The steel tracks first linked the town with Leamington in 1881, with tram cars pulled first by horses and then powered by electricity.

Buses replaced the juddering cars in 1929, but sections of track were never taken up and former Warwick borough engineer Colin Drake believes some still run beneath the streets' surface.

He said: "There are memories left in the track that still exists."

Mr Drake's earliest memory is of being carried off the tram outside Leamington's general post office in Priory Terrace when he was three years old.

Mr Drake, now of North Wales, remembers lines running down Smith Street with a branch running up St Nicholas Church Street.

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The original tram operator was the Leamington and Warwick Tramway and Omnibus Company.

It's stables were in Coten End, with a Warwick terminus outside the Warwick Arms Hotel and a Leamington terminus was opposite the former Manor House Hotel in Avenue Road.

Single decker cars originally passed underneath the arch at Eastgate while later double-deckers went round it. Mr Drake recalls a story his father told him about the days of horse-drawn trams.

On one occasion a horse more used to the single deckers was given a double decker. The horse naturally took the route it was used to and the tram collided with the arch.

Horse power was replaced by electricity. The British Electric Traction Company bought the Leamington company in 1899 and electricity replaced horses in Leamington in 1905, with tram cars carrying the name of the Warwick and Leamington Electrical Company.

Ornate poles held up the wires that carried the supply from the company's power station in Emscote and remnants of these survive in the central islands in the Parade, where the pylons were based.

Electricity had its day when oil began to replace coal as the dominant source of energy in the decade after the First World War.

Trams in Leamington and Warwick had little over a decade left to run and petrol-driven buses replaced the trams in 1930.

Mr Drake later attended Leamington Boys College and in 1942 joined Warwick urban borough council, where one of his early jobs involved measuring up the remaining tram lines in St Johns to see if the steel could be used for the war effort.

Some of the lines were taken up but he believes others were left in place and may still be there beneath the road surface.

* Call the newsroom on 457720 if you know of surviving tramlines or poles or if you have any memorabilia.

* A young man pictured in a hedge laying competition from the 1950s has come forward.

George Bleloch, of Fox Farm, Bascote Heath, believes he was 17 when he won the Harbury Hedge Laying Competition at Campion Hills.

The contest, run by the Harbury Hedge Cutting Society, was nationally renowned at the time and Mr Bleloch was pictured by Courier photographer Frank Cooper.

Mr Bleloch, now 71, took up the craft aged 15. His father was a farmer and ran and judged the events.

Mr Bleloch said: "It's like any craft. You have to work at it a bit but you also need a certain amount of natural ability."

The former champion laid his last hedge 20 years ago, but is pleased that the practice is becoming more widespread after decades in which hedgerows were neglected or removed.

He said: "It gives me a lot of satisfaction to see a hedge nicely laid because I know the work that goes into it."