Electric streetcars \u2014\u00a0or trams, as they say in British English\u00a0\u2014 used to be a primary form of public transportation in cities around the world. Los Angeles, for example, had more than 1,200 streetcars running along 20 streetcar lines. Streetcars\u00a0were considered noisy and inflexible, however, and around the middle of the last century many cities ripped out their streetcar tracks and replaced streetcars\u00a0with buses, or switched to light rail systems.<\/p>\n
Not everyone hated trams, of course, and from the beginning modelers tried to preserve them. London cut off its tram services in the early 1950s, and this 1958 newsreel shows a Mr. Jackson Stevens and his son, Nigel, rebuilt a miniature London streetcar line in their garden in Glastonbury, Somerset.<\/p>\n