Perth’s Vanished Tram Lines — A Photo Essay

Most Australians know Sydney closed its trams, and Brisbane closed its trams, and Melbourne kept its trams. Fewer remember that Perth had a tram network at all. The Perth system ran from 1899 to 1958, covered the central city and the inner suburbs from Subiaco to South Perth, and at its peak was carrying more passengers per capita than Sydney. It closed quietly, without the protests that accompanied the closures in the eastern capitals, and the rails were lifted so quickly that within a decade most of the corridors had been resurfaced for buses or cars. This piece traces what was lost, what survives, and what a Perth tram scroll commemorates — and it is written from our Booragoon studio, which sits a few kilometres from the corridor where the Fremantle Road tram once ran.

The Network at Its Peak — 1920s and 1930s

Perth’s tram network opened in 1899 with a route from the city to Subiaco, operated by the Perth Electric Tramways Company. Over the following two decades the city expanded the system to cover Maylands, Mount Lawley, Inglewood, North Perth, Leederville, Subiaco, Nedlands, South Perth, Victoria Park, East Perth and the Causeway crossing to the southern suburbs. By the 1930s the network had been municipalised under the Perth City Tramways and operated more than a hundred cars across a route mileage that compared favourably to Adelaide or Brisbane. The fleet included single-truck four-wheelers for the early lines and longer bogie cars for the later high-capacity routes. The destination blinds carried the suburb names that any Perth resident still recognises today — SUBIACO, MAYLANDS, MOUNT LAWLEY, NEDLANDS, SOUTH PERTH — and the typography on those blinds is the design language that survives in modern heritage scrolls. The Perth Tramway Preservation Society publishes a comprehensive route-by-route history with photographs, and is the best single source for understanding what the network looked like at its peak. For a wider Australian context, our piece on the Melbourne tram network covers the network that survived — Perth’s system was smaller but operationally similar to the Melbourne network of the same era.

The Decline to Buses — Post-War and the 1950s

The decline of the Perth tram network followed the same pattern as Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and the other Australian capitals. After the Second World War, government policy across the country pushed road-building, car ownership and bus services as the modern alternative to fixed-rail transport. In Western Australia the argument had a particular edge because the state’s mining economy was generating revenue that could be spent on roads, and the political case for keeping trams was thin. Routes were closed in stages from 1952 onwards, and the last tram ran in Perth on 19 July 1958. The trolleybuses that replaced them survived only until 1969, and then the diesel buses that replaced the trolleybuses became the only public transport across the network’s former corridors. The closures were not contested in any organised way — there was no equivalent of Friedel Klussmann’s cable-car campaign in San Francisco, and no equivalent of the route-by-route resistance that delayed (briefly) the Sydney closures. Our piece on the lost trams of Sydney covers the closure logic in detail, and Brisbane’s forgotten trams follows the same story for Queensland. Perth’s pattern was closer to Brisbane’s than to Sydney’s — a quiet, almost technocratic dismantling rather than a debated political decision.

The Booragoon Connection and Our Second Studio

Our Booragoon studio is in the southern suburbs of Perth, a few kilometres from where the Fremantle Road tram once crossed the Canning River via the Causeway and continued through Victoria Park and South Perth toward the inner-city loops. The corridor is now a sequence of arterial roads — Albany Highway, Canning Highway, Stirling Highway — but the line of the old route is still visible in the layout of the suburbs the tram served. Customers in Perth who order from our Booragoon studio often ask about the local heritage when they come to collect, and the most-requested Perth scroll destinations are Subiaco, Mount Lawley, Maylands and the Fremantle Road corridor. We keep the design files for the original Perth City Tramways destination blinds on hand, including the route numbers and the suburb spellings as they appeared on the actual cars in the 1930s and 1940s. The studio is also our pickup point for Perth-metro customers across all our blog topics, including the wedding and Father’s Day gift guides covered in our pieces on wedding gift ideas and Father’s Day picks, where collecting from Booragoon removes the freight buffer from the lead-time calculation.

What Survives — Whiteman Park Tramway Museum

The most important physical survival of the Perth tram network is the Whiteman Park Tramway Museum, located in Whiteman Park north of Perth. Whiteman Park operates restored Perth trams on a heritage loop that runs every weekend, and the museum holds the largest collection of Perth-built cars in the country. The fleet includes single-truck four-wheelers from the early Perth network, longer bogie cars from the inter-war expansion, and several cars rescued from scrap when the network closed in 1958. The destination blinds on these cars are the original 1950s prints, which means a visit to Whiteman Park is the closest you can get to seeing the typography and route numbering that any modern Perth scroll is based on. The museum is run by volunteers and operates under the umbrella of the Whiteman Park heritage operations, and the State Library of Western Australia holds the operational archives. For visitors from interstate, a half-day at Whiteman Park is the single best way to understand what Perth lost — and the Perth Tramway Preservation Society also operates a smaller display of preserved cars at their workshop. Our piece on iconic tram cities of the world covers the broader heritage-preservation logic and gives international context for what Whiteman Park is doing.

WA Railways History — The Wider Context

The Perth tram closure cannot be understood without the wider context of Western Australian railways. The state operated an extensive country rail network well into the 1970s — the Northam, Albany and Kalgoorlie lines were significant passenger operations, and the suburban rail network around Perth itself was modest but functional. The decision to close the trams was made in a context where rail still seemed to be the dominant mode of transport, and the trams were treated as a sub-category of bus rather than as part of the rail system. The argument was that they were slow, inflexible, expensive to maintain, and increasingly incompatible with the rising number of private cars on the road. Some of this argument was correct; some was self-fulfilling, because once the maintenance budget was cut the rolling stock began to fail in ways that justified further closure. The Western Australian government has since reversed direction on rail, expanding the suburban network with new lines to Mandurah, Joondalup and Ellenbrook, but the trams have not been revived. The Transwa network preserves some of the country-rail heritage, and the Transperth operator runs the modern suburban rail system that has expanded several times since the 1970s. Adelaide is the only Australian capital to have revived a tram line — the Glenelg corridor we covered in our piece on the Adelaide tram revival — and there is no current proposal to revive Perth’s system.

Commemorating Perth’s Lost Network

A Perth heritage scroll commemorates a network that ran for sixty years, carried millions of passengers, and disappeared almost without trace. The destinations on a Perth scroll — Subiaco, Maylands, Mount Lawley, Nedlands, South Perth — are still the names of the suburbs they served, but the rails are gone and the corridors are arterial roads. For Perth residents who remember the trams, a scroll is a memory device; for newer residents, it is a record of a city that once worked very differently. We hand-finish every Perth scroll in our Booragoon studio, using the original 1950s destination typography and the Perth City Tramways route numbering. Start with the design your own tool, or browse the pre-built Perth scrolls in our main shop. Perth-metro customers can collect directly from Booragoon at no charge; interstate orders ship via tracked courier with transit estimates on the shipping page. A visit to Whiteman Park is recommended for any customer choosing a Perth route — it makes the rest of the design decisions easier.