I was grew up in Sydney in the 1950s and '60s and trams weren't withdrawn until 1961. I remember them with some fondness and annoyance. We lived behind an Ampol Service Station on the Princess Highway at Tempe, right opposite Tempe Tram Sheds. I remember the trams rattling into the shed right throughout the night, quite often waking me up.
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The Sydney tramway network served the inner suburbs of Sydney, from 1879 until 1961. In its heyday, it was the largest in Australia, the second largest in the Commonwealth of Nations (after London), and one of the largest in the world.
The network was heavily worked, with about 1,600 cars in service at any one time at its peak during the 1930s (cf. about 500 trams in Melbourne today).
Patronage peaked in 1945 at 405 million passenger journeys. Its maximum street trackage totalled 291 km (181 miles) in 1923.
It was a long time between drinks with the Sydney Light Rail System relaunching on August 3, 1997. In the 1980s and 1990s, the inner city areas of Darling Harbour and Pyrmont were the subject of an urban renewal program.
In 1988 the Sydney Monorail opened, connecting Darling Harbour to the central business district.
With poor integration between the monorail and other transport modes and the increasing redevelopment of the Pyrmont peninsula, it was decided to convert a disused section of the Metropolitan Goods railway line into a light rail line. A section of track between Pyrmont and Haymarket was upgraded and a new on-street section was built to link the line to Central railway station. It opened in August 1997, running between Central Station and Wentworth Park, Pyrmont.
The Sydney Light Rail network currently consists of three passenger routes, the L1 Dulwich Hill, L2 Randwick and L3 Kingsford lines. The network comprises 42 stops and a system length of 24.7 km (15.3 mi), making it the second largest light rail network in Australia behind the tram network in Melbourne.
Reference: Wikipedia
