Patton, Brian

About the artist

Name

Patton, Brian

Biography

Brian Patton was born in Glasgow, to families who came from the Isle of Bute and the north of Ireland. This naturally resulted in many trips on Clyde and MacBrayne steamers and on the Irish ships, usually Lairds Isle. It also brought close acquaintance with the tramways of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Belfast and, later, Dundee, Aberdeen and south London. These were then all efficient people movers and, as a wee boy, he was surprised and indeed horrified later to learn that Manchester and Dublin had scrapped their trams and that Belfast, Liverpool and London were following suit.

During a boring English lesson, a friend showed him, under a desk, a magazine that dealt with trams and so he became an avid reader of 'Modern Tramway' and an enthusiastic member of the publisher, the Light Railway Transport League; these have since become respectively Tramways and Urban Transport and the Light Railway Transit Association. This contact also brought some experience of editing manuscripts, including a history of Johannesburg trams.

Despite the enthusiasm, the later 1960s and the 1970s were barren times for the supporters of the tram. Edinburgh’s last tram ran on 16 November 1956 and Glasgow’s on 4 September 1962. But by this time, foreign travel, with camera, was possible and it became clear, from visits to systems such as Brussels and Frankfurt that most other countries did not share the UK’s views. Sometimes the foreign travel was for work and the Erasmus scheme brought much experience of tram travel in the former eastern bloc, with daily commuting on trams in Gdansk, Prague and Szeged in southern Hungary, to name only a few systems. Meanwhile home cities reversed their decisions and Edinburgh saw trams again on Princes Street in May 2014.

An offer of a reduced pension at an early date encouraged Brian to return from a London base to Scotland and a decision to use the experience to try writing on transport topics for a living. That opportunity resulted in the following publications some of which are available to borrow through Edinburgh Libraries:

Another Nostalgic Look at Glasgow Trams, republished as Glasgow in the Age of the Tram, 1996
Scottish Coastal Steamers (The Lines that linked the Lochs), 1996
Paris RER Handbook, 2001
Double-deck Trams of the World, 2002
Clyde Steamers, 2003
Double-deck Trolleybuses of the World, 2004
The Development of the Modern Tram, 2006
Irish Sea Shipping – Tha mile long air Cuan Eirinn, 2007
Via Mound and Tollcross (Edinburgh Transport), 2008
A MacBrayne Memoir, 2009
The Buses of Paris, 2009
Your Postcards (Postcards of Scottish steamers), 2012
The Tramway Revolution in France, 1985-2015, published in five volumes, 2015-2017. Volume 5 also covers North Africa.
The Glasgow Navy (Ships of the Clyde Nav. Trust), published in three volumes, 2017
On Landlocked Seas, (Loch and lake steamers), published in three volumes, 2018
Berlin's Buses - A History, with a look at London's buses, 2013
Mauerfall 25 - tramways in Eastern Germany 1989-2014, with a look at some other forms of transport
Metropolitain, The Urban Railways of Paris – publication date tbc

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