Worthing Tramocars
[1] "The service was the brainchild"[2] of Bill W. R. Gates, a businessman who had made his fortune in New Zealand before returning to his native England.
The development of nearby Brighton as a fashionable resort encouraged slow growth, helped in 1804 by the opening of a turnpike which connected the village to London and other parts of Sussex.
[6] It was also easy to control, as all braking, acceleration and gear change actions were undertaken using a multi-function handle similar to those found in trams.
[11] The body was designed around the characteristics of the chassis, with its transverse-mounted front engine, short wheelbase, small solid wheels and even weight distribution across both axles.
Meanwhile, he established a garage on Wordsworth Road where the drivers would perform maintenance on the Tramocars on Sundays, when no services ran.
These had larger wheels with pneumatic tyres, giving a better ride quality and a higher top speed of 25 miles per hour (40 km/h) at the expense of the low floor level: the entrance had to be placed higher and the steps were made steeper, "to the dismay of [the elderly] as they had become used to the lower floor level of the earlier models".
[1] The red and gold livery used on all the pre-Southdown Tramocars was also replaced with Southdown's cream and green house colours on these new vehicles,[22] although no others were repainted until May 1939.
[23] Also in 1939, Southdown began to replace Tramocars with conventional single-deck buses such as Dennis Falcons and Leyland Tigers.
[24] More Leyland Tigers had superseded them,[23] and wartime reductions in services (particularly in April 1941) reduced the peak vehicle requirement.
[27] The eastern terminus was soon extended to Splash Point, an outdoor swimming pool and leisure centre, as originally proposed in the licence application.
After West Worthing station, the second route ran back towards the town centre, passing the central library and main post office before turning there and returning via the same streets.
[33] After requests by shopkeepers in Rowlands Road, another major shopping street, Gates diverted one route to run along there in 1934.
[34] No further route extensions were made, although Gates had unfulfilled ambitions of serving the new housing in the rapidly developing Goring-by-Sea area.
[37] The last link to the "interesting event in the history of Worthing's public transport"[5] was removed in February 1946 when the former Tramocar route 1, now renumbered 11, was rerouted.
[11] After selling his business to Southdown, Gates retired and returned to New Zealand for some time before moving back to Worthing, where he died in 1947.
The original two vehicles were sold for use in Jersey in 1934;[17] the fourth was bought by a laundry in nearby Portslade in 1938;[22] a few months later a vehicle dealer in Middlesex bought the third and fifth;[38] numbers 6 and 7 both ended up abandoned in Sussex (at Shoreham Airport and on a caravan site respectively) despite being sold to a vehicle broker in London; Brighton Corporation bought number 8 and converted it into a mobile canteen;[23] and of the seven remaining Tramocars sold by Southdown in July 1942, four were used in Staffordshire as transport for wartime munitions workers and the status of the other three is unknown.
The replica was built at the Amberley Museum & Heritage Centre,[24] where it is housed as an exhibit and gives rides around the site.
