The following article is from our May 2007 issue.

Clang, Clang, Clanging - Again The trolley is staging a comeback worldwide and is contributing to urban renewal - By Uwe Siemon-Netto

A generation ago, city fathers in Europe and America destroyed their sophisticated network of streetcar lines even though the 1973 oil shock should have given them pause. Georges Pompidou, then-president of France, decreed that urban centers had better "adjust to the automobile," rather than continue subsidizing tramways. In the U.S., a coalition of the automobile, oil and tire industries and their political allies had by then virtually killed off the trolley. Now it's back and in many places, has resulted in urban renewal.

Clang, clang, clang went the trolley, ding, ding, ding went the bell," sang Judy Garland in the 1944 movie, "Meet Me in St. Louis," a film eulogizing this lively city blessed with a tight grid of streetcar lines. I live in St. Louis now. The only tram I see these days is neither dinging nor rolling. Red and yellow, it stands outside the History Museum in Forest Park pretending to be local. But really local, it is not. Though built in the United States, it was shipped back from Milan, Italy.

True, a very efficient new "light rail" system now connects St. Louis with its airport and neighboring Illinois. But can you stumble out of your favorite beer garden onto one of its cars, certain that it will bring you safely home? Can street urchins play pranks on them the way we Leipzig rascals did on our "Strassenbahn" (street cars) in World War II when we placed benign explosives made from a mix of weed killer and delousing powder on their tracks, sometimes causing their cardboard windows to pop out (the originals made from glass had all fallen victim to air raids)? Could children roller-skate down the street clinging to a trolley's rear bumpers? No way! This is not a trolley - it's a "light rail," in other words, a very serious vehicle.

This is the downside of the wonderful news that the streetcar is staging a comeback worldwide. Consider the gleaming new trains in downtown Nantes, France, and Portland, Oregon, in Strasbourg, Lyon, Minneapolis and Paris. They look and move as if their drivers had trained at Cape Canaveral. Think of elegant Bordeaux whose late mayor Jacques Chaban-Delmas presided over the destruction of its 38 lines in the 1970s; today, futuristic trains blend perfectly with this wine capital's magnificent 18th-century buildings. No messy cables mar Bordeaux' architectural harmony; when "Le tramway" approaches downtown, it pulls in its pantographs and continues its journey sucking current from a third rail sunk into the street surface.

Yet can you imagine such slick, silent vehicles serving as a venue for romance? Flirtations blossom on old-fashioned trains and steamers, not on buses or wannabe spaceships, and least of all, on airliners in economy class. Before Hamburg became one of Germany's few large cities to abolish the tram in 1974 - in contrast to most urban centers in German-speaking countries which wisely resisted this trend - a foreign correspondent on home leave from Vietnam, stepped accidentally on a lady's toes on the number 9 train; the lady trod back with determination and a few weeks later, he brought her to Saigon - as his wife. As Judy Garland so rightly chimed, "Zing, zing, zing went my heartstrings / For the moment I saw her I fell."

But fret not, civility on urban rails is here again as I discovered after a five-hour drive down Interstate 55 from St. Louis to Memphis, Tennessee, where they have something called the Heritage Trolley, a misnomer really because its wonderful, brightly colored vehicles rumbling in 10-minute intervals down Main Street represent some other heritage. The eight-wheelers were brought over from Melbourne, Australia, while the shorter four-wheelers that waddle along like ducks had been built nearly a century ago for Oporto, Portugal. What they have in common, though, is the charm of brass controls and the absence of speedometers.

Is there anything American about them? Well, yes, for starters, most passengers are Americans, as are the cheerful drivers. Then the man who maintains these veteran trams is an American, too. He was imported from New Orleans, a city that had never been unfaithful to its trolley lines, one of which gave yet another play and film its title: "A Streetcar Named Desire." Finally, the company that refurbished Memphis' 20 trams was a quintessential American outfit - the Gomaco Corporation in Ida Grove, Iowa, a state famous for its grain. Gomaco's products now rumble through cities as diverse as Charlotte, North Carolina; Tampa, Florida; Kenosha, Wisconsin; Dallas and Galveston, Texas and even Los Angeles, whose 1,200 mile streetcar network was the world's largest before it was slaughtered in the 1950s and 1960s.

Now one might argue that this is all for tourists, unlike the ever-expanding streetcar systems in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Benelux states, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, which are there to benefit working folk. And indeed, in places like Memphis, cradle of the blues, officials did primarily have visitors in mind when they started installing their three trolley lines 14 years ago. This was the idea of local businessmen eager to revive the inner city, which like so many others had declined egregiously since the 1960s, according to Thomas Fox, assistant general manager of the Memphis Area Transit Authority. But soon it turned out that as many locals use the streetcars as did tourists. Suddenly, the city center, where only 1,000 people lived in the early 1990s, experienced a dramatic growth. One-bedroom co-ops downtown now sell for ?300,000 ($400,000).

This corresponds to a similar trends in Europe. Belgium's famous 80 mile coastal tram running along the seaside from the Dutch to the French border now transports as many commuters as holidaymakers. On Leipzig's 13 tramlines, in Eastern Germany, the number of passengers has risen from 80 million in 1998 to now 125 million.

Streetcar lines are half as expensive to build as subways, according to a recent study conducted in Japan, which hopes to emulate Germany and France in creating new light rail lines in several cities. More importantly, "people enjoy riding trams more than buses or underground trains," said Reinhard Bohse, communications director of the LVB, Leipzig's transit authority. "They feel safer above ground." In Leipzig, as in much of Eastern Europe, the robust survival and boom of the streetcar is one of the few inadvertent success stories of their now-defunct communist regimes. "Because they did not have the money to modernize, meaning to go underground or switch to buses, they were first to maintain what they had inherited - the tram," Bohse explained.

Berlin is a case in point. It was in imperial Germany's capital where Werner von Siemens built the world's first experimental electric streetcar line, which opened on May 16, 1881. In the 1920s, Berlin had 89 trolley lines with more than 644 kilometers of track. But after Germany's defeat in 1945, the city was divided. In the Western sectors, trams were gradually replaced with double-decker buses and subways. The East, on the other hand, expanded its network of streetcar lines, which is now the largest in Germany and one of the largest in Europe.

Ironically, the vehicles used during the Cold War in the Soviet block were indirectly of American provenance, Bohse says. They were adaptations of the "Presidents' Conference Committee Car," or PCCC, so named because they were designed in 1934 in a meeting of U.S. streetcar company chiefs. After World War II, the nationalized Tatra Company of Czechoslovakia bought the PCCC patents and then sold its own versions of this efficient type of trolley to virtually every Eastern European city.

Over the next few years, they will slowly be replaced with more economical models. "They use too much electricity which is why we have already replaced their engines with more economical ones," Bohse said. They are also too heavy, sometimes cracking sewage pipes dating back to the 18th century buried underground. But the funny part of the streetcar's comeback on both sides of the Atlantic is this: while the "American" trams in Europe will soon be history, new German and Czech streetcar prototypes are pointing to America's public transit future, as they glide through cities such as San Diego or Portland.To get back to Judy Garland: Will romance return with the streetcar's renaissance? Well, if you go to Dresden, you'll see freight trams carrying goods for the local Volkswagen plant through town. That's not romantic but a smart idea. Still, in Leipzig, you can travel around this beautifully restored city in a tram consisting primarily of glass. That's at least more enchanting than buses or cars. Further west, in the Lower Rhineland, there was until the 1980s, an 80-mile tramline stretching from Duisburg via Düsseldorf to Krefeld. That line, the "K," actually had a dining car where passengers held a "kaffeeklatsch" in the afternoon, or ate dinner on their way home from work or entertained their girlfriends.

Prosaic types in the local transit authority did away with this charming institution of a bygone era, causing lament among true lovers of civilized urban travel. But perhaps this, too, will come back one day, just like the tram with is clang, clang, clang and its ding, ding, ding in Memphis - like those transplanted Melbourne and Oporto trolleys that have contributed so much to the recreation of some splendor downtown and on the banks of the Mississippi.

One recent weekend, my wife and I spent the better part of two days traveling the ancient cars - along Main Street and the River Front and to the Medical Center up Madison Avenue. Nowhere else have we ever enjoyed such a splendid and harmonious mix of people all jesting with each other - blacks and whites, locals and strangers, workers, nurses, hotel pages and tourists, old people on an outing and, yes, young lovers too.

As they embraced, the compressors kicked into action at every stop, building up pressure for the brakes. Once again we thought of Judy Garland: "Chug, chug, chug went the motor / Thump, thump, thump went the brake / thump, thump, thump went my heartstrings? When she smiled I could feel the car shake."

- Uwe Siemon-Netto, a veteran German foreign correspondent, is a scholar in residence at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri.