Why did Edinburgh trams fail?

The report was finally published in August 2023. The report concluded that failings by the City of Edinburgh Council and its arms-length companies were to blame for the delays. Much of the criticism was directed against Transport Initiatives Edinburgh (TIE), the company that was initially in charge of the project.



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The last Edinburgh tram ran on 16 November 1956.

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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).

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As a result, there has been significant growth in those choosing Edinburgh Trams to travel to and from airport, with these journeys increasing by 56 per cent between 2015 and 2018. It came as no surprise that Edinburgh Trams recorded a profit two years earlier than predicted, and in 2017 profits were £1.6 million.

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Trams were seen to impede on the freedom of private car owners in the city: the authorities believed that removing the tramways and replacing them with buses would allow for easier transport in and around Glasgow.

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How much do train and tram drivers in Edinburgh get paid? Train or tram driver salaries can range between £13.46-34.38 per hour in the Edinburgh area. This data is based on quiz results from 16 employees who live in and around Edinburgh.

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Trams cannot go around obstacles, they don't mix well with bikes, they take up too much space and “they cost a fortune,” as Washington DC can tell you.

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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.

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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.

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The advent of buses and large-scale competition meant that buses often ran the same routes as the trams and would jump in front to grab customers, and buses were able to move into Dublin's expanding hinterland more quickly and at less cost than the trams, and the belief that trams were outdated and old technology, ...

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In 1905, the Belfast Corporation took over and electrified the city's tram network. The trams were partially replaced by trolleybuses from 1938, and finally replaced by buses in 1954.

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Operating systems
  • Blackpool.
  • Edinburgh.
  • South London.
  • Manchester.
  • Nottingham.
  • Sheffield.
  • Tyne and Wear.
  • West Midlands.


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Together the two are multiplied together to give the drag area. 0.8 x 12 = 9.6 for a double decker bus, compared with 0.3 x 6 = 1.8 for the tram. This, combined with the rolling resistance, means a trams energy expenditure once up to speed is a fraction of that of a double decker bus.

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An extensive tram network covered large parts of London for several decades during the first half of the twentieth century. By the 1950s, however, trams were seen as old fashioned and were gradually phased out to create more room for buses and cars.

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The world's very first tram system was actually a horse train called the Oystermouth Railway, a commercial service which began operation in 1804, in order to transport limestone between the south Wales areas of Mumbles and Swansea.

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