Gothenburg Tramway

Prehistory

In spring 1836 there were plans to develop traffic between the centre of Gothenburg and Klippan. The newspaper Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning campaigned for this, and an advantage for omnibuses was that people could have "tickets, small parcels and requests" delivered to Masthugget, Varvet, Majorna, Klippan and all the way towards the mouth of the river. The required starting capital was five thousand riksdaler, which could be achieved through sales of shares of fifty riksdaler each. In late April 1836 there were annoncements for "Gleerupska bokhandlen" on "Stora Hamngatan", and in July 1836 it was announced that a company had been founded. The company was led by Carl Fredrik Kjellberg, Johan Norström, J.R. Melin, Heinrich Röhss and Elias Ahrenberg.

The wagons were planned to be drawn by two horses and carry eight passengers. In December 1836 "Resetourene för Omnibus" were announced in newspapers. At the time of inauguration, the traffic only ran on weekdays. The first wagons started at nine in the morning from Stigbergsliden to the city centre, where the stop was located in front of the Frimurarlogen house on Södra Hamngatan. The wagons turned back towards Stigbergsliden at half past nine in the morning, where they continued to Klippan and turned back at eleven in the morning. The ticket cost was eight skillings, which was paid on entry to the wagon to get a ticket, which was then put in a box by the door at the stop of the journey.

The omnibus traffic lasted regularly for the whole of the year 1837, and in the following year, the timetable was extended with Sunday journeys to Lärje with a stop at Gamlestaden. The omnibus traffic had a practical monopoly on Gothenburg's public transport until the inauguration of the horse-drawn tramway.^[3]

Horse-drawn tramway

Stockholm got a horse-drawn tramway in 1877, and outside Sweden, New York City got one already in 1852 and Copenhagen in 1862.^[4] In 1873 there was a first proposal to construct a tramway in Gothenburg. Lieutenant Carl Wettergren thought it would be possible to have tram traffic in Gothenburg in 60 years. The proposal was rejected in 1874 both by the city council and by the King in Council. The city council's reason for the rejection was "that a private person should have rights to the construction and the city should be given the right to freely oversee the streets and open squares the tracks would be built on". The next proposal came in September 1875 when Aron Philippson made a proposal to the city council to build a tramway in Gothenburg. The city council appointed a committee of five people, including Philipsson. The other committee members were Josef Richert, Carl Gustaf Prytz, James Keiller and August Kobb. In June 1877 the committee made a proposal to the city council to build a horse-drawn tramway in Gothenburg.

After studies in Copenhagen as well as Christiania, there was a proposal to build three tram lines: Redberget - Klippan, Brunnsparken - Getebersgäng and Haga - Slottsskogsparken. The city council approved this proposal, with the exception that the line to Klippan should only go to Stigbergsliden.^[5] The committee got an offer for the construction of the tramway and the operation of the tram traffic. A short time afterwards the committee made a new proposal for the concession of the Gothenburg tramway from the captain Carl Christian Juell in Copenhagen. Juell had decided on a tram line from the St. John's Church to Klippan, because he thought the hills in Majorna would make traffic lethally dangerous to both people and horses. His technical explanation was as follows: "Everything depends on the brakes on the outgoing trip, and despite all care taken in the construction of the trams it would be impossible to account for the case where the brakes broke." According to Juell, it would be both cheaper and easier to build a steamship line to Majorna.^[6]

On 18 October 1877, the Gothenburg city council approved captain Juell's proposal with 29 votes for and 18 votes against and gave him a concession of 40 years, during which time the concession owner had the right to tramway traffic in Gothenburg. The conditions included:

• that the city council would at one point decide on the tram routes and costs
• that the passenger fare should be set at 10 öre for each traffic district within four thousand feet
• that the lines should travel at least every twenty minutes
• that the traffic system should be ready to use two years after the concession was approved, at the latest.^[7]

Captain Juell proved to have problems with financing his project, and in 1879 the city council approved to transfer the concession to William Barfoot from Leicester, to him personally instead of to a company. The concession for the tramway was later taken over by Henry Alexander Milne and after his death in 1881 to his son-in-law Richard Gard'ner.^[8]

The first tram line in Gothenburg was started in 1879 by the Gothenburg Tramways Company Ltd, based in England. This was a horse-drawn tramway, which stretched from Brunnsparken to Stigbergsliden. The city bought the tramway by the end of 1899, and introduced electrically powered trams only three years later when Sigfrid Edström led the electrification of the trams. During the next 40 years, the tram system was heavily expanded, reaching outside the city borders by 1907, and Hisingen in 1940.

The first tram line in Gothenburg was a line between Brunnsparken and the start of Stigbergsgliden - a distance of 2.7 kilometres - which was opened on 24 September 1879. The trip with four horsecars started at 16:00 in the afternoon and took about 15 minutes and "passengers were thereafter invited for refreshments at the local Henriksberg restaurant". The tram line opened for public traffic on the following day, with a tram starting at Stigbergsgliden at 07:30 in the morning and from Brunnsparken at 08:00 in the morning. Trams left thereafter every 15 minutes, until 21:00 and 21:30 respectively. The tram fare was 20 öre per person, from one terminus to the other. However, there was a tax of ten öre in the middle, at the swimming pool in Haga.^[6][9] There were no stops for passengers to embark or disembark, instead the trams stopped anywhere they could along the way by the request of the passengers, except at uphill climbs.^[10] The trams navigated their way among the pedestrians so that the coachmen used a ringing bell. Some coachmen had personal ring signals so that passengers could hear from the signal who was the coachman at the time.^[11]

The first ceremonial shovel load for the tramway was dug at the intersection of the streets Södra Allégatan and Sprängkullsgatan on 16 July 1879.^[5][12] The construction was directed by the engineers Richard Gard'ner and H.R. McKeone.The trams were brown and drove on single tracks on a metre-gauge railway, and by 1882 four lines had been constructed. In 1896 there were 36 trams, 4 buses and 126 horses in service in the Gothenburg public transport with a total passenger count of 2.7 million in trams and 38,831 in buses.^[13] The lines were as follows:

• 24 September 1879: Brunnsparken - Stigbergsgliden (2.82 km or 9,500 feet)^[14]
• 9 December 1881: Brunnsparken - Redbergslid (2.3 km)
• 1881: Brunnsparken - Getebergsgäng (2.34 km)
• 3 October 1882: Brunnsparken - Slottsskogen (2.98 km)^[15]

Electric tramway

In the 1960s, plans for converting the tram system to an underground rapid transit system were created, and the new tram sections to the suburbs of Tynnered, Angered, Bergsjön, and Länsmansgården were built free from level crossings and partly in tunnels to make a future conversion to underground standards easier. However, after further investigation, it was concluded that it would be too expensive to dig the necessary tunnels under the city centre, as the foundation of the city is partially made up of clay.

When Sweden's switch to right-hand traffic in 1967 made existing unidirectional trams obsolete, Gothenburg was one of only two cities in Sweden to maintain its city-centre tramway, the other such network to survive being the Norrköping Tramway.

The expansion of the net through the Kringen Project is gradually creating a tramway ring around the city centre. In 1999, the first step was started, which most notably included Chalmers Tunnel which was opened for traffic in 2002, connecting the Chalmers tram stop with the Korsvägen tram stop. The second and third steps are currently in the planning stage.

Since 2010, the previously used magnetic stripe cards have been replaced with RFID cards. Ticket machines taking coins and credit cards have also been installed on the trams, along with a text message system where tickets may be purchased with mobile phones.^[16] From about 2019, a phone app has become the leading mode of ticket purchase.

In December 2025, a new tramway route to Lindholmen, Hisingen, opened. This extension was the latest of the tram network since 2002. Several tram stops was also taken down so that the new, longer tram carts could operate.