America
In Argentina there were trams in many cities, and with the most varied propulsion systems. The most important network was that of Buenos Aires, with almost 900 km of tracks. The first Buenos Aires tram "Porteño (gentilicio)") (blood traction) circulated in 1863, being in that case only an extension of the Northern Railway, from the Plaza de Mayo to Retiro. In 1865 the Southern Railway did the same and installed its extension tram line from the Constitución Station to the Lima and Av. Belgrano property. On February 27, 1870, trams began to run through the downtown area of Buenos Aires, with the simultaneous inauguration of the “Central Tramway” by the brothers Julio and Federico Lacroze (which linked Plaza de Mayo with Once on Gral. along the parallel Sarmiento street, then Cuyo, barely 100 meters away). The electric tram arrived in Buenos Aires in 1897, although the first of its kind circulated in La Plata in 1892.
In 1888 a line was inaugurated as the Lacroze brothers' "Tramway Rural" of 47 km (29 miles) drawn by horses from Buenos Aires through the countryside to the town of Pilar, which thanks to modernization and the increase in population became what is today the General Urquiza Railway.[22].
In addition to Buenos Aires and La Plata, the Argentine cities of Bahía Blanca, Concordia "Concordia (Argentina)"), Córdoba "Córdoba (Argentina)"), Corrientes "Corrientes (Capital)"), Mar del Plata, Mendoza, Necochea, Paraná, Avellaneda "Avellaneda (party)"), Quilmes "Quilmes (party)"), Rosario had electric trams. "Trams in Rosario (Argentina)"), Salta, Santa Fe "Santa Fe (Capital)") and Tucumán.[23].
In Rosario, trams had a certain success between the beginning of the 20th century until the 1960s, where due to competition with the bus and trolleybus, they were completely radiated and a large part of the tracks were buried or raised.
But, in 2014, a unit from the 1930s was restored by a little-known local association and since that year, it has been put into use on certain dates for a few blocks of the Rosario macrocenter.[24].
Even smaller Argentine cities had animal-drawn trams. For example, in Chivilcoy, province of Buenos Aires, it was granted in 1872 to the company Carlos Villate y Cía. a concession to establish a tram line, which in reality had to wait until 1895 to be formalized, through the Vega-Castro consortium, between the North station and Villarino avenue. Only two units were circulating. Another Buenos Aires city, Florencio Varela "Florencio Varela (Buenos Aires)"), had a tram that linked the Ferrocarril Sud station with the Villa Vatteone neighborhood. In this case, for a route of approximately 2 km there was only one car.
In Concordia, Entre Ríos, a 7 km long horse tram service operated between 1880 and 1915. From 1928 to 1963, two metric gauge electric lines (unique in the country) with 9 km of tracks operated.[25].
Since 1960, the massive deactivation of lines throughout the country began. In Buenos Aires they stopped operating on February 19, 1963, with line 38 being the last to close. The last city in Argentina in which trams circulated was La Plata, capital of the province of Buenos Aires. The final trip was completed on December 25, 1966.
After an interregnum of almost twenty years, on November 15, 1980, the Friends of the Tram Association,[26] founded in 1976 and chaired since then by the architect Aquilino González Podesta, was able to inaugurate the “Historical Tramway of Buenos Aires”, a living museum of restored historical trams that since then has operated every weekend and holiday in the Caballito neighborhood.
In 1987, a modern tram line was opened in the southwest of the city, called Premetro "Premetro (Buenos Aires Subway)"), while in 1995 the Tren de la Costa was inaugurated, a Metro Ligero type line that takes advantage of the layout of the formerly known as "Tren del Bajo" between the Avenida Maipú and Delta stations "Estación Delta (Buenos Aires)"), but which was equipped with modern tram cars.
In 2006, the Eastern Tram project was launched, which was officially inaugurated on Saturday, July 14, 2007 and put into public service on the following July 25, in its first section along the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Puerto Madero, as an experimental and demonstration service, equipped with modern Citadis 302 units brought from Mulhouse, France, by agreement with the government of that country. Unfortunately, shortly after beginning its operation, in 2012, it stopped providing service. It is currently in a state of abandonment.[27].
In 2012, the Urban Metrotram was inaugurated in the City of Mendoza.[28] The route is 12.5 km long and goes from the Central Station of the city of Mendoza to the Gutiérrez Station in Maipú. This line and the Buenos Aires Premetro are currently the only two tram-type services that are operable in the country.
Chile was one of the first countries to have animal-drawn trams in approximately 1850, they were the so-called “Carros de sangre”. Towards the end of the century, the electrification of the tram began, both in Santiago and Valparaíso and other cities and towns (such as Villa Alegre). Electric trams were operated by German, English, and North American companies and were finally nationalized and nationalized, creating the National Electric Transport Company, which was later renamed the State Collective Transport Company (ETC del E, its acronym), better known as the ETC.
At the end of the 1940s, trolleybuses appeared, which, with minibuses, prevailed over the tram in terms of travel speed. Adding to this the explosive increase in the Chilean automobile fleet, this caused tram users to decrease drastically, so that the tram was withdrawn from Santiago (it had already disappeared from the rest of Chile), with the last car circulating in 1957.
There are projects in Arica, Copiapó, Quilicura, Maipú "Maipú (Chile)"), Temuco, Concepción "Concepción (Chile)") (the Biotrén, already in operation), Rancagua-Machalí and the Arturo Merino Benítez International Airport. In Antofagasta, a tram that runs through the city from north to south is in the design stage, while the communes of the Colchagua Valley such as Santa Cruz, San Fernando and San Vicente intend to unite their attractions using the same system.
In Colombia, specifically in Medellín, as of March 31, 2016, there is the most modern tram system in Latin America. The Ayacucho Tram (Medellín Tram) which consists of a 4.3 km line, from the San Antonio Metro station to the Oriente station, with a total of 9 stops, 3 of them transfer. From the Miraflores and Oriente Stations separate cables that climb the eastern mountain of the city, integrating the popular neighborhoods in the eastern central area of the city into the metro system, see Metrocable (Medellín) "Metrocable (Medellín)").
The Bogotá Tram was inaugurated in Bogotá on December 24, 1884, it was the mule-drawn tram that rolled on wooden rails covered with straps. Eight years later, steel rails imported from England were installed. In 1910 the electric tram system began to be implemented. To modernize its administration, the old Railway Company was closed and the administration of the tram passed to the municipality, the Bogotá Municipal Tram Company was then created. The municipality received a system composed of 4 lines, 1 power plant, 180 mules, 9 oxen, 6 electric cars, 33 cargo passenger cars, 12 km of network, 2 km electrified. After electrification, service provision was extended to the southern neighborhoods; In 1922 the system had twenty-nine electric cars, five for mules and two for cargo.
The destruction of some tram cars during the events of April 9, 1948 (Bogotazo) was used by the government as an excuse to end the company. The tram service operated in Bogotá until 1951 when Mayor Fernando Mazuera Villegas decided unilaterally and through deception to end it, according to his testimony from the time, as he covered its asphalt rails in just a few days, at the same time asking the City Council for more time to reflect on the measure.
The Medellín Tram was inaugurated in January 1887 and was a series of cars pulled by mules. In 1921, the operation of the electric tram began and its coverage was extended to other places in the city and the region, such as the La América neighborhood and the neighboring municipality of Rionegro. In 1922, the tram had 12 cars serving the city that moved 9,150 people a day; Three years later, the system already had 22 km of routes, to which were added those built in the Manrique, Robledo, Belén and Envigado neighborhoods in the south of the Aburrá Valley, with which the system reached 36 km and served a population of 120 thousand inhabitants. With the massification of gasoline buses in Colombian cities, and the increase in private vehicles in Medellín, tram operations began to decrease from 1945 and by 1951, only the Aranjuez route was providing service, which closed that same year.
The Barranquilla tram operated between 1890 and 1927.
Since 2015 it consists of a 4.3 kilometer tram line, from the San Antonio station "Estación San Antonio (Metro de Medellín)") of the Metro to the Alejandro Echavarría neighborhood. It has a total of 9 stations, 3 of them transfer stations.[29].
The passenger tram in Montecristi, Dominican Republic. This tram was moved by a mule and horses, starting in 1884. It was destroyed by a fire in 1904.
In Ecuador there were electric trams in the cities of Quito and Guayaquil until the beginning of the 20th century.
In 2020, the Municipality of Cuenca inaugurated the first line of the Cuenca Tram, which has a length of 20.4 kilometers round trip and has 27 stations.
The oldest streetcar still operating today in the United States is the Green Line operated by the Metropolitan Boston Transportation Authority (MBTA) in the city of Boston, Massachusetts. Another tram notorious for its age is that of New Orleans, more precisely the St. Charles line, devastated in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina, but recently reopened (Dec. 2007). Other old systems have been maintained, such as the famous Cable Cars of the city of San Francisco "San Francisco (California)"), California.
There were countless cities and tram systems in the United States, both in their purely “urban” mode and in another type of “suburban” tram that gained special development in the country between 1900 and 1920, called “interurbans”. The latter were characterized by linking towns and cities, running in the urban fabric through the streets, sharing the rails with the urban trams that were there, and then going cross-country, with generally precarious, low-cost facilities, which seriously competed with the large railway companies with parallel routes, and more agile vehicles that stopped everywhere, making it possible to transport people, parcels and even loads with better performance than conventional railways.
The emergence of automobile transport in the 1930s, and the policies and “lobbies” that promoted them at a rapid pace since the end of the Second World War, greatly affected the tram in the USA, where they barely survived in a few cities (16), of the many in which they circulated.
The prospects for future energy resources and oil scarcity have led in recent decades to several cities, particularly in the west of the country, embarking on projects to build transportation systems based on light rail technology, the modern evolution of the tram.
These projects include:
Mention must also be made of the cities of Sacramento "Sacramento (California)"), Saint Louis "Saint Louis (Missouri)"), New Jersey, Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Baltimore and Buffalo "Buffalo (New York)"), with new systems, and the cities of Boston, Pittsburgh, San Francisco "San Francisco (California)") (streetcar lines J, K, L, M and N of the "Muni"), Cleveland "Cleveland (Ohio)"), and New Orleans that renewed and expanded their current systems.
Mexico City.
The evolution of trams, first animal traction (mulitas) and then electric (1900), as well as the construction of the first railway lines to the town of Guadalupe and Tacubaya, accelerated the emergence of new subdivisions in the city. The history of railways and trams began in parallel: these providing an intra-urban service, and those linking towns, neighboring towns and other cities of the Mexican Republic.
The invention of the tram, as well as other inventions, is not necessarily exclusive to a single person, since the need to improve anything goes hand in hand with imagination and intelligence, which in turn becomes creativity and by having the appropriate materials, the solution can be created or invented. This happened with a Mexican named De Anda who, in that era of rails and wheels, designed a concept of a car to transport passengers on the existing tracks, but that was powered by electric motors and a rheostat, which by feeding energy to the motors, through reduction gears, made the car move.
His idea was not accepted among the sponsors he was looking for when an American from Chicago, who worked in the nascent oil industry in Mexico, heard him and convinced him to travel with him to the United States, where they bought his idea and they developed their ideas, applying them to this new transportation system.
In 1890 there were 175 km of tracks, 55 locomotives, 600 passenger cars, 800 carts, 3,000 mules and horses, 300 drivers, 800 coachmen, 100 inspectors, 7,000 workers and a veterinarian with several assistants.
For several years, Mexico City had tram routes distributed throughout a good part of the old urban area, but due to the demographic explosion, the increase in urban sprawl and the multiplication of transportation for personal use, they ended up disappearing at the end of the second half of the 20th century; even in some central neighborhoods you can see remains of the old tracks that remained. Likewise, there were tram lines in various cities in the country.
In 2007, the possibility of reincorporating trams into the public transportation network was announced, with the aim of reducing the significant environmental pollution suffered by Mexico City.
On July 1, 2008, the construction of the tram was officially presented to the public with a route from the historic center to the Buenavista station of the suburban train, where Metro Line B and Line 1 of the Insurgentes Metrobús converge in Mexico City. A Bombardier Flexity Swift tram had even been shown as well as a model of what its stations would be like. However, at the beginning of 2009 the economic crisis forced the government of the Federal District to postpone the project indefinitely, declaring the tender that was in progress void.
The tram line project was replaced by Line 4 of the metrobus "Metrobús (Mexico City)") with a route from Buenavista "Buenavista (station)") to San Lázaro "San Lázaro (station)"). leaving zero or little possibility of being able to execute the tram project, this is also due to the interests of several trucking companies that did not want to be displaced.
Veracruz.
Veracruz trams.
During the 1920s, the Port of Veracruz Tram Cooperative existed, which was made up of the following lines: "Villa del Mar", "Villa Bravo", "Reforma Zaragoza", "Bravo Laguna", "Panteones", "Cortes Lerdo" which were distributed from its base on Avenida Constituciónntes Veracruzanos on the corner of Morelos, next to the Puerto de Veracruz Railway Station and where they all passed through the City Center and distributed towards the beach areas (Villa del Mar and Villa Bravo), to the north of the City, (Cortes Lerdo), towards the recent residential areas in the area where the Luis "Pirata" De la Fuente stadium and the Veracruzano Baseball Sports Park (Reforma Zaragoza) are located, converging at the end of their route in the center of the city, on one side of the boardwalk and their arrival at the tram station.
Its heyday was in the late 40s, 50s and 60s, but as the city began to grow, spread to the four cardinal points, as well as the appearance of urban routes provided by passenger trucks, its traffic began to decrease, until reaching the 70s when its public service finally ended. Many of these trams, still functional, were sold to various cities in the United States, some of them being museum pieces.
Which provided the service until 1979 when their service was unsustainable, taking into consideration several eventualities: The aging of the trams, many of them from the time of the 30s and 40s similar to the trams of San Francisco, in the United States, the lack of support from the state government and later from the federal government headed by President Lic. José López Portillo who were not able to stop the bankruptcy in addition to the indifference of many Jarochos for its rescue, They favored its disappearance, without taking into consideration that the trams were a tourist attraction.
Also in 2008, the tram that would link the historic center of the city and the port of Veracruz in the state of Veracruz was planned, but never carried out. There is a tram simulation consisting of a wooden construction with an urban truck chassis that develops routes through various tourist sites in the city.
Guadalajara.
On April 30, 2008 in Guadalajara[30] a project was presented to build 2 tram routes that would depart from the Juárez station towards Plaza del Sol and the Chivas Stadium, respectively. However, the project failed to prosper.
It was not until November 30, 2010 when a project was presented to build a tram line linking Guadalajara and Zapopan,[31] which is planned to leave from the Glorieta de La Normal to the town of Tesistán in Zapopan. This project is currently under analysis.[32].
Regarding the electric tram project, it was reported that it will have 12 stations and will transport 75,000 passengers daily in 15 rolling cars with its own engine. This work would be completed 18 months after its construction began.[33].
On September 6, 2011, during the X International Congress Towards Car-Free Cities, the Guadalajara Tram project for Zapopan was presented.
This transportation will include, in its first stage, which corresponds to the executive project being developed, the Highway to Tesistán, at the height of the Arc de Triunfo, to the Glorieta de La Normal. It would have a length of 9.6 kilometers and 14 stations; It would have a connection with Line One of the Light Rail at the Ávila Camacho Station.
In the second phase, it is intended to cover the Glorieta de La Normal towards Alcalde-16 de Septiembre, to El Agua Azul, including this stage, 4.2 kilometers with 7 stations would be added, to total 13.8 kilometers of tram.
To which the first Tram line in Zapopan has 21 stations.[34][35].
The first tram that operated in the city of Lima was the so-called Blood Tram, in 1878. This tram operated by animal traction, with two horses that pulled the car on rails. At the end of the century, 3 tram lines operated in the city,[36] with cars manufactured by the John Stephenson Company of New York. Despite the damage caused to the railway lines caused by the Guano and Saltpeter War, the system continued to function. However, the service was deficient and could not meet the demand for a city, which at the beginning of the century already had 250 thousand inhabitants.[36].
In 1904 the conversion of the tram system to the electric version began. Until 1906, two new electric lines had been inaugurated:[37].
Lima - Chorrillos.
Lima - Callao.
The tram of that time was part of the city environment, accompanying the architectural beauty of Republican Lima. In 1918, the length of the tram network was 39 kilometers. Until the 1920s, the network was made up of 240 electric-powered trams, traveling at a speed of up to 40 kilometers per hour.[37].
Due to the debts that afflicted the National Tram Company (CNT), Law No. 15876 was enacted in 1965, during the government of President Fernando Belaúnde Terry, which ordered the liquidation of the system and the completion of operations.
The urban animal-drawn railway was succeeded by the electric tram in 1913. Firstly, on March 14, 1875, the service for transporting people by means of animal-drawn vehicles, called the urban blood railway, was implemented, 11 years after the same system was implemented in Callao and three years before that of Lima. Not much is known about the service provided over the next three decades.
According to the annals of the history of Arequipa, on October 25, 1905, Carlos Espejo y Ureta presented to the Provincial Council, with Juan Aragón being mayor, a proposal for the implementation of the electric tram in the city. In that same year, the registration of vehicles that were in charge of transporting people and cargo was regularized. After long service in the first decades of the century, the Arequipa Electric Tram did not order any more vehicles after 1930, until 1939, when it purchased two used cars from an abandoned tram route in the city of Elmira (New York), located in upstate New York. These cars were numbered 701 and 702. The New York streetcars originally had 12 windows on each side. They were too long for the narrow streets of Arequipa, so they were redesigned, transforming the first and last windows into doors and the terminals remodeled. Its track system was changed from 1435 mm. at 1067 mm.
In the last years of the Arequipa tram, where there were controversies regarding its service and operation, on September 18, 1962, a statement was issued in which it was intended to replace the old tram system with a modern one, something that in the end did not come to fruition (Diario El Deber on the 26th of that same year). In January 1966, the trams were withdrawn from public service as a result of the company's liquidation. The Arequipa trams were the last to provide services in Peru. The one in Lima was closed in September of the previous year.
In 2015, the Co-financed Private Initiative (IPC) for the construction of two tram lines in the city of Trujillo "Trujillo (Peru)") for an investment amount of EUR 447 million was admitted for processing by the Agency for the Promotion of Private Investment (PROINVERSIÓN).[38]
The horse tram service in Uruguay was inaugurated in Montevideo in 1868 BC.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, new companies with foreign capital were created that began to acquire the existing horse tram companies in order to electrify them and improve the service. On November 17, 1906, the then Commercial Society of Montevideo inaugurated the route between Customs and Pocitos "Pocitos (Montevideo)"). On December 31, 1925, the last convoy of horses, from the Tranvía del Norte company, left the center and ended its journey in Agraciada and Zufriateguy, closing a cycle that lasted 56 years.
In 1947, the Municipal Administration of Collective Transport of Montevideo was created, which took charge of the trams as part of payment of the debt that Great Britain had contracted with Uruguay for supplies made during the Second World War. The new entity progressively replaced the 61 tram lines with trolleybuses and in April 1957, electric tram services ceased in Montevideo. In turn, the cities of Salto and Paysandú had trams, but not electric ones.
In the sixties, while many cities chose to remove the tram from the streets, the city of Montevideo was planning to have a historic tram circuit. In 1967, after a few years had passed since the suppression of trams in Montevideo, the Uruguayan Association of Friends of the Riel proposed to the Government of Montevideo the creation of a historic circuit in the city. Which finally materialized for that year, being in some way the first historic tram circuit in the world.[39].