They burnt the trams at Randwick.

In the late 1950s Sydney ripped up its tram network, once one of the largest in the world. Nearly 1,000 trams – some only a few years old – were rolled to the workshops in the city’s eastern suburbs and stripped of anything that could be sold, before being unceremoniously tipped on their sides, doused with sump oil and set ablaze.

Now the trams are returning, as the city painfully rebuilds a tiny part of its old system. The construction of 12.8km of light rail from Circular Quay to Randwick and Kingsford will cost $2.7bn at the latest estimate, has caused untold misery to shops and other businesses in its path and will be almost a year overdue by the time even the first section is open.

The new line hardly represents a fundamental shift in Sydney’s transport thinking, coming as it does alongside the vast “congestion-busting” WestConnex freeway project, and further investment in metro rail (a separate light rail link is also under construction at Parramatta). But it is a reminder that the city might have looked very different today but for the decision taken in the 1950s – and ruthlessly carried out – to prioritise motor transport.

Barely a decade before its closure, Sydney’s tram system had carried 400 million passenger journeys a year on a network of more than 250km, primarily serving the eastern, southern and inner-west suburbs, and stretching as far north as Narrabeen at its peak. But the explosion of car traffic in the postwar years persuaded the New South Wales government that urban freeways were the way of the future (the first in Australia, the Cahill Expressway, opened in 1958), and trams were an impediment to that vision.

The destruction of the network from the mid-50s was swift and brutal. In 1958 the bizarre castellated Fort Macquarie depot at Circular Quay was demolished to make way for the Opera House, and the lines along George Street were torn up. The last Sydney tram ran on 25 February 1961 from Hunter Street to La Perouse (along much of the same route now being rebuilt), packed to the rafters and greeted by crowds of people, before it joined the dismal procession to “burning hill” at Randwick.

The photographer Peter Sage followed its journey to the workshops after the passengers were ordered off at Kensington on the way back from La Perouse. “The gates closed and the trams were locked away,” he wrote. “We gathered to say farewell and went home by car and bus.”

‘A convenient falsehood’

Mathew Hounsell, a senior research consultant at the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology, Sydney, has called the destruction of the network “the largest organised vandalism in our nation’s history”.

He says the decisions made in the 50s had a disastrous long-term effect. “When the trams were removed from Sydney, mass transport patronage plummeted and private car usage soared. Our space-saving trams were replaced with ever-more space-hungry cars, causing ever-worsening traffic.”

That wasn’t how the planners saw it at the time. They were strongly swayed by powerful international influences, which chimed with the unstoppable rise of private car ownership in Australia.

As Graeme Davison relates in his book Car Wars, a succession of Australians studied traffic engineering in the US in the 50s, some under a scholarship sponsored by the Myer family, and brought back an evangelical commitment to urban freeways. And, as one engineer from Los Angeles invited to advise on Melbourne’s traffic future put it: “All large American cities that were beating traffic tangles were getting rid of trams.”

Sydney also listened attentively to British experts. In 1949 three representatives of the London Passenger Transport Board recommended to the NSW government that Sydney cancel an order for 250 new trams and replace the entire system with buses by 1960. Three years later Alec Valentine, the president of the British Institute of Transport, came to Sydney and repeated the message.

“London has resolved its traffic problem by replacing trams with buses, and Sydney should do the same,” he advised.

It seems obvious with hindsight that no city’s traffic problem could be “resolved” so easily, but the desire in the postwar years to open up streets to motor vehicles, and particularly the lure of the private car, was intense. A decade of petrol rationing in Australia finally came to an end in 1950, and the recovering economy allowed an unprecedented number of families to think about buying their first car.

Besides, the tram network would have needed serious new investment to make up for unavoidable penny-pinching during the war and the early postwar years of austerity, according to David Critchley of the Sydney Tram Museum.

“It was a tired system, it was a worn-down system and they kept the system running for quite a while on just the bare minimum,” he says. To many the trams “represented something that was old and outdated, and they were looking for something new, particularly after the war”.

In their history of Sydney trams, Shooting Through, Caroline Butler-Bowdon and Annie Campbell reinforce how that thinking about trams and cars became loaded with symbolism: trams as “an embarrassing and sentimental anachronism in the age of speed and streamlined proficiency” and cars as representatives of “modernity and progress”.

But while Sydney joined dozens of other cities around the world in getting rid of its trams, Melbourne somehow bucked the trend. As the University of Queensland historian Peter Spearritt has argued, there were a number of reasons for that, including the relative strength of the tramway unions and the “much more demure” attitude of the RACV compared with the NRMA in Sydney, which aggressively attacked the tram system.

Melbourne being a relatively flat city, with the exceptionally wide streets laid out in colonial times, meant trams were “pretty well adapted to topography”, Davison says.

The 50s experts such as Valentine argued that Sydney was particularly unsuitable for trams because of the narrowness of its streets, but Mathew Hounsell calls that “a convenient falsehood”.

“The streets of Porto, the streets of Istanbul, Prague, many of the cities that are still running trams now, they’re much narrower. Basically, most of the Sydney streets where the trams ran were quite wide – they were main roads.”

Indeed many photos of Sydney’s trams in the 50s, such as those collected in Lindsay Bridge’s vast archive, show streets outside the city centre with ample room and strikingly sparse traffic by today’s standards. The car boom seemed unstoppable at the time but in 1955 there were only about 15 cars for every 100 people in Australia, a figure that has since quadrupled.

Destroying the evidence

Some surprisingly large reminders of Sydney’s network can still be seen, such as the tramshed next to Newtown train station, which has somehow survived all-but-untouched for decades. But most of the system was actively destroyed rather than abandoned.

In 1949 part of the line from the city to Watsons Bay was closed, only to reopen within a year thanks to well-organised protests from prosperous eastern suburbs residents. To avoid any repetition of those conflicts when the wholesale closure of lines began in 1955, overhead wires were pulled down overnight once the last services had run, and tracks immediately tarred over (the evidence can still be seen in the black strip running down the middle of streets such as Addison Road in Marrickville).

“The department [of government transport] is making sure, no matter how the buses behave, that trams can never run along Pitt and Castlereagh Street again,” a tram driver told the Sun-Herald with some bitterness in November 1957, when that service was closed.

“There was a nastiness to it that is quite surprising in hindsight,” Hounsell says. “There was a clear ideological attack on this particular mode of transport – an attempt to destroy it and to obliterate it, to erase it from history.”

The burning of the trams themselves at Randwick completed the job of removing the evidence, and perhaps removing the memory of a popular system from the consciousness of Sydneysiders.

“There’s no room for sentiment,” the city’s licensed tram burner, Oswald “Mick” Price, told the Sydney Morning Herald in September 1957. “Not that I enjoy destroying things, mind you. These trams were well built – still going strong after 40 years’ wear.”

David Critchley says the burning of the trams was carried out largely behind closed doors, and attracted little comment. “In the context of the times, burning things to get rid of them wasn’t an unusual event.”

But there were protests on nearly every line as they were marked for closure. Retailers along tramlines were persuaded by the government campaigns that trams were causing congestion, only to find that freeing up space for cars helped destroy local shopping and promote out-of-town supermarkets.

“It was a very big con job,” Critchley says. “They just got convinced by what was going on overseas, what the Americans were doing ... It was the wrong decision. I think we’ve always regretted that.”