About this notebook
I am an amateur, not a railway historian, and this is a hobby kept in my own time. It started when I tried to trace an old tram route across a city I was visiting and found that the useful facts were scattered across timetables, street plans, a museum pamphlet and a few photographs, with no single place that pulled them together. So I began writing my own notes, and the notes turned into this site.
I try to be careful about what I actually know. Where a date comes from a printed timetable I will say so; where I am reconstructing it from photographs or from the memory of someone who rode the line, I say that too. Trams are easy to romanticise, and it is tempting to round a story off neatly, but a wrong date repeated often enough becomes hard to undo. When I am not sure, I would rather write that plainly than guess.
Nothing here is comprehensive. I write about the lines and depots I have been able to look into, which is a small and uneven selection. If something is missing it usually means I have not got to it yet, or I could not find enough to say.