tram

Tram appears in Low German and Scots dialects by the sixteenth century, meaning a beam, shaft, or frame — specifically the wooden rails along which coal wagons were pushed in mines. The word may trace to Middle Low German traam, meaning a beam or handle of a barrow. In the coal regions of northern England and Scotland, tram referred to the flat wooden tracks and later the iron rails that guided mine carts underground.

The leap from mine to street happened in the early 1800s. Horse-drawn carriages running on iron rails embedded in roads appeared in Swansea, Wales, in 1807, and in New York City by 1832. These were called tramways — the mine word applied to the street. The vehicles were tram-cars, then just trams. In America, the word 'streetcar' competed and eventually won. In Britain and most of Europe, tram held.

Electric trams transformed cities in the 1880s and 1890s. Werner von Siemens demonstrated the first electric tramway in Berlin in 1881. By 1900, nearly every major European city had electric tram networks. The word tram became synonymous with urban public transit — a meaning so far from its coal-mine origin that no one remembered the connection. Then cars and buses pushed trams out. Most European cities dismantled their tram networks between 1930 and 1970.

The tram came back. Strasbourg rebuilt its tramway in 1994. Melbourne never dismantled its network and now operates the largest tram system in the world. The word that started underground, naming a wooden beam in a coal shaft, now names one of the cleanest forms of urban transit. The beam became a rail, the rail became a route, and the route became a symbol of the livable city.