The Tramway: Building Track by Hand

A preserved tram without track is furniture. Haddon’s roughly 650-metre tramway — graded, laid, wired and later comprehensively rebuilt by volunteers — is what turns a shed full of historic vehicles into a living museum.

Stylised silhouette - our own artwork, not to scale; livery indicative only.

The original line was constructed through the 1980s alongside the overhead and the DC substation that powers it. Real tramway track is unforgiving work: rail must be laid to precise gauge on a prepared and compacted formation, curves need superelevation and gauge widening, and every metre of overhead wire must sit at the correct height and stagger for the trolley poles that follow it.

The Curve Reconstruction Programme

By the late 2000s the tramway’s original curves were due for renewal, and the volunteers took the opportunity to rebuild them to a higher standard rather than patch them. The programme, carried out around 2010–2011, is a compact case study in heritage-tramway engineering:

Full excavation and re-formation. Rails and sleepers were lifted from the south-west curve and the track bed excavated and levelled before anything went back down. Spoil from one curve became backfill for the other — nothing wasted.
New sleepers to suit the job. The rebuilt curve received a full-length 80 lb checkrail — a second rail inside the running rail that guides wheel flanges through tight radii. Steel sleepers would have made fitting it awkward, so treated-pine sleepers were purchased for the curves.
Welded joints and tie rods. All rail joints were fully welded, and new tie rods manufactured to hold gauge through the curve — the details that decide whether track stays true under a seventeen-tonne tram.
Rail surgery. Rails with crippled joints were cropped, and lengths cut to size with a rail saw borrowed from the Ballarat Tramway Museum — the kind of practical cooperation between neighbouring museums that heritage tramways run on.
Overhead renewal. With the track relaid, both curves’ overhead was renewed to bring the contact wire to correct height and alignment.

The same programme included forming a new single-track terminus at the lower end of the line. Progress moved with the weather — a wet winter cost whole workdays, with effort redirected to tram restoration under cover — which is the honest rhythm of an outdoor volunteer railway.

It is worth pausing on what this represents: a handful of people, working weekends, executing permanent-way engineering that professional tramways assign to specialist gangs with heavy plant. That capability — not any single tram — is the Haddon site’s most remarkable artefact.