Asia's first electric tramway, 1902
Take the tram
Esplanade to Shyambazar, seven stops, forty-six minutes. This is a journey the network could once make and no longer can, so it is offered here instead.
- Journey
- 46 minutes
- Routes in 1970
- 37
- Routes now
- One
Stop 1 of 7
Esplanade
এসপ্ল্যানেড
Depot, terminus, and the top of the Maidan.
Esplanade to Shyambazar · 46 minutes
The tram starts here because everything starts here: the depot, the bus terminus, the metro interchange and New Market five minutes east. The Tram World museum car sits in the depot with two coaches and a small display.
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1873
The first line
Horse-drawn, Sealdah to Armenian Ghat, and it failed within nine months.
1902
Electrified
The first electric tramway in Asia.
37
Routes at its height
More than sixty kilometres of track.
1
Routes now
The state announced in 2024 it would keep a single heritage route. The case is in the High Court.
Why this matters
A tram is not a nineteenth-century object
It is a twenty-first-century one that happened to arrive early. Melbourne, Lisbon, Prague, Amsterdam and San Francisco all worked that out.
A tram at fifteen kilometres an hour on a dedicated median does not stop for the traffic beside it, emits nothing at the point of use, and carries two hundred people using less road space per passenger than any bus.
In a city with among the lowest road-area ratios of any Indian metropolis, roughly six per cent against Delhi’s twenty-plus, that arithmetic should have been decisive. It was not.
Routes were suspended for road works and never restored. Tracks were tarred over during flyover construction. In 2024 the state announced it would retain a single heritage route, and the case is in the High Court.