Adelaide and the Tram
Anyone who knows me knows I love almost any type of train, and, perhaps oddly, any metro system or tram service. So, recently, while planning a trip to Australia and I was fascinated to know that Adelaide has that country’s longest tram. Immediately, that made Adelaide a must-see destination and I began arranging for my trip and making a reservation at the best Adelaide hotel I could find.
The tram runs in Adelaide to Glenelg Beach and is listed as a Type H car, introduced in 1929, eighty years ago! These are the oldest passenger trains serving Australia. Until 1958 or so, there was a network of Adelaide trams, serving the suburban areas. They ran horse trams in 1878 to 1914, and electric trams starting in 1909. Today, there remains only a single tram line, with only two classes of electric trams, one built in 2006 and the other in 1929.
The tram line, the longest in the country, connects Adelaide’s business district to the Glenelg, a seaside suburb. The Glenelg tram runs for 7.6 miles, every fifteen minutes, and is a part of the Adelaide Metro transport network for the public. In the city, there may be some short sections between stops, but once outside of town, the Glenlg route follows through a private reservation, therefore there’s no interference from road traffic, and creates a fast trip. These vintage 1929 H-Type cars were the only rolling stock on line, until January, 2006. In that month, the new up-to-date Flexity Classic trams came on line. There are eleven of these new low-floor, 30m-long vehicles for the Light Rail.
A new portion of the line was constructed and opened for public use as of October 14, 2007. And the government has been studying the feasibility of expanding farther. In recent years, the plan has been to build a bridge over South Road in order to replace the present crossing and then to extend the tram service even farther to Port Adelaide, Semaphore, and even out to Woodville and the West Lakes.
It may seem crazy to some to be so interested in riding one of these classic cars, but so far I’ve been on trains in London, and Paris, St. Petersburg and Moscow; it seems a shame to leave Australia out.
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