THE GALWAY/SALTHILL TRAMWAY

by Tom Kenny

The Galway and Salthill Tramway Company was inaugurated in 1877. The Town Commissioners gave the project every encouragement and extended the time limit in which the tracks had to be laid. The single tramline was two and a quarter miles long with 8 passing loops, roughly 250 yards apart. The rails were heavy steel, the gauge was three feet wide and the trams were horse-drawn, there was no electricity in Galway for another twelve years or so. The cost of construction was £13,000. The depot was in Forster Street and the western terminus was opposite the Eglinton Hotel.

The Irish Times of October 2^nd, 1879, reported that General Hutchinson, Government Inspector of Railways and Tramways, expressed himself highly pleased with the mode of construction and the manner in which the work had been carried out. “Yesterday, at two o’clock, the gentry of the town and the surrounding locality were invited to seats in the tramway cars on their maiden trips to Salthill, and the greatest enthusiasm was evinced on the part of the public, who assembled in thousands along the streets, and wished, in their own native simplicity a very long life and prosperity to the contractor and gentlemen connected with the Tramway Company. On their return from Salthill, where all were hospitably treated by the company, the Industrial School Band accompanied them dispersing some excellent music (as you can see from our first photograph): and, arrived at Galway, about 100 gentlemen sat down to an excellent dejeuner at Black’s Royal Hotel”.

They had 5 open-topped four-wheeled cars for the opening, each carrying 36 passengers. The top deck had iron railings and large advertising panels along the side. These were known as ‘decency boards’ as they stopped people looking up the skirts of ladies on that deck. The cars were horse drawn but they needed and extra horse to pull the tram up Kingshill. The last one was named Polly and she was stabled in a small shed at the corner of Beach Avenue. There was a service every ten minutes if traffic demanded it, otherwise every 20 minutes in summer and 30 minutes in winter. In those days, the last part of the journey was virtually in the countryside with occasional thatched cottages and green fields.

The company secretary P.J. McCarthy reported in 1901 that in 1898, they had owed £193, 15s 1d to their banker and £702 10s 4d to sundry creditors. “Since then, we have not only worked off this liability, but in the meantime renovated the rolling stock at a very large cost and spent a considerable sum on the permanent way; and today I am glad to be in a position to inform you that we don’t owe anything to our banker or anyone else and that we have a sum of £400 to credit on deposit”.

In 1888, they bought a single-decker covered-in tram for use in winter. It was pulled by one horse. Some of the problems they had were bad weather, especially in summer; the price of hay which effected the cost of keeping horses; repairs to the rolling stock; strikes by employees. The biggest problem was the weakness of the tourist industry. Nevertheless it was a very useful line and at the height of its popularity, it was carrying in excess of 100,000 passengers per annum.

It was an unusual tram system in that you would have heard a lot of Irish being spoken, and passengers going to market were allowed to bring chickens and ducks and the occasional piglet with them.

In 1910, a local man was travelling to Salthill with a friend from abroad when the latter missed a half sovereign from his pocket after having paid for the tickets. Suspecting that he had given it in mistake for sixpence to the conductor, he demanded that he should turn out all the money in his bag. The conductor showed his money but it did not contain the missing half sovereign. After a sharp struggle, during which the driver came forward and raised his whip in defence of his colleague, the missing coin was found in the conductor’s mouth.

 In 1909, the company bought five new cars with transverse seating on the upper decks but they only saw short service as the British Army commandeered all of the company’s best horses to serve in Flanders during World War 1. The company was now facing serious competition from petrol-driven buses. It was experiencing financial trouble anyway, but without their motive power, they could not function. There was talk for a time of running the trams on steam but it was not to be, so they closed down in April, 1918.

Our second photograph shows passengers alighting at the Salthill terminus c.1890. The ‘decency boards’ have been installed on the upper-deck railings but have not been installed as yet.

In its brief lifetime, the tramway had changed Galway as a tourism destination, opened up the village of Salthill as a resort and provided a very useful transport for the citizens of both.