Introduction to Special Issue on Tram Closures Narrated,Experienced and Contested

This special issue argues for the importance of studying how the closure of electric tramways has been narrated, experienced and contested in different geographical and historical contexts. Arguably, the closure of individual tram lines and entire networks is a global phenomenon, even if historical patterns differ from city to city, region to region. From the 1920s to the 1970s, the electric tramways of many cities in Europe and North America closed or became much smaller in extent. ¹ Our attention in this special issue is focused on cities of northern Europe, many of which lost their tramways between the early 1950s and the early 1970s, while ongoing discussions in the frameworks provided by notions of heritage and of sustainable urban mobilities during the twenty-first century cast a new light on older, sometimes defunct, electric tram networks. The case-study cities are in Denmark, Finland, Poland and the United Kingdom.

The city where the three editors of this special issue live, Turku (in the southwest corner of Finland), is a characteristic example. It once had an electric tramway, which earlier in the twentieth century expanded into growing suburbs on what was then the urban periphery. Made up of just three lines at most, this network nevertheless ran for over 60 years. ² In the 1960s, for a variety of reasons, the municipal authorities decided to close the tramway. To be more precise, it was bustituted: the trams were replaced with diesel buses. ³ The process started with line 1 on 11 March 1967 and concluded on 1 October 1972 when a tram on route 3 passed through the streets of the city for the last time. ⁴ However, it is not only the pattern of closure that finds resonance elsewhere. Also recognisable is the fact that, although it stopped serving a public transportation function, the Turku tramway did not disappear into thin air. Now, some 50 years after the final closure, parts of the infrastructure are still clearly visible – façade hooks, electricity posts, a depot – and, as Silja Laine shows in her contribution to this special issue, the memory of the tramway lives on in the hearts and minds of the city's inhabitants. ⁵ In Turku as well as in cities with similar histories, trams often have an afterlife of sorts, not only in the physical remnants but also in the way people think about and communicate the closure of the tramway. It is an interest in this last fact that has led to the publication of this special issue. We argue that, although not neglected, the social and cultural impact of these instances of tram closures calls for more attention, especially in light of how trams are now perceived in many places. Today, trams are (once again) seen as a decidedly up-to-date urban mode of public transport, and, since the 1980s, so many cities have (re)introduced them that, for some time now, scholars have been talking of a “tramway renaissance.” And Turku is no exception in this regard either. In the autumn of 2023, after years of discussions, the municipal authorities started making concrete plans for how the building of a new tramline could be carried out. ⁶

Tram closures have been studied in different geographical and historical contexts, often with the aim of understanding the subsequent reintroduction and newfound popularity of trams in the cities where they once operated. Several scholars have argued, quite rightly, that to fully grasp the tramway renaissance it is necessary to understand how tram closures have been narrated, experienced and contested in the past. Often, the conclusion has been that the processes which led to the closure and (re)introduction of a tram line or an entire network had as much to do with how different modes of transport were perceived, their cultural and symbolic value, as with efficiency, functionality and sound economic planning. ⁷ Overall, the special issue aligns itself with such scholarly perspectives. However, where scholarship on tram closures tends to be situated within recent trends in transport and mobility studies which aim to highlight the relevance of historical research to contemporary policymakers, the special issue has no such articulated aims of practical applicability, even if lessons may well be drawn from several of the contributions. ⁸ Rather, it has emerged out of a wish to understand and trace the social and cultural reverberations of tram closures as well as a conviction that the relevance of city dwellers’ experiences should not be assessed solely according to the needs of policymakers. Although tram closures often follow a recognisable pattern, their affective histories tend to be local and deeply entangled with specific urban memory cultures.

The special issue has come about through discussions and collaborations within the project “Public Transport as Public Space: Narrating, Experiencing, Contesting” (PUTSPACE) and most of the contributions have developed from papers presented at a workshop organised by the authors of this article at the project's concluding conference in Brussels, Belgium in April 2022. ⁹ Unsurprisingly, the special issue builds on some of the same premises as PUTSPACE and it looks to make similar scholarly contributions. ¹⁰ Looking across the articles included in the special issue, they might not explicitly state that they are investigating public transport as a particular kind of public space. But, implicitly, they are doing just this. The partial or full closure of a tramway amounts to the removal of a particular kind of public space from a city as well as to the disappearance of a particular kind of vehicle from the public space that is the city's streets. As the contributions demonstrate, such eradications create a vacuum that is not easily filled. Buses and metro systems are introduced to serve the same function, perhaps even in better ways, but many people experience these vehicles differently from the trams that, in many cities, they replaced. Tram closures reveal that public transport is not merely a matter of finance, functionality, efficiency and sustainability. It is also a question of personal attachments, experiences and memories. Along with our colleagues in PUTSPACE, we maintain that there is an urgent need to supplement the often strongly technology-based and even economistic approaches that long dominated public transport research with a more humanising approach, one that considers closely how human beings experience, perceive and reflect on the different modes of public transport available to them. Qualitative perceptions of different transport modes, including evaluations of what they convey about the city concerned to outsiders, can, we argue, play a major part in decisions about whether to spend large amounts of money on a new network or to renew an old one as opposed to letting it decay until bringing it up to date is no longer feasible.

PUTSPACE had a strong emphasis on interdisciplinarity. The reasoning was that when it comes to understanding something as diverse and multifaceted as human beings’ experience of public transport, a perspective from the vantage point of one field of study is insufficient. We agree and are therefore pleased to include contributions from a broad range of scholarly disciplines, including cultural history, geography, sociology and literary studies. They each approach the topic in different ways and through diverse kinds of primary and secondary materials. From a geographical and historical perspective, the articles also represent a varied set of case studies but all consider the same continent. Turku, Copenhagen, London and Glasgow all exemplify well the fate of tramways in many Western European cities during the middle of the twentieth century. Toruń, in Poland, illustrates how these same issues played out in Eastern Europe.

Common to all these tram closures is that they took place in cities: trams are a quintessentially urban phenomenon. Indeed, all the authors share an interest in cities and urban studies. One of the suggestions underlying all the articles is that to better understand the affective remembering of tram closures, as well as the excitement of tram (re)openings, it is necessary for such events to be understood in an urban context, and to be related to the respective cities and their histories.

In the first article contained in the special issue, Silja Laine examines the urban cultural memory of the Turku tram that has developed since the network closed in 1972 and which is now an integral part of the city's urban culture and identity. At closure events that year, people came to say farewell to the trams and decked them with flowers. More than half a century later, the Museum Centre of Turku holds many tram-related materials and has published research on the history of the tram, but it does not have premises where a permanent exhibition related to the city's transport history (including the former tramway's place in it) could be housed. As a result, keeping the memory of the Turku tram alive has become the task of private citizens, visible in enthusiast groups, civic activity and political activism. The trams of Turku were photographed by professional and hobby photographers, resulting in a rich visual heritage that has been used in varied ways. At present, these memories and the senses of the city they give rise to are influencing the planning of the city's possibly future light-rail network. However, as Laine argues, the relationship between the long-closed tram network and these future plans remains complicated.

In the second article gathered here, Adam Borch explores the tramway of Copenhagen, which for much of the twentieth century was the most important public transport network in the capital of Denmark. The Copenhagen tramway played a central role in urban life, featuring prominently in Danish art and literature produced during its lifespan as well as after its final closure, which happened simultaneously with the Turku tramway's final disappearance, in 1972. There is little scholarship on the Copenhagen tramway, however. Borch addresses this by drawing attention to the tramway's extended life in art and literature. One example of this is the short story “På Sporet af den Tabte Vogn” (“On the Track of the Lost Tram”) (1985), by Klaus Rifbjerg. Set in Copenhagen, 12 years after the closure of the last tram line, it tells the story of an elderly enthusiast and watchman in a warehouse full of old, dilapidated trams who, in the last hours of his life, imagines taking a tram ride through the city. Not surprisingly, the short story has often been described as nostalgic. However, as Borch shows, Rifbjerg's story does not boil down to a sentimental longing for a lost past when trams used to drive through the streets of Copenhagen. Instead, Borch argues, Rifbjerg examines the status of nostalgic memories of the tramway in contemporary urban society and nudges his readers to sympathise with such remembrances. Ultimately, this particular short story becomes classifiable as part of a broader tendency in writing about closures of electric public transport networks in Western Europe and North America. It works as a counternarrative to notions of progress, as an antidote to the car-led notions of urban development which dominated in the mid-twentieth century.

For their part, Iuliia Eremenko and Timoteusz Kraski examine the rationale behind the proposed modifications to the tram network of Toruń in Poland. Unlike the other cities examined in this special issue, Toruń still has its original electric tramway, and this has been expanded during the twenty-first century to serve outer suburbs and the city's university. Specifically, the proposals concerned involve excluding trams from Toruń's medieval city centre, which has made it a designated UNESCO World Cultural Heritage City since 1997. Trams have not run in the medieval old town of Toruń since 1970, just before the final tramway closures in Copenhagen and Turku. The authors assess the impact of local experts’ opinions on the decision-making processes surrounding these changes, using a polycentric governance framework. Empirically, the analysis relies on historical public transport maps, newspapers pre- and post-tramline closures, expert interviews, and public consultation reports related to the public transport network changes in Toruń under the European Union's regional development programme. The study casts light on the diverse rationales which different groups of actors present for the network's partial closure. Its authors highlight the pivotal role of local expert Ignacy Tłoczek, whose influence extended beyond the tramline closure to shape subsequent tram network development within the World Heritage Area.

Jason Finch, finally, argues that film representations of transport networks’ closure events can be used as materials in critical, comparative urban studies. He takes as his materials films commemorating the last nights of the London and Glasgow tramways. These two cities had the most extensive tramway systems ever built in the United Kingdom, until their gradual closure began in the mid-twentieth century (in London's case before the Second World War). London's remaining tram lines closed in 1952, and Glasgow's final night of tram operation was in 1962. Both films were released shortly after the events they depicted. Unlike literary texts and feature films, short documentary films have rarely been examined in urban cultural studies, whereas transport historians considering the early and extensive tram networks of London and Glasgow, operational since the late Victorian period, have tended to be more technical and economistic in their interests than Finch is. Working towards an understanding of public transport as a type of contested public space, he asks how the filmmakers, John Krish documenting London's last day of tram operation and Kevin Brownlow Glasgow's, depicted the cities’ publicness or lack of it. On the one hand, both manufacturers consented to the removal of on-street electric public transport on rails at a time when internal combustion engine vehicles, both private and public, were becoming massively more widespread in the United Kingdom. On the other, both Krish and Brownlow use techniques incorporating popular music and drawing on the work of Italian neorealist film directors to provide affectionate views of transport modes largely considered outmoded in the later twentieth century. Their films pave the way for heritage discourses of transport and even anticipate sustainability-led positions in the city that would only gain traction decades after these networks closed.