page_title: St Kilda, South Australia
section_title: Tramway museum
hierarchical_section_title: St Kilda, South Australia / Features / Tramway museum
caption_attribution_description: English: First electric tram in Adelaide – on display at the St Kilda, South Australia tram museum.
context_page_description: St Kilda is a seaside suburb in Adelaide, South Australia. St Kilda has a small number of houses and a 2006 population of 246. There is a single connecting road to the rest of Adelaide which, where the road enters the suburb's residential area, is surrounded by salt crystallisation lagoons used in the manufacture of soda ash. The inhabited section of the suburb occupies less than 100 hectares along the seafront, with the remainder used for salt lagoons and also settlement ponds of nearby Bolivar sewage treatment works.
  What was originally a seaside town was named by John Harvey, the founder of nearby Salisbury, as it reminded him of St Kilda in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland with its similar abundance of birdlife. St Kilda is an internationally recognised bird watching area with over 100 species of birds feeding in and around the mudflats, salt Lagoons, mangroves and seagrass beds. The suburb is home to a number of tourist attractions, including an adventure playground, tram museum, mangrove forest walk and an abundance of birdlife.
context_section_description: The Tramway Museum, St Kilda is built on the site of the 1902 school and showcases trams and trolleybuses that were either used or built in Adelaide. The museum is dedicated to preserving and restoring Adelaide’s former transport vehicles. It houses over 30 electric trams, horse trams and electric trolley buses, many of which are restored and operational. Visitors can ride the electric trams along 2 km of purpose-built track that runs between the museum and the adventure playground.
  The first vehicle was a trolley bus donated from the Municipal Tramways Trust in 1958 with others soon following. The museum opened as a static display in 1967. Workshops were built to enable the restoration of the old trams to operating condition. ICI, then operator of the salt lagoons, donated land for the tramway to run next to St Kilda Road. The tramway opened for trials in 1973 and was officially opened in 1974 by Harry Bowey, mayor of Salisbury, and Frank Kneebone, Minister for Lands, to coincide with St Kilda's centenary. In 2001 a large additional museum building was completed to house the increasing number of donated trams.
caption: Adelaide's first electric tram on display
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