Dundee’s Last Surviving Electric Tram Unearthed in Local Allotment
The remains of Dundee’s last surviving electric tram, discovered hidden away in a city allotment, are set to return home to the very depot where generations of Dundee’s trams spent their working lives.
Dundee Museum of Transport has secured permission to remove the remarkable tram remains, dating back to 1901 or 1907-8, from City Road allotments. Subject to funding, the team hopes to bring the structure back to Maryfield Tram Depot, which housed trams from 1901 until the very last services in 1956. The depot, on Forfar Road, will soon become the museum’s new home after it leaves its Market Mews site at the end of October.
Once recovered, Dundee will become the only place in the UK where visitors can see surviving examples of three key stages of historic tram operation – horse, steam and electric. The horse and electric trams will be in the museum, and the steam example is home to The Auld Tram café in Dundee city centre.
The news comes as visitors enjoy the final weeks of Oor Trams: Dundee’s Tram Era Remembered. The exhibition brings the city’s tramway story vividly back to life through photographs, artefacts, vehicles and the personal memories of those who travelled, worked and lived alongside the trams.
The team behind Dundee Museum of Transport discovered the allotments tram while researching material for the exhibition. The structure is thought to have been removed from service in the 1940s, possibly becoming a hen house before eventually being repurposed as a shed at the allotments, where it is believed to have remained since the 1950s.
Oor Trams: Dundee’s Tram Era Remembered gives visitors the chance to see Dundee’s only surviving horse-drawn tram and a tower wagon: a type of vehicle used to maintain the overhead infrastructure that powered the trams, before buses eventually took over, including the 1953 bus on show.
One of the exhibition’s particularly popular features is a life-size reconstruction of the front of a Dundee tram, built by the museum’s volunteer build team using original drawings from the 1920s. Visitors can step onto the reconstructed platform, offering a hands-on experience of what travelling on a Dundee tram might have felt like. With dressing-up clothes and oral-history recordings, including memories from a former tram driver, visitors can also see a range of original artefacts, from a tram seat and driver’s coat to destination blinds and a section of tram track uncovered during current works on Union Street.
Hannah Crookes, Learning and Engagement Officer, said, “Oor Trams: Dundee’s Tram Era Remembered has allowed us to bring Dundee’s tram story back to life through our vehicles, artefacts and, importantly, the memories and voices of those who remember the trams.
“To have discovered the electric tram is of huge significance in itself but, subject to funding, to be able to bring it home would be the icing on the cake, the perfect ending to the exhibition which marks the 70th anniversary of trams leaving the city.
“We set out to tell the story of Dundee’s tram era and, in the process, have discovered another remarkable piece of that story. To bring the remains home to the depot where its story may have begun, and to the new home of Dundee Museum of Transport, would be an extraordinary full-circle moment.”
Lynne Nealon of the City Road Allotments Committee added, “It is heartening that the inbuilt instinct of our ancestral allotmenteers, to reuse and re-purpose in imaginative ways, has been instrumental in this instance, with the preservation of a tram that holds significance to the past and present social and cultural history of Dundee.”
Supported by Dundee Historic Environment Trust, Oor Trams: Dundee’s Tram Era Remembered is open from 10am to 4.30pm, seven days a week, until 31 October 2026.
For more information, visit https://www.dmoft.co.uk/
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