About This Site

Haddon Tramway Heritage celebrates the preserved Melbourne trams at Haddon, Victoria, and the volunteer-built tramway they run on — carrying forward the legacy of one of Australian tram preservation’s longest-running websites.

The Site’s Own Story

A website has lived at this address since 1998 — first hosted by Railpage in the early days of the Australian rail internet, then rebuilt in 2009 into the hand-crafted pages that generations of tram enthusiasts came to know. Encyclopaedias, museum catalogues and enthusiast sites around the world linked to its tram pages over two decades. When the original site went offline, all of those references led nowhere.

This rebuild keeps that legacy alive: the same pages at the same addresses, rewritten fresh for today’s readers from the public record — museum catalogues, conference papers, encyclopaedia entries and archived pages, all listed on the sources page. A reader following a fifteen-year-old link to the W2 407 page still finds a page about W2 407, better than they left it.

About the Association

The Melbourne Tramcar Preservation Association Inc. is an incorporated volunteer association, formed in 1984 from a preservation effort begun at Haddon in 1974. Its long-published aims are to preserve and restore selected Melbourne trams, to construct and operate a demonstration tramway, and to keep alive the coachbuilding skills embodied in wooden-bodied tramcars. The group remains active — recent conference reporting shows its current focus is the restoration of W5 792 to original 1937 condition. This site is an independent enthusiast tribute rather than the Association’s official voice; for the Association itself, start with the COTMA member directory.

Corrections

Heritage writing lives and dies by accuracy. If you spot an error — a date, a fleet number, a technical detail — or you have first-hand knowledge that would improve these pages, please get in touch.