Ebay Watch - Parry People Movers

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/304805684371

Two (complete?) railcars and one chassis, plus 50m of track.

Photos are taken at Parry People Movers' closed works at Overend Road, Cradley Heath, Birmingham. From the mobile phone number the seller is next door neighbour Grabloaders Groundworks Ltd, (aka Grabaway).

 

I have a feeling these will end up in the scrap bin, a bit to costly for what they are and to restore (£15,000) you could build something the same size brand new with less hassle, if you wanted to.

 

Agreed. But I doubt if the £15k is cast in stone, the guy strikes as a wheeler dealer and in this case he doesn't know what he's selling.

 

From my understanding of eBay from running my wife's shop for some years is that with a listing price of £1 and a buy it now button you get the lot for £1 regardless of what the description may say.
Of course he may decline eBay would refund your £1 and probably ban him from their site.

 

Free Postage included !

 

If there are a couple of bodies available, they don't seem bad value to me. I think you'd be pushed to build one for that unless all the work was done by unpaid labour.

 

One of them does look like the early prototype tested at the Welshpool & Llanfair Light Railway about 30 years ago?
https://www.whrsoc.org.uk/WHRProject/ppm.htm
Perhaps should have gone for hybrid battery rather than flywheel technology, but the battery technology was not so good then?.
Sad to see another ecological rail company (like Vivarail) go bust.

 

Both the complete(?) railcars pictured were at Welshpool in September 1994. Both, I understand, are readily regaugable between 2ft and 2'6".

 

I'm not sure how ecological these ones were. Operation seemed to involve absolutely thrashing the nuts off the diesel to spin the flywheel up for a few minutes. Then you could travel about half a mile uphill before you had to repeat the process all over again. It was all very low tech and now somewhat obsolete with advances in battery technology.

I think any prospective purchaser should be aware that being prototypes they were quite rough and ready even when new. They tended to hack them about to suit whatever funding or prospective buyer they were chasing at the time. Then slap a new number on it.

The 50 meters of track might be alright though.

 

Witnessed the test at the WLLR. It wasn’t very successful. Really the problem was that the flywheel was only a semi viable idea while battery technology was being improved. These days you’d be better off starting with a Tesla battery. Actually, you’d be better off with a bicycle.

 

In 1990 I visited the Cradley Heath works and was shown the first working prototype by Mr Parry. A two seater that only operated in one direction, the flywheel was spun up by a built in electric motor whilst in the station, making electrical contact to a short overhead wire. (Actually, memory is hazy, it could have been a short third rail. But either would work.) Drive from the flywheel to the wheels was by a type of mechanical cvt. I thought this set up had merit and could have been expanded to a multi station railway where the railcar's flywheel was spun up as it paused to pick up passengers at each station, and I was slightly disappointed when they started including internal combustion engines in the design.

 

Agreed the original idea (NB it was a concealed pick-up shoe under the platform edge - the whole idea was to get rid of all overhead, conduit or electrified rails) was best: thus such a system could go THROUGH an indoor shopping mall. There was also a pad design of ultra-lightweight track which wouldn't even require any digging up of the roadway. A quite sophisticated feature was regenerative braking, which fed power back into the flywheel.
Unfortunately it was never properly developed from its experimental early designs. However, demonstration short tramways in a couple of towns (one Brighton, AFAICR) were successful - the Bristol Harbour line less so, ditto the trials on FR, WHR, W&L, and so on - the inevitable small irregularities of real-world track tended to damage the drive train. I was peripherally involved in trying to get it set up in Norwich, Felixstowe, Aberystwyth.....well, you get the idea. There are still two PPMs at Stourbridge I understand - though these are hybrids. A large part of the problem was the lack of suitable regulation - ultra-lightweight railcars do not fit in to the current technical specs anywhere (a bit of a vicious circle - the technology needed to be robustly proven, but without an actual installation somewhere on an extended trial basis, that was never going to happen with the original non-hybrid type.).
One of the great "might have beens".
But - an important historic technology which should really be in a museum somewhere.

 

It's interesting that this started off very much like the PRT pod system (ala ULTra at Heathrow) or the Morgantown PRT in West Virginia, but became something more traditionally rail at Stourbridge. Ahead of it's time?

 

It always needed a driver. In that respect the tech was quite different.
The early prototype at Cradley used something akin to a squash ball between two tapered rollers to transfer the kinetic energy from the flywheel to the wheels. Speed was regulated by moving said roller up and down the tapers. Until that is there was either pop and the “ball” came out of the cage, or a smell of burning when it overheated.

 

We (HSNGR) phoned the vendor yesterday - seems it will all be scrapped as soon as the current auction period is over - i.e. very soon. Which is a pity. Innovative technology - even not very successful innovative technology - should have a place in railway engineering history - because it's as historically important as the successes. We'd try to keep a Webb divided-drive compound, presumably - if one still existed! NRM should really have one of these - or possibly Crich (a static exhibit, because of gauge).

 

Rail magazine reports that John Parry died Feb 17th. RIP.

 

I get the feeling that Parry People Movers is doing very little as a company.

Companies House list them as, "Active proposal to strike off", although the strike off proposal is currently suspended. Such a shame.

 

https://www.railmagazine.com/news/network/2023/03/15/people-mover-inventor-john-parry-dies-aged-85

 

Can't be much metal in that lot.