The Trolleybus Museum at Sandtoft is taking delivery of its equivalent of the 2008 Tornado A1 steam locomotive — a Czech-built replica of one of the earliest trolleybuses to operate in Britain. It will be unveiled to the public at the end of June.
The original vehicle on which it is based was supplied to Keighley Corporation by Cedes Electric Traction, which was registered in London to sell the Mercédès-Électrique-Stoll system of trolleybuses.
This system used a four-wheel ‘troller’, developed by Ludwig Stoll from his father Carl’s unsuccessful design, which ran along the top of a pair of overhead wires to collect and supply power to the trolley vehicle by means of a flexible cable. Usually, only one pair of overhead wires was used and when two trolleybuses met they had to stop for the drivers to unplug and swap their trollers.
These vehicles had electric hub motors designed by Ferdinand Porsche, who later founded the Porsche car company and designed the prewar Volkswagen ‘Beetle’ car.
The original chassis was built in the Austro-Daimler factory in Wiener Neustadt, Vienna and after being imported to the UK in 1911 it received a body built by Bayleys of Newington Causeway, London. It was demonstrated th…
