Museum’s plans see trams back on track

SHUT since Friday, 20 March, the Ballarat Tramway Museum plans to run its trams along Wendouree Parade again from Sunday, 19 July.

BTM’s Peter Waugh said they could have operated under the COVID-19 restrictions of 20 people, but the group decided 50 was safer and sensible.

“It’s hard to say in the middle of winter that we can only have 20 people inside the shed and others have to wait outside in the rain,” he said.

“There’s more to do than just opening the shed doors again, but whenever the restrictions lift, we’ve got everything in place and we’re ready to go.

“In the short term, the museum won’t open because it’s a crowded, narrow space, but we’ll run the trams. Our main priority is that our volunteers are safe, so every one of them has COVID-19 awareness training.”

Passengers will be picked up and dropped off from the museum, and the shop will be open for ticketing so conductors won’t have to handle money or tickets on board.

Mindful of four-square metres per person, small trams can fit six people, medium can seat eight and the large trams, 10.

“It’s going to be a very personal, frequent tram ride when we run it. We’ll be insisting people are sanitised and leave their contact details. We’ll have all those facilities in place, and the tram will get a clean before a new group boards,” Mr Waugh said.

While the museum and tramway has been closed, two or three volunteers have been working on tram maintenance a day or two per week, getting ahead on projects. The workshop formally reopened on Tuesday, 30 June.

“We’ve done a lot of work on the electrical systems, they’ve been redoing the substation and some of the power controls. That has been really good because normally it’s hard to shut everything down while you’re pulling all that apart.

“We had Central Power come in, they straightened some of the poles out on the street along the track. That was a major undertaking with about six trucks,” Mr Waugh said.

“At our off-site storage area, there’s a new shed, so they’ve been working in there, putting up shelving, and doing preliminary restoration on a W-Class tram we got from Melbourne.”

Also throughout the COVID downtime, there’s been some large-scale Tetris inside the museum, with reshuffling of trams.

“A crew of two to three blokes have been completing repair on a tram where a part of it had been sent off to Bendigo.

“The tram’s been up on jacks, suspended in the air, they’ve put the parts back under the tram and have re-joined it to its wheels again. People may have seen a tram out on the track in the last two weeks for a test run,” Mr Waugh said.

“One tram has been sent off to Bendigo for repairs, and the boys had to escort that up on the truck. They had it towed through the streets of Bendigo by a tractor, so they got very excited by that.”

For some of BTM’s volunteers, it’s been frustrating not to share the tourist attraction as normal. The museum’s 1887 horse tram didn’t get a run this year, the oldest working tram in Australia.

But for other volunteers, they’ve simply enjoyed the opportunity to take a break.

“Some are itching to get back, and some have been coming up here from Melbourne to work on the trams and drive trams for over 40 years, so they’ve discovered there is a life outside the tram shed,” Mr Waugh said.

2021 marks 50 years since the trams stopped operating throughout the city, and 50 years since the museum started, so planning has begun for celebrations.

Most trams that travel along Lake Wendouree are over 100 years old, originally from the streets of Melbourne. They were sold to Ballarat between the 1930s and 50s.

“There’s a couple that have done over one million miles in the streets of Ballarat, and that’s not counting probably the one million miles they did in Melbourne before they came here,” Mr Waugh said.

“They’re still being preserved, and it’s the best spot to come and ride really historic vehicles.”

Visit btm.org.au. Find the Ballarat Tramway Museum on the south side of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens.