FROM THE ARCHIVES:The last tram from Dublin city centre to Blackrock turned into a raucous Saturday night event, as this report described.
- JOE JOYCE
‘When the last tram ran from Dublin to Blackrock early yesterday, strange things happened. A band was “lost” in dense, yelling crowds; six trams were damaged and three almost totally wrecked; several persons missed electrocution by the merest chance as they clambered on tram rooftops; and some of the residents of Ballsbridge lit a bonfire on the main road.
At 8.30am yesterday the first bus to take over on the route sped into town; it took about 20 minutes. Eight hours earlier, Tram No. 252, the last one, had struggled free from the clutches of thousands of souvenir hunters in Westmoreland Street and had set out for Blackrock; two hours later it crawled into its home depot.
The tram’s seats were gone, windows smashed, side panelling ripped away, still accompanied by a roaring, singing, hooting crowd, which had to be forcibly restrained by police reinforcements from breaking into the Blackrock depot.
No. 252 lurched to its destination with heads sticking out of every smashed window, looking, to quote a C.I.E. official, as if had been bombed.
Two of the last three trams came in for severe usage before No. 252 appeared at the Ballast Office, the last objective of every sentimental souvenir hunter and of a vast throng of hilarious youths.
On one of these two earlier trams, the control handle was stolen from the front. It had to be driven in reverse from Dublin to Blackrock.
When C.I.E. officials turned tram No. 252 at the Ballast Office, several hundred people tried to board it. Groups of wild young men forced their way on board and there were several melees with the police.
At one time six people balanced on top of No. 252. Others cut the trolley ropes, ignoring the frenzied warnings by C.I.E. inspectors about the imminent danger of electrocution.
Officials started the gravely overloaded vehicle on its way. Had it not been for one strong-nerved C.I.E. inspector who leaned far out over the front top-deck rail to hold the trolley on to the overhead lines, no progress would have been made at all.
Preceded by a police car and followed by a C.I.E. breakdown wagon, the last tram screeched protestingly down Nassau Street. A bonfire composed of an old tyre soaked in petrol blazed in its path at Ballsbridge. The fire brigade was summoned and extinguished the flames. Tram 252 rattled on.
Down the length of Merrion road the spectacle presented, perhaps, the most impossible picture of all. It was a black, swaying, vociferous consignment of humanity, the vanguard of hundreds of cyclists, running pedestrians and motorists.
Everything that was detachable was taken. People were seen walking down Blackrock high street with tram seats over their shoulders.
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