Encyclopedia
A
tram,
tramcar,
trolley, or
streetcar, is a
railborne, lighter than a
train, designed for the transport of passengers within, close to, or between villages, towns and/or cities. Trams are distinguishable from other forms of rail-borne equipment in that they travel wholly or partly along tracks laid down in streets, usually on track reserved for the tram system. Also, most tram systems lack platforms; riders simply step off the car. This feature of trams enables virtually complete integration with other forms of transport and pedestrians making simultaneous use of the streets.
Tram systems were common throughout the industrialized world in the early 20th century. Although they disappeared from many cities for many years in mid-century, in recent years they have made a comeback. Many newer
light rail systems share features with trams, although a distinction is usually drawn between them, especially if the line has significant off-street running.
Etymology
The terms "tram" and "tramway" were originally and Northern English words for the type of container used in
coal mines and the tracks on which these container ran — probably derived from a North Sea Germanic word of unknown origin meaning the "beam or shaft of a barrow or sledge", also "a barrow" or container body.
Although "tram" and "tramway" have been adopted by many languages, they are not used universally in English, with North American use generally preferring "trolley" or "streetcar". The sense of "streetcar" is first recorded in 1860, and is a North American usage, as is "trolley," which is believed to derive from the "troller," a four wheeled device that was dragged along dual overhead wires by a cable, which connected the troller to the top of the car, and collected live power from the
overhead wire, sometimes simply strung, sometimes as
catenary. The trolley pole, which supplanted the troller early-on, was, at one end, connected to the top of the car by a spring loaded device to keep pressure on the overhead wire, and the trolley wheel, at the other end of the pole, and formerly the chief means of contact between car and wire, both owe their names to the troller. Modern trolleys often do not use a trolley wheel or even a trolley pole, a
pantograph being the preferred means of contact. Other streetcars are sometimes called trolleys, even though this may be technically incorrect, as for a cable car or a conduit car that drew power from an underground power supply.
Tourist buses made to look like a streetcar are also sometimes called trolleys; see tourist trolley. Likewise, open, low-speed segmented vehicles on rubber tires, generally used to ferry tourists short distances, can be called trams, particularly in the U.S.; a famous example is the tram on the
Universal Studios tour.
Electric buses, which still overwhelmingly use twin trolley poles are called
trolleybuses,
trackless trolleys , or sometimes also
trolleys.
History
Appearing in the first half of the 19th century, trams were at first pulled by horses.
The first trams, known as streetcars or
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 and without the need to be pre-hired. These first lines operated in
Baltimore, Maryland in 1828, in 1832 on the
New York and Harlem Railroad in
New York City, and in 1834 in
New Orleans, Louisiana. At first the
rails protruded above street level, causing accidents and major trouble for pedestrians. They were supplanted in 1852 by
grooved rails or
girder rails, invented by Alphonse Loubat. The first tram in France was inaugurated in 1853 for the upcoming World's Fair, where a test line was presented along the Cours de la Reine, in the
8th arrondissement.
These trams were an animal railway, usually using
horses and sometimes
mules to haul the cars, usually two as a team. Rarely other animals were tried, including humans in emergencies.
One of the advantages over earlier forms of transit was the low rolling resistance of metal wheels on
steel rails, allowing the animals to haul a greater load for a given effort. Problems included the fact that any given animal could only work so many hours on a given day, had to be housed, groomed, fed and cared for day in and day out, and produced prodigious amounts of
manure, which the streetcar company was charged with disposing of. Since a typical horse pulled a car for perhaps a dozen miles a day and worked for four or five hours, many systems needed ten or more horses in stable for each horsecar. Electric trams largely replaced animal power in the late 19th and early 20th century. New York City had closed its last horsecar line in 1914. The last regular mule drawn streetcar in the U.S.A., in
Sulphur Rock, Arkansas closed in 1926. However during
World War II some old horse cars were temporarily returned to service to help conserve fuel. A mule-powered line in
Celaya,
Mexico operated until 1956. Horse-drawn trams still operate in
Douglas,
Isle of Man.
The tram developed after that in numerous cities of Europe . Faster and more comfortable than the omnibus, trams had a high cost of operation because they were pulled by horses. That is why mechanical drives were rapidly developed, with
steam power in 1873, and
electrical after 1881, when
Siemens AG presented the electric drive at the International Electricity Exhibition in Paris.
The convenience and economy of electricity resulted in its rapid adoption once the technical problems of production and transmission of electricity were solved.
The first prototype of the electric tram was developed by Russian engineer
Fyodor Pirotsky. He modified a Horse tramway car to be powered by electricity instead of horses. The invention was tested in 1880 in
Saint Petersburg,
Russia.
The word's first electric tram opened in Lichterfelde near
Berlin,
Germany, in 1881. It was built by
Werner von Siemens. .
Steam trams
The first form of mechanical trams were operated using mobile steam engines. Generally, there were two types of steam trams. The first and most common had a small steam locomotive at the head of a line of one or more carriages, similar to a small train. Systems with such steam trams included
Christchurch,
New Zealand,
Sydney,
Australia and other provincial city systems in
New South Wales.
The other style of steam tram had the steam engine mounted in the body of the tram. The most notable system to adopt such trams was in
Paris. French designed steam trams also operated in
Rockhampton, in the
Australian state of
Queensland between 1909 and 1939.
Stockholm also had a steam tramline at the island of
Södermalm between 1887 and 1901. A major drawback on this style of tram was the limited space for the engine, meaning these trams were usually underpowered.
Cable pulled cars
The next type of tram was the cable car, which sought to reduce labor costs and the hardship on animals. Cable cars are pulled along a
rail track by a continuously moving cable running at a constant speed on which individual cars stop and start by releasing and gripping this cable as required. The power to move the cable is provided at a site away from the actual operation. The first cable car line in the United States was tested in
San Francisco, California in 1873. The second city to operate cable trams was
Dunedin in New Zealand in 1881. Dunedin's cable trams ceased operation in 1957.
Cable cars suffered from high infrastructure costs, since a vast and expensive system of cables,
pulleys,
stationary engines and vault structures between the rails had to be provided. They also require strength and skill to operate, to avoid obstructions and other cable cars. The cable had to be dropped at particular locations and the cars coast, for example when crossing another cable line. Breaks and frays in the cable, which occurred frequently, required the complete cessation of services over a cable route, while the cable was repaired. After the development of electrically-powered trams, the more costly cable car systems declined rapidly.
Cable cars were especially useful in hilly cities, partially explaining their survival in
San Francisco, though the most extensive cable system in the U.S. was in
Chicago, Illinois, a much flatter city. The largest cable system in the world which operated in the flat city of
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia had, at its peak, 592 trams running on 74 kilometres of track.
The
San Francisco cable cars, though significantly reduced in number, continue to perform a regular transportation function, in addition to being a tourist attraction.
Other power sources
In some parts of the
United Kingdom, other forms of power were used to power the tram.
Hastings and some other small tramways, for example
Stockholm in
Sweden, used Petrol driven trams and Lytham St Annes used gas powered trams. Paris successfully operated trams that were powered by compressed air.
Electric trams
Multiple functioning experimental electric trams were exhibited at the 1884
World Cotton Centennial World's Fair in
New Orleans, Louisiana; however they were deemed as not yet adequately perfected to replace the Lamm fireless engines then propelling the
St. Charles Avenue Streetcar in that city.
Electric-powered trams , were first successfully tested in service in
Richmond, Virginia in 1888, in an installation by
Frank J. Sprague. There were earlier commercial installations of electric streetcars, including one in Berlin, as early as 1881 by
Werner von Siemens and the company that still bears his name, and also one in
Saint Petersburg,
Russia, invented and tested by Fiodor A. Pirotskiy in 1880. Another was by John Joseph Wright, brother of the famous mining entrepreneur Whitaker Wright, in Toronto in 1883. The earlier installations, however, proved difficult and/or unreliable. Siemens' line, for example, provided power through a live rail and a return rail, like a
model train setup, limiting the
voltage that could be used, and providing unwanted excitement to people and animals crossing the tracks. Siemens later designed his own method of current collection, this time from an overhead wire, called the
bow collector. Once this had been developed his cars became equal to, if not better than, any of Sprague's cars. The first electric
interurban line connecting
St. Catharines and
Thorold,
Ontario was deployed in 1887, and was considered quite successful at the time. While this line proved quite versatile as one of the earliest fully functional electric streetcar installations, it still required horse-drawn support while climbing the
Niagara Escarpment and for two months of the winter when
hydroelectricity was not available. This line continued service in its original form well into the 1950s.
Since Sprague's installation was the first to prove successful in all conditions, he is credited with being the inventor of the trolley car.
Two rare but significant alternatives were conduit current collection, which was widely used in
London,
Washington, D.C. and
New York, and the Dolter Stud Collection method, used in
Wolverhampton and
Hastings, UK.
Attempts to use on-board batteries as a source of electrical power were made in the 1880s and
1890s, with unsuccessful trials conducted in
Bendigo and
Adelaide in
Australia.
A very famous Welsh example of a tram system was usually known as the Mumbles Train, or more formally as the Swansea and Mumbles Railway. Originally built as the Oystermouth Railway in 1804, on March 25 1807 it became the first passenger-carrying railway in the world. Converted to an overhead cable-supplied system it operated electric cars from March 2, 1929 until its closure on January 5, 1960. These were the largest tram cars built for use in Britain and could each seat 106 passengers.
Another early tram system operated from 1886 until 1930 in
Appleton, Wisconsin, and is notable for being powered by the world's first
hydroelectric power station, which began operating on September 30, 1882 as the Appleton Edison Electric Company.
Golden Age
Trams experienced a rapid expansion at the start of the 20th century until the period between the two world wars. There was a rapid increase in the number of lines and increase in the number of riders: indeed, it became the primary mode of urban transportation. Horse-drawn transport virtually disappeared in all European, American and
Indian cities by 1910. Buses were still in a development phase at this time, gaining in mechanical reliability, but remaining behind compared to the benefits offered by trams; the
automobile was still reserved for the well-to-do.
Disappearance from many cities
The advent of personal motor vehicles and the improvements in motorized buses caused the rapid disappearance of the tram from most western and Asian countries by the end of the 1950s. Continuing technical improvements in buses made them more reliable, and a serious competitor to trams because they did not require the construction of costly infrastructure.
In many cases postwar buses were cited as providing a smoother ride and a faster journey than the older, prewar trams. For example, the tram network survived in Budapest but for a considerable period of time bus fares were higher to recognize the superior quality of the buses. However, many riders protested against the replacement of streetcars arguing that buses weren't as smooth, efficient and polluted the air. In fact, in the United States there was a conspiracy in which General Motors used National City Lines Bus Company to buy up streetcar systems, dismantle them and replace them with buses so as to make public transit so inconvenient that people would buy more cars. General Motors was convicted, but sentenced very lightly.
Governments thus put investment principally into bus networks. Indeed, infrastructure for roads and highways meant for the automobile were perceived as a mark of progress. The priority given to roads is illustrated in the proposal of French president
Georges Pompidou who declared in 1971 that "the city must adapt to the car".
Tram networks were no longer maintained or modernized, a state of affairs that served to discredit them in the eyes of the public. Old lines, considered archaic, were then bit by bit replaced by buses.
Tram networks disappeared almost completely from
North America,
France, the
UK, India, and altogether from
Ireland,
Turkey,
Spain and
South Africa. On the other hand, they were generally retained or modernized in most
communist countries, as well as
Switzerland,
Germany,
Austria,
Italy,
Belgium, the
Netherlands,
Scandinavia, and
Japan. In France and the UK, only the networks in
Lille,
Saint-Etienne,
Marseille, and
Blackpool survive from this period, but they are each reduced to a single line. Most Australian tram networks disappeared by 1973, with the exception of the extensive system in Melbourne and
the Glenelg line in
Adelaide.
Ballarat retains a tram for tourists and
Bendigo still has a .
Geelong maintained an electric tram service from 1912 until 1956.
Return to grace
The priority given to personal vehicles and notably to the automobile led to a loss in quality of life, particularly in large cities where
smog,
traffic congestion, sound pollution and
parking became problematic. Acknowledging this, some authorities saw fit to redefine their transport policies. The bus had shown its limits on account of its low capacity and its difficult coexistence with automobile traffic, which made it slow both on the road and commercially.
Rapid transit required a heavy investment and presented problems in terms of subterranean spaces that required constant security. For rapid transit, the investment was mainly in underground construction, which made it impossible in some cities . Metro construction thus was not a universal panacea.
The advantages of the tram thus became more visible. At the end of the 1970s, some governments studied, and then built new tram lines. In France,
Nantes and
Grenoble lead the way in terms of the modern tram, and new systems were inaugurated in 1985 and 1988. In 1994
Strasbourg opened a system with novel British-built trams, specified by the city, with the goal of breaking with the archaic conceptual image that was held by the public.
The public, who realized with each installation of tram lines their benefits in urban flexibility and redistribution and the reduction in downtown automobile traffic, encouraged numerous city governments to so equip their streets. Many cities already equipped with trams have extended their lines and built new ones.
A great example of this shift in ideology is the city of
Munich, which began replacing its tram network with a subway a few years before the
1972 Summer Olympics. When the metro network was finished in the 1990s the city began to tear out the tram network , but now faced opposition from many citizens who enjoyed the enhanced mobility of the mixed network -- the metro lines deviate from the tram lines to a significant degree. New
rolling stock was purchased and the system was modernized, and a new line was proposed in 2003.
Technical developments
Later, cable cars were attached to a moving cable underneath the road. The cable would be pulled by a steam engine at a powerhouse. The Monongahela and Duquesne Inclines in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, have some of the appearance of trams, but are more accurately
funiculars. Modern trams generally use overhead electric cables, from which they draw current through a
pantograph, a
bow collector or the now-rare
trolley pole . The first operational electric street railway was started in
Scranton, Pennsylvania, but the first large-scale electric street railway system was built in
Richmond, Virginia in January 1888. By 1890 over 100 such systems had been begun or were planned.
There are other methods of powering electric trams, sometimes preferred for aesthetic reasons since poles and overhead wires are not required. The old tram systems in
London,
Manhattan , and
Washington D.C. used live rails, like those on third-rail electrified railways, but in a conduit underneath the road, from which they drew power through a
plough. It was called Conduit current collection. Washington's was the last of these to close, in 1962. Today, no commercial tramway uses this system. More recently, a modern equivalent to the old stud systems has been developed which allows for the safe installation of a
third rail on city streets, which is known as surface current collection or
ground-level power supply; the main example of this is the new tramway in
Bordeaux.
In narrow situations double-track tram lines sometimes reduce to single track, or, to avoid
switches, have the tracks interlaced, e.g. in the Leidsestraat in
Amsterdam on three short stretches ; this is known as interlaced or
gauntlet track.
Traditionally trams had high floors, requiring passengers to climb several steps in order to board, but since the 1990s this design has been largely replaced by
low-floor trams, or occasionally by high-floor trams with level boarding platforms, as in
Manchester's Metrolink and some parts of
Cologne's network, which allow passengers in
wheelchairs or with
perambulators to access vehicles more easily. In some jurisdictions this has even been made mandatory since the
1990s, for example by the HMRI in Britain and the Disability discrimination act in the
United Kingdom and other
Commonwealth countries.
Tram-train
Tram-train operation uses vehicles such as the
Flexity Link and Regio-
Citadis which are suited for use on urban tram lines, but also meet the necessary indication, power, and resistance requirements to be certified for operation on main line railways. This allows passengers to travel from suburban areas into city-centre destinations without having to change from a train to a tram when they arrive at the central station.
It has been primarily developed in Germanic countries, in particular Germany and Switzerland.
Karlsruhe is a notable pioneer of the tram-train. This system may have been brought into service in the Paris area in 2005.
Cargo trams
Goods have been carried on rail vehicles through the streets, particularly near docks and steelworks, since the 19th century, and some Belgian
vicinale routes were used to haul timber. At the turn of the 21st century, a new interest has arisen in using urban tramway systems to transport goods. The motivation now is to reduce air pollution, traffic congestion and damage to road surfaces in city centres.
Dresden has a regular
CarGoTram service, run by the world's longest tram trainsets , carrying car parts across the city centre to its
Volkswagen factory.
Vienna and
Zürich use trams as mobile recycling depots.
Amsterdam commissioned a feasibility study into goods trams in November 2005.
Kislovodsk had a freight-only tram system comprising one line which was used exclusively to deliver bottled Narzan mineral water to the railway station.
Pros and cons of tram systems
Advantages
All transit service involves a tradeoff between speed and frequency of stops. Services that stop frequently have lower overall speed, and are therefore less attractive for longer trips. Metros,
light rail,
monorail, and
Bus Rapid Transit are all forms of
rapid transit -- which generally signifies high speed and widely-spaced stops. Trams are a form of local transit, making frequent stops. Thus, the most meaningful comparison of advantages and disadvantages is with other forms of local transit, primarily the local bus.
- The greatest advantage of modern trams is social rather than technical. In most countries, trams don't suffer from the image problem that plagues buses. On the contrary most people associate trams with a positive image. Unlike buses, trams tend to be popular with a wider spectrum of the public, including better-off people who often shun buses. This high level of customer acceptance means higher ridership and bigger public support for investment in new tram infrastructure.
- Multiple entrances means trams are faster to load than buses, which tend to have a single entrance. This, combined with swifter acceleration and braking, means that trams can maintain higher overall speeds than buses
- Trams can adapt to the number of passengers by adding additional cars during rush hour . No additional driver is then required for the trip in comparison to buses.
- In general, trams provide a higher capacity service than buses.
- Unlike buses, but like trolleybuses, trams give off no exhaust emissions at point of use. Compared to motorbuses the noise pollution emitted by trams is generally perceived to be less disturbing.
- Rights-of-way for trams are narrower than for buses. This saves valuable space in cities with high population densities and/or narrow streets.
- Because they are rail-bound, trams command more respect from other road users than buses do, when operating on-road. In heavy traffic conditions, rogue drivers are less likely to hold up trams, for example by blocking intersections or parking on the road. This often leads to fewer delays. As a rule, especially in European cities, trams always have priority.
- Passenger comfort is normally superior to buses because of controlled acceleration and braking and curve easement. Rail transport such as used by trams provides a smoother ride than road use by buses.
Disadvantages
- The initial cost is higher than for buses, hence the usual preference for the latter in smaller cities
- When operated in mixed traffic, trams are more likely to be delayed by disruptions in their lane. Buses, by contrast, can easily maneuver around obstacles. Opinions differ about whether deference that drivers show to trams -- a cultural issue that varies by country -- is sufficient to counteract this disadvantage.
- Tram tracks can be dangerous for cyclists. This and problems with parked cars are avoided by building tracks and platforms in the middle of the road. Cyclists can avoid this by always riding across and never along tramways, as bikes particularly those with narrow tyres may get their wheels caught in the track grooves. It is also possible to close the grooves of the tracks on critical sections by rubber profiles. Those profiles are pressed down by the wheelflanges of the passing tram but cannot by lowered by the weight of a cyclist.
- Tram infrastructure occupies urban space above ground and requires modifications to traffic flow.
- Steel wheel trams can be noisier than rubber-wheeled trolleybuses, especially when cornering.
Regional variations
Europe
Western Europe
The German-speaking countries,
Germany,
Austria, and Switzerland are notable for their large numbers of extensive tram systems, although even in these countries, many systems were closed after the
Second World War. In divided
Berlin, for example, the
West Berlin tramway was closed in 1967 in favor of the city's
subway and bus systems, while the
tram system in
East Berlin was retained. Today, Berlin enjoys one of the largest
tram systems in Germany, but it is confined almost entirely to the eastern part of the city.
In the
Benelux countries, tram networks exist in Amsterdam,
