Trams in Sydney

Trams In Sydney

The Sydney tramway network once served Sydney, the capital city of New South Wales, Australia. In its heyday, it was the largest in Australia, the second largest in the Commonwealth (after London), and one of the largest in the world. It was extremely intensively worked, with about 1,600 cars in service at any one time at its peak during the 1930s (cf. about 500 trams in Melbourne today).

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, an average of more than one tram journey per day was made in Sydney by every man and woman, infant and child in the city. Patronage peaked in 1945 at 405 million passenger journeys. The system was in place from 1879 until its winding down in the 1950s and closure in 1961 (a single horse-car line operated from 1861 to 1866). It had a maximum street mileage of 181 miles (291 km), in 1923.

In 1997, more than 30 years after trams disappeared from Sydney streets, the Metro Light Rail, a privately owned single line, opened. In 2012, the NSW Government announced the construction of an extension of the current light rail line to Dulwich Hill and a new CBD to South East line to open by 2019.