Tramway Museum, St Kilda
The Tramway Museum, St Kilda is Australia's principal museum of the 19th and 20th century trams of Adelaide, South Australia. It is situated at St Kilda, north of the centre of Adelaide. It is operated by the Australian Electric Transport Museum Inc., a not-for-profit volunteer organisation affiliated with the Council of Tramway Museums of Australasia. It is dedicated to the study, conservation and restoration of trams that were used in Adelaide or built there, and likewise with a small bus and trolleybus collection.Trams provide unlimited free rides for visitors on payment of the entrance fee. They operate along a purpose-built track between the museum and a large adventure playground.
Scope
The museum is one of very few transport museums in the world holding at least one example of every principal tram type to have been in service on a city street system.From a vacant site in 1958, the museum as of 2024 housed 24 electric trams, 2 horse trams, a tram-hauled horsebox, 5 trolleybuses, and a diesel bus of the type that operated when the street tram network was closed in 1958. Museum features include an entrance gallery, bookshop, interpretative displays and archive. Maintenance and construction facilities include two workshops, a wheel lathe building, ancillary storage sheds and a "travelling workshop", a former Melbourne W2 class tram.
Staffed by volunteers, the museum relies mainly on visitor admissions to fund its work. Major projects are supported by donations from museum members and occasional grants from South Australian Government museum assistance programs and the Salisbury Council. The council crucially secured funding from a 1972 state government unemployment relief scheme to lay the all-important tramway from the museum site alongside St Kilda Road towards the sea, and to erect poles for overhead wiring.
Development
In 1958, work started at the museum site with the arrival of donated vehicles: the first were four trams from Adelaide's Municipal Tramways Trust, which that year had closed its street tram network, leaving intact only the mainly enclosed Glenelg tram line. The museum opened as a static display in 1967. The tramway commenced trials in 1973 and was officially opened in 1974, coinciding with St Kilda's centenary. Subsequently, workshops were built to restore trams to operating condition; additional depots between 1980 and in 2001 to house the increasing number of trams in the collection; and in 2017 the original depot and workshop was replaced by a new facility.Fleet
The pre-electric era, from 1878 to 1917, is represented by horse tram no. 18 of the Adelaide and Suburban Tramway Company, the largest of 11 companies that together operated more than 150 vehicles on a network of about, mostly of standard gauge. Displayed next to it is tram no. 15 of the Adelaide, Unley and Mitcham Tramway Company, in the deteriorated condition that is a common starting point for many restoration tasks of tramway museums.The electric era, which started in 1909, was under the management of the MTT, a body established in late 1907 and governed mainly by councillors nominated by local governments. From then until 1958, when the street tram system was closed down, the trust had owned more than 300 trams and operated over a network of about. After 1958, there remained only the line from Glenelg to the geographic centre of Adelaide. About 85% of the line was in its own reserved corridor, and a 1957 study of the economic and physical features of the line had concluded that the good state of the track and rolling stock would allow the tramway to continue for about ten years, when its future would be reviewed. Another report recommended that the right of way be converted to a "sturdy" pavement solely for a bus service; but funding never eventuated. It was to be another 47 years before a tramways renaissance began.
The museum holds at least one tram of each main type from the MTT era. Its collection also includes two Melbourne trams. One, W-class Melbourne tram no. 294, was built in Adelaide by Holden's Body Builders, the predecessor of General Motors-Holden; the other, which offers a comparison with the MTT's fast-loading Type F cars, has been modified for easy wheelchair access. A third fast-loader is a Sydney R1 Class tram, lent by the Sydney Tramway Museum.
Trolleybuses preserved are a 1925-built Garford, a 1937 AEC 661T, a 1942 double-deck Leyland, a 1945 single-deck Leyland whose chassis was originally destined for Canton, China, and a 1952 Sunbeam MF2B. A 1954 AEC Regal IV motor bus is also preserved.