The M.P.T.A. Conference
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MORE than 350 delegates attended the 47th annual conference of the Municipal Passenger Transport Association, which opened at Liverpool on Tuesday and closes to-day.
Mr. W. G. Marks, Minst.T., general manager of Liverpool Transport Department, the retiring president, gave his presidential address on Wednesday. It was an historical treatise, in which be recalled that the Association came into being in 1902, when, at the suggestion of Mr. John Young, then general manager at Glasgow, 20 general managers of municipal tramways undertakings met in Manchester. All the 96 municipal operators in this country were now members of the Association.
As examples of municipal enterprise, Mr. Marks mentioned the development of the trolleybus to its present high state of efficiency, and of the oilengined bus.
To illustrate the growth of municipal operation, Mr. Marks said that in 1935, when the Association began to keep fleet records, municipalities owned a total of 15,575 vehicles, of which 6,816 were motorbuses and 984 trolleybuses. To-day, the comparable figures were 19,574, 12,292 and 2,154. During that period, the number of electric trams had declined from 7,729 to 5,082, but the number of horsed trams had remained static at 46.
In 3938-39, municipal operators carried 5,100,000,000 passengers and earned traffic revenue of £30,000,000, whereas last year the number of passengers had risen to 7,200,000,000 and revenue to £50,000,000.
The Association's annual general meeting was also held on Wednesday morning and in the afternoon Coun. J. W. Hardwick, chairman of South Shields Transport Committee, read a paper on "'Labour and Personnel Problems." On Thursday, Mr. R. C. Moore, M.Inst.T., general manager of Sheffield Transport Department, contributed a paper entitled " Municipal Passenger Transport; The Old Order Changeth."
The conference programme included an official reception by the Lord Mayor of Liverpool.
One of the items on the agenda of the annual general meeting was concerned with the rates of pay and conditions of service of skilled maintenance workers in the municipal passenger transport industry.
The council's report for 1947-48, which was submitted to the meeting, gave information on the life of carbonshoe collectors, as used on trolleybuses, and showed that the highest recorded figures were 1,650 miles for long carbons, and 768 miles for short carbons. The most common figure for trolleyhead pressure was between 28 lb. and 30 lb. per sq. in. New span wires, protected with petroleum jelly, were said to have a particularly long life.
Summaries of the two papers appear on this and the next page, and the discussions will be reported next week.