Tucked away in a Hobart City Council shed off the Brooker Highway in a former quarry sit three beautifully restored heritage trams rarely seen in public.
The late councillor Darlene Haigh was the driving force behind saving trams 17, 39 and 118 that are patiently waiting for their next passengers.
They were brought back to life by volunteers using lovingly crafted Tasmanian timbers such as Huon pine and King Billy pine in the early 2000s, after the original Hobart tram network was shut down in 1960 due to rising car ownership.
Her daughter Emma Riley has fond childhood memories of her and her mother venturing to Oatlands and the Derwent Valley in pursuit of valuable tram parts that had been scattered around the state after their demise.
"She spent many years finding old tram bodies that operated in Hobart and parts from across Tasmania," she said.
They were all part of her dream of one day seeing and hearing them returned to their rightful place rattling along tracks around the city of Hobart for locals and tourists to enjoy once again.
Ahead of its time, Tasmania's capital city was the first place in the southern hemisphere to install a fully electric tram network back in 1893.
At its peak, 75 trams serviced the commuting needs of Hobartians from Glenorchy to South Hobart and Lenah Valley down to Sandy Bay.
Calls to restore heritage trams
The former owner of the State Cinema John Kelly has since taken up the baton as a spokesperson of the Hobart Tram Restoration and Museum Society (H-TRAM).
After a tortuous eight years of application work, he was pleased that the Hobart City Council had finally given planning permission to build a tram museum and workshop at the Regatta Grounds in December.
They had also been gifted a parcel of land adjacent to the old rail line and were in the process of raising the money to build a new home for the three reclusive trams to go on public display.
He was hopeful that around $2.5 million of federal funding would soon be forthcoming to what he described as stage one of a shovel-ready project.
That has been thrown into doubt after the recent proposal by the state government to build an AFL stadium at the same location.
Despite this, he is still optimistic that one of the restored trams may yet see some action by running on a section of track from the Regatta Grounds to Cornelian Bay.
The society has had the old freight track to Brighton assessed by an engineer, "and it is fit for purpose for a heritage tram", he said.
They are also investigating the use of retrofitted batteries in each unit to keep the set-up costs to a minimum.
Mr Kelly says that heritage trams in other parts of the country, such as Ballarat and Bendigo, were hugely popular with tourists and saw no reason why they would not receive a similar response in his home town of Hobart.
Judy Spinks was born in 1938 and used to travel everywhere by tram growing up because her parents did not own a car.
She used them to get to Ogilvie High School in New Town from her home in Lenah Valley on two separate trams.
"If we went for a picnic to Sandy Bay beach, it was quite a trip from Lenah Valley," she said.
She said journeys on the tram could be quite an effort as everything had to be carried on as luggage — not like today where belongings are simply placed in the boot of a car.
"[But] people don't realise what they've missed out on over the years with trams, they are steady and sturdy and really good," she said.
