My Soviet Era Brick Tram, 35 Years Later
Times have changed. Trams have changed. But my love for the bricks, or anything that moves on rails, hasn’t…
One of the few undisputed facts of childhood is that anything that runs on rails, is cool. I grew up loving trains, and many of my best childhood memories are in some way or another connected to trains and trams. I can’t be sure if it’s quite the first, but playing on the kitchen table with LEGO-like bricks at around the age of 4, in candlelight, is definitely one of my most vivid early memories. I was pushing a brick-built two-car tram around the table. Why the candlelight? In Communist Romania, along with everything else you could think of, electricity was rationed, so I spent a lot of my evenings in the dark. But as long as I had my bricks, I couldn’t care less.
What I did not know as a 4-year-old was that I happened to be born in the same city — Arad — that implemented the first electrified tramway in all of Romania, after a few decades of horse-pulled operation. You see, we had a tram since 1869 and Arad continues to be the city with one of the best tram infrastructures in Romania. It made sense…
