Behind me is the Gisborne District Council Testing Station where you currently go to get your car’s warrant of fitness. But 100 years ago, this building was quite different entirely. This is where you’d find Gisborne’s trams.”

The testing station in Carnarvon Street was previously the tram barn, where the trams parked up at night to charge. I’ve been interested in the trams since seeing pictures of them on the National Library website, and I had questions, Where are they now? Why did they stop? Why does the council occasionally dig up tram rails when doing roading projects?

Oh, and if you are wondering why I am wearing the hat and tie in that first clip, well, it would only be fitting to the time, as that’s what everyone wore on the day the tramway officially opened on the 16th of April 1913.

To fully understand the history of the tramway system, we need to go back a bit further than 1913, to July 1910, when the Gisborne Borough Mayor, William Douglas Lysnar, was in New York talking with Thomas Edison, yes THE Thomas Edison, the inventor.

Here’s a picture of Mr Edison in his Bailey battery electric vehicle and I believe the other person in the vehicle with him is Mayor W. D. Lysnar.

Here also is a picture of Thomas Edison with one of his Edison Batteries.

While in New York, Mr Lysnar saw the Beach Tramcars equipped with Edison’s Nickel-Iron storage batteries, and decided these Edison-Beach battery tramcars would be a great option for Gisborne - because our town was relatively flat.

This is one of the things that made Gisborne’s tramway network rather special - although trams were common across New Zealand at the time, and remnants of them still remain in places like Christchurch, Gisborne’s was the only tram system in New Zealand - and the first in the southern hemisphere, to be battery electric.

This had a few advantages over the normal tram system:

No overhead wires or poles required No smell, less noise Lighter rail requirements - these trams were half the weight of a usual tram system No draw on the powerplant during peak power demand, such as when electric lighting was in use.

In 1911, the council started building the powerhouse and tram barn in Carnarvon Street. The powerhouse provided DC electric current for overnight charging of the trams, and was used by the town during other times. One of the engines used in this powerhouse can still be seen at the East Coast Museum of Technology.

By April 1912, the tramway had commenced construction along Carnarvon Street and up to Childers Road. The track then proceeded from the Post Office on the corner of Gladstone Road and Customhouse Street up to Roebuck Road, a distance of a little over a mile. Loops were provided for cars to cross and a double line installed from Peel Street to the Post Office to allow for future extensions.

You may notice a familiar building in this shot of the tram rails being placed in 1912 - yes, that’s Number 9, originally the Bank of Australasia, a{the} building that still exists in Gladstone Road. The Albion Club Hotel building seen here was demolished in 1916 to be replaced with the Albion Buildings, to which the current building on the same site now looks very similar.

The first two trams came from America, where half the cost of 2200 pounds was the customs and shipping. The trams were 28 feet long with seats placed lengthwise 26 seated passengers and room for 20 standing, a total of 46. They were controlled by one man who was both driver and ticket keeper. Weighing 4 tons, the trams had two ten horsepower motors at 200 rpm, a 10 cell battery for locomotive power and 5 cells for the lights.

On the official opening day, April 16th, 1913, the first tram was driven out of the barn in Carnarvon Street by Mayor William Pettie (yeah, the guy who the bridge is named after) who succeeded Douglas Lysnar as mayor. Mayor Pettie ran the tram over the track from one end to the other, and provided free rides for school children that day.

I said earlier that the trams went up to the Post Office, but don’t confuse this with the current post office on Grey Street. Gisborne’s post and telegraph office was located on the corner of Customhouse Street and Gladstone Road, where you will currently see the canoe prow and the courthouse. The first post office on this site, a wooden building, was erected in February 1877, but in October 1902 the newer two-storey brick building was opened, and in August 1903, it was adorned with a clock made by J. B. Joyce and Co, a world renowned clock maker who has also made clocks for Sydney and Beijing.

This building was damaged in the 1931 and 1932 earthquakes, and the clock tower was then removed - but the clock is still familiar to us as in 1934 the R. D. B. Robinson Memorial Clock Tower, although you’ll probably just know it as the Gisborne Town Clock, was built, inheriting the bells and clock faces from the Post Office, ringing the same song - the Westminster Chimes - the same tune played by Big Ben. In 1966 after another earthquake, this brick Post Office was demolished, and this piece of land became Endeavour Park, later Heipipi Endeavour Park.

At this side of town, this was the terminus for the trams - they never proceeded any further towards Kaiti, despite the fact that the Gladstone Road bridge had tram rails added when it was built in 1925, just in case.

Even as early as 1913, the tramway system was considered a white elephant. It was said “Though it runs the full length of the principal business street of the town it does not sufficiently tap the suburbs to be of use to residents in outlying areas - it should be extended to Te Hapara or Mangapapa and brought down through Ormond Road.”

And what that meant by principal business street was just to Roebuck Road at the edge of town. By 1915, the tramway lines down Gladstone Road were extended to Stanley Road, and by September 1918, Lytton Road.

In 1917 the council ordered another tramcar. This tram body was built by Boon & Company in Christchurch and shipped to Gisborne by boat. The chassis and battery were shipped from America. The new New Zealand-built tram could seat 30 passengers instead of 26, the motors were 25 horsepower instead of 10, and at 15 miles an hour and up to 100 miles on a charge, there was no issue with the full-day service.

In 1918, the tramcars needed to be cleaned and disinfected twice a day due to the Spanish flu.

In 1919, the last of the tramcars, number four, arrived from Christchurch. Similar to tram number three, this entered service at the end of May.

In November 1923, the new Peel Street ferro-concrete bridge had been built and the tramway could progress across the bridge, through Fitzherbert Street, and down Ormond Road to the new terminus at the borough boundary. This boundary was where the Borough of Gisborne ended and you were instead in Mangapapa, which was not just a suburb in those days. You can notice when you’re in this location as the road narrows. This wasn’t specifically because of the trams, but simply that the Gisborne Borough treated Ormond Road differently to the County. Unlike the Gladstone Road line, which was built on wooden sleepers, the line down Ormond Road was set in thick concrete. The bridge officially opened on November 24th and the tram was the first thing across the bridge.

Around 1925, council constantly debated whether to extend the route of the tramcars . From the start, the tram system was enabled by a very expensive loan, council having spent more than fifty-thousand pounds. Further extensions were suggested:

• Up Ormond Road to Valley Road in Mangapapa; • Up Wainui Road to De Lautour or Huxley Road; • Up Gladstone Road to the Park Racecourse; (where the Park Golf Club now is) • Up Grey Street to the Railway Station

Three of these extensions are shown on this map, with the yellow and green lines being the Gladstone and Ormond Road routes respectively, with red lines depicting the extensions to the Park Racecourse, Mangapapa and Kaiti.

These extensions “failed to arouse enthusiasm” with both ratepayers and councillors, with a recommendation made to council to add 6 more trams, more batteries and trailers. But with the costs likely to exceed one hundred thousand pounds, and the tramways still not making a profit, none of these extensions was realised, except perhaps for the tram rails being put onto the new Gladstone Road bridge, just in case.

But the problem was that the trams didn’t go anywhere that people lived. It didn’t serve those in the Mangapapa Township, it didn’t service anyone in the suburbs of Kaiti or Elgin. Those in Te Hapara were worried that any extensions to Mangapapa or Kaiti would reduce their tram availability - there were only four tramcars!

By 1929, the decision had been made to pull the pin. Buses were starting to replace the trams, and only the newer trams 3 & 4 were capable of running the Ormond Road route.

The last trip was on the 8th of July 1929, when all four trams lined up in front of the Post Office for a final trip to the tramway barn. Parked just around the corner on Reads Quay in front of the government buildings were a fleet of buses ready to replace them.

When the service was discontinued, the councils fleet of trams still only numbered four, with only 3 and a half miles of track. With only service for 16 years, Gisborne was the first town to discontinue their tramway, with the least amount of service. Some of the bigger centres didn’t switch to busses until the 1950s.

So the question is … Where did they end up?

At the time it was stated that... One was sold to a builder who was using it as an office One went to a farmer in the country One went to a “well known” resident in Lytton Road The fourth was not yet sold, although putting it in the Botanical Gardens as a hot-house was considered .

We do know that one was placed on the basketball/netball courts near the YMCA, and a video taken in 1932 has a very “tram shaped” building in the background which apparently was being used as a changing shed.

In 1934, one at the A&P show was being used as the office for the secretary and the press, but they found it cramped and eventually moved it away.

It is said that one of the trams ended up as part of a house at Wainui beach, does anyone know? Some of these pictures of the trams off the rails and rotting away are in one of Graham Stewarts tram books, but no one seems to know where they went after that. In 1967, Mayor Harry Barker asked the same question, but didn’t seem to get any more of a reply.

The tram lines still occasionally show up when people go digging up the roads, 100 years later, especially in Ormond Road, with them being set in the thick concrete.

In a way, the battery electric trams were ahead of their time. It feels like they were better suited to the 21st century, considering electric vehicles are only now starting to gain traction. But the way they were implemented was, sadly, not well thought out, and they have been consigned to history. We must also remember that the hydro-electric power scheme from Waikaremoana was yet to come to Gisborne. So these trams, although electric, were being charged overnight by fossil fuels, diesel and coal. However, if anyone ever claims in the future to be the first to run electrified public transport vehicles in Gisborne, this video serves to prove them wrong.

And the loans for the tramway service? The loans were finally paid off in the 1970s.

You can also watch this on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ii5uqyrTg8