Do you remember the experimental mini tram?
What year was this? What was the purpose of the experiment?
Did you ever travel on it?
What was its route? How long did the experiment run?
If you can furnish us with any information or memories, please leave a comment below.
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It was not that long ago, in fact hardly history yet! My guess, 2000ish, it just ran the length of New Road.
I was involved with the installation of this tram system and the route was along New Road. The experiment ran for the summer of 1994. It was called the Parry people mover, and used a flywheel propulsion system housed in the floor rotating at 4,000 and 1,500 revolutions per minute. Charging stations were along the way, and they were used to spin the flywheel. It was thought by John Parry that it would run on the Volks Railway; this never happened.
The now defunct Electric Vehicle Association used to put on exhibitions of electric and environmentally friendly vehicles. When I was interested in such things I was a member of the Battery Vehicle Society which was affiliated to the EVA. I went to one of their shows back in the 1990s and had a ride on a (or the?) Parry People Mover. Somewhere I’ve got their publicity leaflet. It was one of those things which seemed a good idea at the time but was somewhat impractical due to the delay involved in spinning up the power storage flywheel. If I remember correctly the flywheel ran on air bearings to reduce drag. Around the same time someone built a bike with a similar flywheel drive system but most people didn’t like the idea of having a heavy flywheel between their legs running at several thousand revolutions per minute. I think the idea in that case was that the flywheel ‘charged up’ going down hill sufficiently to take you up the next hill. The law of physics is against all these ideas, i.e you can’t get out more than you put in!
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