Did you know that, from its opening, trams on bridge trams used the Sydney Harbour Bridge?
[1]Dr Bradfield, who brilliantly designed Sydney’s transport infrastructure at that time, had four railway tracks on the bridge, two were used for trams which ran into Platforms 1 and 2 at Wynyard Station.
During the late 1950s, as part of a multi- national campaign to remove trams, the paths were converted to road lanes 7 and 8 and the Wynyard platforms became a car park for an hotel!
During peak hours, one would often see up to five coupled pairs of trams as pictured, each pair seating 160 passengers – that’s 800 – and easily holding another 500 standing – travelling between the two sets of brige pylons on just one of the two tram tracks. Could today’s cars and buses match that 1300 in that same space today?
Pictured: a coupled pair of high capacity trams heads to Wynyard to pick up its afternoon load of peak hour passengers. A northbound corridor tram makes its way towards the sout-east pylon.