Qualla: Wirral Transport Museum

Wirral Transport Museum: Introduction

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit El Pollock, CC BY-SA 2.0. There is a particular kind of pleasure in riding a tram across a town that has not had trams for sixty years. Until April 2023, you could do that in Birkenhead - board a 1948-style double-decker at the Mersey Ferry terminal at Woodside and rumble half a mile inland on a stub of preserved track to a converted depot on Taylor Street. The trams themselves were not Birkenhead originals - they were Hong Kong-built vehicles, ordered in the early 1990s when the council needed working stock at short notice and the Hong Kong Tramways system happened to be retiring fleet of the right vintage. But Birkenhead's claim to a tram museum is not arbitrary. The town invented the British street tram. In 1860, the American entrepreneur George Francis Train laid the first horse-drawn tramway in the country here, running from Woodside to Birkenhead Park. The route the museum's modern trams trace is, more or less, the original Train line.

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Image: El Pollock | CC BY-SA 2.0

Wirral Transport Museum: A Tramway From Hong Kong

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rodhullandemu, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Wirral Tramway opened on 17 April 1995, built and operated under contract by Blackpool Transport on behalf of Wirral Borough Council. The vehicles were Hong Kong tramcars 69 and 70 - real working trams from the Hong Kong system, refurbished and painted in heritage liveries. N...

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Image: Rodhullandemu | CC BY-SA 4.0

Wirral Transport Museum: Saved at the Buzzer

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Craine, CC BY-SA 2.0. By the early 2020s the museum was in trouble. It cost Wirral Council 85,000 pounds a year to run and was drawing only about 6,000 visitors. In March 2023, ownership was transferred to Big Heritage, a non-profit also responsible for the Western Approaches Museum in Liverpool and t...

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Image: Peter Craine | CC BY-SA 2.0

Wirral Transport Museum: Buses, Brass, and a Police Wolseley

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rept0n1x, CC BY-SA 3.0. Beyond the trams, the collection runs deep into the everyday transport of mid-twentieth-century Merseyside. The Birkenhead Corporation buses include a 1943 Guy Arab rebodied in 1953 - wartime utility chassis in postwar dress - and a 1946 Leyland Titan that ran the town routes thr...

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Image: Rept0n1x | CC BY-SA 3.0