The following pictures were taken at the Vienna Tramway day 2003, an annual event at which the public is allowed into one of the tramway, bus or subway depots. There's usually some third-rate entertainment, some public transport-related exhibition and staff are giving behind-the-scenes information. This year's tramway day took place at the Hernals tramway depot, so they put a couple of vintage trams from the Erdberg tramway museum on display.
This is one of the earliest electric trams from around 1900; it was restored only recently.
These trams of M and K stock from the 1920s/30s carried the bulk of public transport in Vienna well up into the 1970s.
These two-axle trams (used with up to two trailers) were built in the 1960s, but they weren't too successful and had all been withdrawn by the mid-1980s.
Nobody was really interested in this tram of standard E1 stock from the 1960s/70s,
which is the most frequently used kind of tram in Vienna today.
Ultra low floor tram 41 of A stock is one of the newest trams in service;
it was used to demonstrate easy disabled access.
There was also the usual tramway flea market, at which they're selling mostly old signage and line boards. Now that these are increasingly replaced by LCD displays, I wonder what they'll be selling ten years from now -- single dot matrix pixels?
I'm not sure what happened here because I couldn't see anything,
but it certainly needed a lot of security.
Today, Hernals depot services lines 9, 43 and 44. The first section of is line 43 today was the first tramway in Vienna; it opened as a horse-drawn tramway in 1865. The line links the suburb of Neuwaldegg with the city at Schottentor station.
A map of Vienna's tramway network can be found here.
Words & pictures ©2003 by Horst Prillinger
