History of Trams - Overview

Overview

The very first tram was on the Swansea and Mumbles Railway in south Wales, UK; it was horse-drawn at first, and later moved by steam and electric power. The Mumbles Railway Act was passed by the British Parliament in 1804, and the first passenger railway (similar to streetcars in the US some 30 years later) started operating in 1807. The first streetcars, also known as horsecars in North America, were built in the United States and developed from city stagecoach lines and omnibus lines that picked up and dropped off passengers on a regular route without the need to be pre-hired. These trams were an animal railway, usually using horses and sometimes mules to haul the cars, usually two as a team. Occasionally other animals were put to use, or humans in emergencies. The first streetcar line, developed by Irish-American John Stephenson, was the New York and Harlem Railroad's Fourth Avenue Line which ran along the Bowery and Fourth Avenue in New York City. Service began in 1832. It was followed in 1835 by New Orleans, Louisiana, which has the oldest continuously operating street railway system in the world, according to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

In 1883, Magnus Volk constructed his 2-ft gauge Volk's Electric Railway along the eastern seafront at Brighton, England. This 2 km (1.2 mi) line, re-gauged to 2 ft 9 in (0.84 m) in 1884, remains in service to this day, and is the oldest operating electric tramway in the world.

The first electric street tramway in Britain, the Blackpool Tramway, was opened on 29 September 1885 using conduit collection along Blackpool Promenade. After 1960, this remained the only first-generation operational tramway in the UK - it is still open.

Electric trams run in Budapest since 1887, and this first line has now grown to be the busiest tram line of Europe, with the tram cars following each other at an interval of 60 seconds at rush hour. Bucharest and Belgrade ran a regular service from 1894 and Sarajevo from 1895.