Melbourne’s Trams, Preserved in a Paddock Near Ballarat

On a rural block at Haddon, ten minutes south-west of Ballarat, a small band of volunteers has spent five decades keeping a fleet of Melbourne’s classic electric trams alive — complete with their own working tramway to run them on.

The story begins in late 1974, when a group of enthusiasts formed the Haddon Tramway Workshops and bought land on Sago Hill Road with an ambitious plan: not just to store retired tramcars, but to build a genuine operating electric tramway for them. That group became the Melbourne Tramcar Preservation Association Inc., incorporated in 1984, and their Haddon site grew to include a carbarn, workshop, substation and roughly 650 metres of running track with overhead wire.

This site carries on the story that the Association’s much-loved website told from 1998 to 2022 — the history and technical details of every tramcar preserved at Haddon, the major restoration projects, and the patient craft of building and maintaining real tramway track and overhead by volunteer hands. The old pages live on here at their original addresses, rewritten and refreshed for a new generation of readers.

The Fleet at a Glance

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• A fifty-year history — from bare paddock to official tramway opening.
• Building the Haddon Tramway — how volunteers lay and rebuild real tram track.
• Restoring W3 663 and returning SW5 849 to service.
• Visiting Haddon and the tram heritage of the Ballarat district.