In their heyday, trams carried millions of Sydney siders to school, work, shows, sports, beaches and churches. Quite what happened to all the old trams is not known. One historic tram was the last to run in Sydney, No. 1995, which was on the La Perouse run in 1961.
It is one of half a dozen corridor-style trams left in the old Rozelle depot at Glebe. Vandalised, virtually stripped bare and covered with graffiti, the trams are in 'very poor condition'. Rescue plans have been hindered by ownership and access issues,
Huxley explained in his article, by the cost of restoration and storage, and by uncertainty over the future of the shed, which was recently sold to developers by the NSW Harness Racing Club.
Tram No. 805, painted in its 1920 olive drab and fawn with red trimming, is now in the Loftus workshops where its electrics and mechanicals, its power and braking systems, went through a thorough check.
The O-class, Bondi ''toast rack'' model was one of the stars on show at a two-day festival in February which marked the 50th anniversary of the last tram ride in Sydney, on February 25, 1961.
Howard Clark, the chairman of the Sydney Tramway Museum, noted that the O-types were the iconic Sydney trams.
www.smh.com.au/nsw/move-over-melbourne-sydney-trams-are-back-on-track-20110130-1a9pz.html
Now there is talk of bringing back a tram system in Sydney which the new Government may be considering.
www.smh.com.au/nsw/all-change-for-light-rail-20110330-1cgdc.html
Well-Being Australia chairman Mark Tronson asks the obvious question, as to who can remember these Sydney trams as two generations have come and gone since these trams were taken out of the Sydney transport system.
He says that he grew up in Mackay, Queensland and his parents took the family on a 1960-61 Christmas-summer holiday and visited family and friends as they headed down the coast to Sydney, then onto Canberra and the apple country of Tumut-Batlow.
During that trip, they stayed with a relative in Bondi and Mark Tronson remembers how the family regularly rode the Bondi Tram as it was by far the easiest and most accommodating way top get around for a north Queensland family unaccustomed to the city.
He recalls the public outcry when the trams were finally removed, less than two months after their Sydney visit, as his parents spoke of it at length.
One of the fascinating side issues of the Sydney tram network, are the Christian church records that show that a surprising number of Sydney siders used the trams to go to church or their mid-week or youth meetings.
His mother, as a teenager newly arrived from England in the 1930s, would probably have travelled to Church and her beloved hockey matches on the trams.