Isle of Man Transport: Douglas Promenade Horse Trams

The only commercial horse tramway in the world still in operation runs along the seafront at Douglas, the Isle of Man's only city. Its southern terminus is a few minutes walk from the Steam Railway Station, at the Seaport Terminal. It then heads north, at a fast trot, with traffic on both sides, slowing down (and occasionally stopping) to let passengers on or off at a handful of stops in between the two termini.
It then passes the stables, where the horses are changed up to every two hours so that they are not overworked. The tram then continues past the Sheds, which we have a brief look inside and see the hand-operated traverser which moves the trams to the correct tracks inside, and finally it arrives outside the Terminus Tavern at Derby Castle, a terminus it shares with the Manx Electric Railway (which is coming up in my next video).
There were two out-of-service trams at the Derby Castle terminus: one is a Toastrack tram, the other painted in a different livery as it is the Royal Tram used when members of the Royal Family visit the Island.
All the trams date back to the beginning of the horse tramway in the late 1800s, but only includes one working double-decker which does one trip a day. Unfortunately I was never in Douglas when it ran so didn't catch it on film.
Hope you like the video, and the series will continue shortly as I'm trying to clear a backlog of videos for both this and my other channel (8spliced).

Category:

Autos & Vehicles

Tags:

• Douglas
• Prom
• Promenade
• Horse
• Tram
• Tramway
• Trams
• Tramcar
• Sea
• Seafront
• Front
• Derby
• Castle
• Terminus
• Horses

[brendanbutterworth]

Look at the state of that main road at the start of the clip. No wonder they use horse trams, you would not want to drive your car across that road surface