Day 85, Netherthorpe Road Tram Preparation

A substantial amount of work was done on Netherthorpe Road when the Supertram was built.  The road was widened, buildings were demolished at the bottom where it becomes Hoyle Street and had a junction with Penistone/Infirmary road. There was also the complete redesign of the pedestrian underpass when it was increased in size and became the entrance to the Netherthorpe tram stop.

While this construction was under way a temporary foot bridge was built.  This was a fantastic construction made of scaffolding, planks, and hardboard.  This gave us (almost) 30 year old adolescents a great opportunity to extend our Block Mania, real life, gameplay across the estate.  The 2000 AD Judge Dredd story had quite an influence on us for a while.  It was possible to climb up the temporary bridge and stalk our opponents with an Air Soft machine gun.  Generally this meant that I got shot by plastic pellets.  It was tremendous fun.  We also pasted up posters in the form of ransom notes with writing made up from letters cut out from newspapers, these were clearly very silly.  One of these posters was in the pocket of my jacket that was nicked form my flat, along with a load of other stuff, by the junkie that lived on the fifth floor of my block.  The police returned everything to me except the poster...

The bridge with ransom poster.

The flats I lived in were being modernised at the time and builders had a habit of leaving flats unlocked.  It was also the builders that spotted five vacuum cleaners through the window of the flat of the junkie as they went past on one of the gantry lifts that went up and down the outside of each side of the block.  Silly sod.

This is a view from high up on the scaffolding looking up towards Brook Hill and the Arts Tower.

Here's the view looking downhill.

At 1 in 10 apparently this gradient is the greatest that any tram in the UK has to deal with.  The Supertram company is the only one that manufactures trams that can handle this type of incline.  There's a whole bunch of other specialist stuff these trams can do that others don't have, however I'm not a transport geek so I won't mention any more.