September 1967.
Colin Barker has compiled this book — essentially a hardback picture album — with personal knowledge gained when growing up in Derby. He presents it on a route-by-route basis, drawing upon a rich selection of black and white and colour photographs from the earliest days to the final one.
He has been helped enormously by many trolleybus photographers’ desire to capture not just the vehicles in many of their images but also the overhead wiring that delivered the electricity that propelled them. In so doing, much other interest is in these pictures — buildings, shops, motor dealers and repairers, public clocks and other everyday aspects of British urban life 50 and 60 years ago.
There are other vehicles to savour in some of these pictures, as well as advertisements for the likes of lon…
