A tram (called a streetcar or trolley in USA) is a rail vehicle that travels on tramway tracks on public urban streets; some include segments on segregated right-of-way.
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British Dictionary definitions for tram (1 of 3)tram1. / (træm) / noun. Also called: tramcar an electrically driven public transport vehicle that runs on rails let into the surface of the road, power usually being taken from an overhead wire: US and Canadian names: streetcar, trolley car.
streetcar, also called tram or trolley, vehicle that runs on track laid in the streets, operated usually in single units and usually driven by electric motor.
The advent of personal motor vehicles and the improvements in motorized buses caused the rapid disappearance of the tram from most western and Asian countries by the end of the 1950s (for example the first major UK city to completely abandon its trams was Manchester by January 1949).
Tram — a light train for passengers capable of being used extensively on street level. Metro — a grade separated train for passengers (on bridges, tunnels and stuff that prevents it from crossing street levels) separate from the standard railways in the area within an urban area that runs on high frequencies.
In the UK, a 'rake of coaches / carriages' describes a set of passenger coaches pulled by a locomotive. Trains can also be described as a 'formation', particularly when both passenger and freight stock is used.
The North American English use of the term trolley instead of tram for a street railway vehicle derives from the work that Sprague did in Richmond and quickly spread elsewhere. Los Angeles built the largest electric tramway system in the world, which grew to over 1600 km of track.
However, the demise of the streetcar came when lines were torn out of the major cities by bus manufacturing or oil marketing companies for the specific purpose of replacing rail service with buses. In many cases, postwar buses were cited as providing a smoother ride and a faster journey than the older, pre-war trams.
But the trams had become a political football (in Leeds it was Labour that did for them, in Liverpool it was the Conservatives). They were unwanted clutter from the past at a time when operating costs of public transport networks were rising and meeting housing targets was the big priority for investment.