A Working Inheritance: Dalian’s Trams and the People Who Made Them

A tram makes a city’s past move. Its rails constrain the route, overhead wiring supplies power, and the driver repeatedly negotiates the relationship between a heavy vehicle and the street around it. Dalian’s older cars invite an affectionate gaze, but their survival is also an engineering story.

Xinhua’s January 2024 portrait of driver Li Peng paired him with a 3000-series car on route 201. The series dates to 1935, but keeping a working tram on the rails requires maintenance, replacement parts and practical knowledge passed between generations.

One revealing episode comes from Dalian Daily’s 2024 interviews with tram workers. Designer Jiang Suqing recalled the development of the Chenggong, or “Success,” tram in 1951, working alongside chief engineer Chen Peifeng. Its streamlined body had to be shaped without a large pressing machine: workers formed the sheet metal by hand. Fitting flat glass into the curved design created another problem.

The result gives “local industry” a precise meaning. It was not simply a factory name stamped on a finished vehicle. It involved decisions about how a drawing could become a body, what the available tools could achieve, and where a design had to accommodate the properties of glass and steel. The curve visible from the street was the outcome of labour that a photograph of the finished tram can easily conceal.

The same reporting follows a later generation of design: the partly low-floor Dalianren tram entered service in 2001. The change concerns the body of the passenger as much as the body of the vehicle. A lower floor changes the relationship between platform, doorway and interior; styling is only one part of modernisation.

Li Peng also described different driving practices. Older equipment separates tasks that a modern single controller can combine, demanding a different coordination of the driver’s hands. The comparison makes the cab a useful place to think about historical continuity. Knowledge passes from worker to worker, but it does not remain identical as machinery changes.

Shaping a panel, fitting a window and working a controller connect the designers’ workshop with Li Peng’s cab. Dalian’s tram heritage is carried in those actions as well as in the silhouette of the carriage.