Ian Warden | Tram fandom isn't just a Canberra phenomenon

By contrast with those of us who are tram-contented the opponents of trammery have always been loudly, foaming-at-the-mouthly articulate in their loathing of the trams.

Overwhelmingly the anti-trammists are mature-age bean counters (perhaps still carrying the DNA of grandparents who during the Depression learned to make frugality a quasi-religious virtue) who become incandescent with rage at the promiscuous costs of the trams.

They especially include the Canberra Liberals who (partly out of this same bean-counting anal-retentiveness but partly out of political Machiavellianism) are trumpeting they will make righteous opposition to the satanic evil of extending the tram to Woden a big, big issue at the looming 2024 ACT election.

But now this columnist's kinds of enthusiasm for the trams (never counting the beans I have always looked at the trams as city-enhancing, city-adorning transports of delight) are beautifully expressed in a grand new piece in the online Los Angeles Review of Books.

I not only commend the highly-readable piece The Glory of Trams to tram lovers but also prescribe it, as homework, for all pro-tram Canberrans who have yet to find ways of openly rejoicing about, speaking up for trams.

"In twinned essays," the Review introduces The Glory of Trams, "American writer Christopher Atamian and Armenian novelist Aram Pachyan exchange childhood memories of trams and discuss how they serve to make up the cultural fabric of a city and nation."

"I've been in love with trams ever since I was a child-madly, deeply in love with them," Christopher Atamian enthuses.

"I spent summers in Geneva ... in the early 1980s intoxicated by the dark red tramways that crisscrossed the capital.

"These trams were strong and elegant, understated and secretive as well - stereotypically Swiss ... If 'intoxicated' sounds like a strong word to describe my high esteem for tramways as a child, the adjective, in fact, perfectly describes the Zen-like state that I entered whenever I boarded a tram."

"I'm not alone in my reverence for trams. There are few things that can inspire such a state of wonderment in a little boy as a speeding tram (A jet plane passing overhead? A rocket ship headed to the moon? A humpback whale jumping out of the ocean and crashing back down again?).

"There's [the way] the scenery flashes by like so many movie stills - especially fantastic on days when lightning fills the sky and rain pours down on all sides while you remain safe inside, watching less fortunate souls stuck on the outside scatter like insects in the downpour ...

"The lessons in all of this [include] that trams are more than simply a mode of transportation. They are cultural reference points, fellow travellers through urban history, and records of important technological change. While the bus says, 'I am slow and old-fashioned,' and the subway warns, 'I am fun but dangerous,' the tramway proudly proclaims: 'I am sleek but friendly, speedy when needed but always at your service.' "

Here is essay twin Aram Pachyan recalling the spiritual importance of the coming of the tram to the Armenian capital city of Yerevan: "Districts were built for workers in Yerevan that were linked to factories by tram, which was introduced in 1933.

"Now, when you leaf through one page after another of the literature of the 1930s, it's as if the introduction of the tram was some kind of messiah, a maddening religious ecstasy, finally programming a way of life, bringing order to the routine of a person's work and meaning to their existence, as if it were a sectarian symbol of salvation and of what was to come. From then on, it was not the church but the tram depot that would be the house of the soul, and it was not the priest but the tram driver who was the guardian of the soul."

All of us who have a little poetry in our souls know/have known what it is to love, to feel affection about some form of public transport. To have commuted by ferry, by train, by omnibus, by tram without ever taking delight in the characterful contraption that is bearing us us is to be unhappily incapable of delight.

I have just spent some time in Melbourne, rejoicing at how my journeys on suburban trains were such rich adventures of people-watching, every man and woman with a unique personality etched on his or her face and with unique tattoos engraved into his or her flesh.

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It is one of the tragedies of Canberra being so planned and fawningly adjusted to the motorcar (a metrotyranny of traffic that light rail is coming, now, to deliver us from) that at commuting times there is so little people-watching to do but only Audi-watching, RUV-ogling, as anonymously car-encased and faceless Canberrans scud and sizzle to and fro.

lf only we had a City Poet, a Canberra Poet Laureate (this column keeps campaigning for this, given that every self-respecting city in the UK and the USA has such a bard) she would be exactly the person to articulate a love of trams.

Our City Poet, if only we had one, would be picking up on and proclaiming (like Aram Pachyan singing so poetically of Yerevan's tram coming) the dreamed of extension our tram system to Woden, how it will be some kind of messiah, at last bringing order and meaningfulness to the lives of all it serves.