ACR                The night that Fulwell Depot went dark

This tale was told me by one of the chaps I worked with at London Transport.  Quite a bit of the story I can personally confirm from earlier knowledge.

In the 1930s Fulwell Depot had a substation that fed most of the trolley-bus overhead wiring right into Kingston and beyond.  The early trolley-buses were known as "Diddlers".  I don't know the origin of the term, but it distinguished that type of bus from later versions.  As any electrical-trained person will tell you, a DC motor makes an excellent dynamo if operated in reverse,  The Diddlers used regenerative braking most of the time, and on one occasion I actually saw a fool run across a pedestrian crossing in front of a speeding bus.  I've never before, or since, seen a bus stop so quickly.  It almost did a front wheel skid.

But back to the story.  St Marks Hill Surbiton is quite steep and the 601 trolley-buses used it to and from Tolworth, with the other terminus being Twickenham.  There was always a staff bus that ran sometime after midnight.  The public could use the bus, but it was intended mainly for London Passenger Transport Board (LPTB) staff.  (That was the name of the organisation in the 1930s).  So that last bus would have been the only bus on the network.

During normal time, the regenerated power that the bus fed back into the system when it braked coming down St Marks Hill would have been absorbed by the other buses in the system.  But as this bus was the only one on the system, it appears that the driver used the regenerative function much more severely than normally would be the case.  Maybe there was some sort of emergency.  But the upshot of the drivers action caused chaos at Fulwell.  The rotary converter that rectified the AC from the incoming feeder speeded up and back-fed power into the transformer.  The tertiary winding on the transformer fed power to the lighting that lit the depot proper.  My informant told me that a lot of the lamps in the deport went pop plunging the whole show into darkness.