A love letter to my favorite form of transportation

Riding the Rails of Prague

The trusty, long-haul no. 26 chugs along the fringe of Letná Park, with Prague Castle in the background. Photo by Mark Baker.
The tram slides past the National Theatre on central Národní třída (National Boulevard). Photo by Mark Baker.

While Prague has a fine metro and an extensive bus network, it’s the tram – or tramvaj in Czech – that sets the transportation tone. Any visitor to the city will be familiar with the sight of these mainly (though not always) red- and cream-colored “whales on rails,” gliding smoothly over the cobblestones and pushing their girth through impossibly narrow streets that were originally built to accommodate horses, but are now packed with cars, trucks, buses, and an endless stream of streetcars.

Tram no. 22 is even a guidebook staple. For the price of a 90-minute ticket, 32 Czech crowns (a little more than a euro and change), you can ride all the way from Prague Castle, down through the picturesque Lesser Quarter, across the Vltava River (with stunning views of Charles Bridge), and practically to where the gates of the Old Town once stood. Stay on the line and you’re transported in minutes through the prosperous suburb of Vinohrady, and out to the Communist-era, high-rise housing projects at the end of the line. You may even have some time left on your ticket to return to the center free of charge.

But what do the trams say about Prague and Praguers?

That’s a tricky question, especially for me, a resident expat, but one I set out to try to answer a while back by spending the entire day on the tram. My goal was to navigate all 22 or so of the daytime lines and 142 kms (more than 500km in total length) of track from sun-up to sundown. In the end I didn’t finish (there were too many line spurs to cover), but I did gain some valuable insight into the city and the people who live here.

The Porsche-designed newer trams still look out of place in some older Prague neighborhoods. Photo by Mark Baker.
I’m apparently not the only one who sees a bit of romance on Prague’s trams. Photo by Mark Baker.
A futuristic streetscape in the outlying Prague suburb of Řepy. Photo by Mark Baker.

Trams remain a repository of civility that long ago vanished from many other aspects of everyday life. Visitors to Prague, who normally interact mostly with waiters and shop-clerks, sometimes come away with an impression of Czechs as gruff or even rude. Maybe that’s a legacy of 40 years of Communist rule or a reaction to the enormous influx of tourists since the 1989 Velvet Revolution. But step onto a tram and it’s like going back 50 years in time.

It’s still considered, for example, the height of ill manners on a crowded tramcar for a man to fail to offer his seat to women of a certain age. This societal nicety curiously doesn’t apply as strictly to the city’s newer and far-less-mannered metro. The calculation of when and whether to offer a seat is not always easy in practice. It’s clear if a woman is elderly, enfeebled, or with child in arms, but what if she’s simply older and otherwise able-bodied? Too rapid a rise risks handing her a backhanded compliment; too slow and you risk eliciting the wrath of the rest of the car.

Young women, too, are expected to yield their seats to older men, but an added dose of sensitivity is required. Male egos, after all, are notoriously fragile. A former work colleague of mine here – a man of about 60 and in pretty good shape – once told me how depressed he became after an attractive young woman, on seeing him standing there, quickly leapt out of her seat and offered it to him. He told me he’d originally interpreted her smile as flirtatious interest – certainly not unknown on Prague’s trams – and then quickly realized she was probably thinking of her father or grandfather.

Men are also expected to learn the delicate art of assisting young mothers with babies in on- and off-loading their baby carriages. Though some of the newer trams stand fairly low to the ground, the older models are a good three steep steps up and in (or down and out). Once a mother has locked eyes on you as the honorary carriage-lifter, there’s no polite way of refusing the request. To properly offload a pram, wait for the tram to come to a stop, precede the carriage down the steps, take firm hold of the front axle, and deliver the baby gently to the ground. Such is the responsibility demanded of strangers on a tram.

Prague’s trams are generally quiet and there’s not much banter among the riders. This changes, of course, after 11 p.m. when the city’s day fleet retires to the garages and special night trams are brought into service to ferry revelers from pubs in the center to housing projects on the outskirts. The mood at 3 or 4 a.m. can get raucous, and night trams are often little more than pubs on wheels. There are few laws against carrying open containers of alcohol (although some restrictions apply to the city center). Unlike in New York, there’s no need to swill from a paper bag.

The tourist-friendly no. 23 trams plies the rails in upscale Vinohrady. Photo by Mark Baker.
A journey on the tram is a slice of daily Prague life. Photo by Mark Baker.
A rare green tram (covered by an ad) emerges from a tunnel in Malá Strana. Photo by Mark Baker.
Trams are especially talented at navigating tight corners. Photo by Mark Baker.

Tram drivers are notoriously tough -- equally so the growing number of women “behind the wheel” (though there are no steering wheels to speak of, just a series of buttons that control the speed and brakes). The drivers take no guff from surly passengers and have been known to eject undesirables in the middle of night in the middle of nowhere. In the winter, when some trams become, in effect, rolling shelters for the city’s growing homeless population, the drivers have the unenviable task of clearing the seats for paying customers. During the coldest days, drivers sometimes relent and allow the homeless to stay put, often sprawled out and snoring over half the car.

The drivers also brook no dissent from cars, bikes, or even pedestrians as they maneuver their mechanical beasts along the city’s narrow streets. Cars caught inadvertently crossing over the tracks at rush hour inevitably hear the tram driver’s rage in the form of a jarring, hyperactive bicycle bell, an aural cattle prod that speaks directly to the basest survival instinct to get out of the way.

Prague’s extensive tram network sprang up in the early years of the 20th century, more or less concurrent with the country’s independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War I. One of the original electronic geniuses behind the system was a Czech, František Křižík, though it must be admitted that tram culture here borrows heavily from Vienna. Anyone who’s spent much time in the Austrian capital will feel at home in Prague.

As in Vienna, the basic tram color is red, with Prague sometimes adding an incongruous cream-yellow or gray to the mix (or other colors if the tram is carrying an ad). In both cities, the stops are usually spaced at comfortable 200- to 300-meter intervals, and each stop has a timetable showing the exact arrival time (down to the minute) and the distance (in minutes) to each stop along the way. In Prague these are surprisingly accurate. In a city where plumbers, electricians, and even real estate agents routinely turn up for appointments an hour or even a day late, it’s rare that a tram is even a couple of minutes behind its appointed round.

If there’s a difference between the two cities, it’s that in Vienna the trams feel, well, quaint, as if the city fathers keep them running to reinforce the image of a truncated but still grand imperial capital. That’s especially true of those highly evocative, older trams that until recently plied Vienna’s Ringstrasse. The cars were filled with that pleasing odor of wood scent and grease, like a roller-coaster car in an old-time amusement park.

In Prague, the trams are anything but quaint. I often think of them as the transportation equivalent of the city’s panelaky – the utilitarian pre-fab housing projects that surround the city and were highly popular from the 1960s to the ‘80s. Like the panelaks, Prague’s trams can be drafty, boxy, and spare, complete in some cases with cracked veneer and a kind of institutional drabness that permeates inside and out. On the other hand, as with public housing, the trams are remarkably efficient and democratic. Each day, they effortlessly haul carloads of doctors, lawyers, housewives, students, and vagrants, all primly seated next to each other, enjoying a lovely view out the window.

In a city that’s now in the midst of remarkable change, the trams add a welcome sense of permanence. Looking at old tram maps from the 1920s and ‘30s at the city’s Public Transport Museum (Muzeum městské hromadné dopravy) in the Střešovice district, it’s shocking to see how little the basic layout has changed. Even with the modifications to the system the city made in 2016, the no. 12 tram still wends its way northward from the suburb of Smichov in the southwest across town to the neighborhood of Holešovice and beyond -- just as it did 70 years ago. The no. 17 tram still hugs the eastern bank of the Vltava for much of its run, as it always has. It’s no stretch to say that an old man, a Czech Rip Van Winkel, coming back to the city from the 1930s might be, in turns, horrified and amazed to hear about the Nazis and Communists, the Velvet Revolution, and the European Union, but would have no trouble at all making his way home that night on the tram.

Prague’s cobblestones are crammed with all kinds of vehicles, including whale-sized trams and old-timer jalopies. Photo by Mark Baker.
A tourist favorite, the no. 22, negotiates a narrow curve in Malá Strana. Photo by Mark Baker.

Comments

  1. This is so beautifully written. I love the trams of Prague (of Europe in general, really; the romance of the tram exists for me from Bratislava to Stockholm) and this was a lovely ode to a most delightful method of transportation.

  2. I especially liked the observation of mothers with baby carriages choosing the carrier. That is something I grew up as a Czech with and take for granted. The more I can appreciate when “foreigners” notice that. Good eye and description, thanks Honza

  3. My memories of Prague from about five years ago was of several crowded trams lining both tracks at Adel when a screaming ambulance was heard. It seemed impossible that the tangle of trams could be untravelled to let the ambulance pass, yet the task was completed with ease. Those tram drivers are real professionals.

    • Hi Richard, Thanks for reading the story and leaving a comment. I have real respect for tram drivers and the stuff they have to put up with every day on the job! Mark

  4. Whenever in Prague I go for sightseeing rides on the trams not only #22 and 23 but all trams. I go to the last stop and return by ankther line. The old trams are the best, the 7000 series or 8000. The nrw trams with the wooden seats are not comfortable neither are the airconditioned ones. A good place to see the roof of the trams and all the electronic equipment, or the lack of it is from the cafe on the first floor of Nova Scena on Narodni

  5. Such a nice read to ride the city and explore the ways and people, I’m looking forward to go back to Prague and explore it again.

  6. I first visited Prague in February 2000. One of the things that most charmed me were those trams with the heated metal seats….bliss on a freezing cold winter’s day ?

  7. Your story is so true. I have loved the Trams of Praha since my first visit in 2004. I ride to see the city and the people and the manners that don’t exist off the Tram. So friendly and helpful to an outsider. Thanks for your description.

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About the author

Mark Baker

I’m an independent journalist, travel writer and author who’s lived in Central Europe for nearly three decades. I love the history, literature, culture and mystery of this often-overlooked corner of Europe, and I make my living writing articles and guidebooks about the region. Much of what I write eventually finds its way into commercial print or digital outlets, but a lot of it does not.

And that’s my aim with this website: to find a space for stories and experiences that fall outside the publishing mainstream.

My Book: ‘Čas Proměn’

In 2021, I published “Čas Proměn” (“Time of Changes”), my first book of historical nonfiction. The book, written in Czech, is a collection of stories about Central and Eastern Europe in the 1980s and early ‘90s, including memories of the thrilling anti-communist revolutions of 1989. The idea for the book and many of the tales I tell there were directly inspired by this blog. Czech readers, find a link to purchase the book here. I hope you enjoy.

Tales of Travel & Adventure in Central Europe
Mark Baker