| Turnpike abolition brought horse-omnibus services to Saltley and
Nechells Green in the later 1870s. These were replaced by open-topped
horse-drawn tramcars of the Birmingham Central Tramways Company on
Council-built lines in 1884. Other routes were soon being served by
steam-cars, the Great Lister Street to Saltley line having them a
year later. Nechells might have been first to have electric trams
but for local opposition to overhead cables: in the event it was last,
keeping its horses until 1906. There was a tramcar depot off Long
Acre thereafter. Meanwhile steam trams had been chuffing their unloved
way along Prospect and Ashted Rows and Great Francis Street to join
the earlier route along Vauxhall Road and Bloomsbury Street (both
widened in the 1880s) and Saltley Road.
After electrification the line through Nechells was a loop via
Nechells Park Road and Long Acre. In 1922 the City's first trolley
buses were introduced on the Nechells route, where trams had been
causing the greatest obstruction to other traffic. Six years later
the Inner Circle 'bus route was instituted via Saltley Road, Nechells
Place, and Rocky Lane. In the '50s both trams and trolley buses
gave way to diesel buses.
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