The old tram

The day of 16^th March 1958 was one of the saddest in the life of Tomeu Bibiloni. After devoting his entire professional career to the electric tram, he was charged with ordering the final departure of the trams in service in Palma, destined towards the depot. They were all lined up in Paseo Sagrera, under the attentive gaze of the foremost civil, religious and military authorities, along with hundreds of curious citizens who had gathered to see those – by now obsolete – vehicles, which had formed part of Palma’s urban landscape for decades and were succumbing to the bus boom, set off for the very last time. With tears in his eyes and his son Sebastià, aged 31, at his side, he felt a deep sorrow as he blew the whistle for the last time...

One can only imagine how thousands of memories swirled around in his mind at that time. How, at the age of 21 and almost by accident, he started working as a driver of this new means of transport, because the man he was working for as a private chauffer formed part of the board of directors of the newly-created tram company, the Sociedad General de Tranvías Eléctricos Interurbanos de Palma (SGTEI). The expectation generated by the electrification of the tram in 1916 was front page news on the most important local papers and was even immortalised in a film, when the cinema was still a dazzling novelty as well. A tragic accident tarnished the first day of circulation, when a carriage came off the rails opposite Teatro Lírico and fatally ran over a 17-year-old boy, as a result of which it took the residents of Palma months before they trusted the new mode of transportation. That summer, the old trams pulled by mules co-existed alongside the electric trams, crossing through the streets of Palma like symbols of two eras and a world in transition: from animal traction, which had functioned for thousands of years, to the modern, electrified society.

Tomeu had memories from his childhood and youth of the old mule trams, inaugurated in 1891 as the first regular collective transport service in Palma, in an age when bicycles and carts were the only vehicles available. The painter Santiago Rusiñol said in his book La isla de la calma (“The Island of Calm”, 1922), “This tram isn’t for people in a hurry. Anyone who is should go on foot, they will arrive earlier. More than a tool for travelling, ti is a kind of social club or a family reunion for having conversations”. The route had particularly delicate moments for the animals, like the Conquistador hill, when an extra mule was hitched on so as to be able to go up the slope better. This mule was trained, so as soon as its mission was accomplished, it would go back down the hill on its own to await the next tram.

Of his time as a worker on the electric trams, Tomeu remembered the peculiar hexagonal shape of the vehicles, which people would get onto and alight from practically whilst they were moving, and where it was “forbidden to smoke, spit and blaspheme”, according to a sign. Children would hang onto the back to travel for free. The depot was initially located on sa carretera (now called Calle Aragón), and many of the SGTEI workers lived around them; the company had between 400 and 500 workers – tram drivers, office workers, repair and maintenance personnel and coach washers. Although the majority came from a humble background, they all had to know how to read and write, something not everyone could boast of in that age. In the workshops, which had a fundamental specific weight within the company, there were lathe operators, mechanics, metalworkers, electricians, painters, builders, upholsterers, fitters and carpenters, as the entire interior of the carriages was made of wood.

Tomeu rememberd how, as he moved up from errand boy to driver, from driver to conductor and from conductor to inspector, the tram network grew to 50 kilometres of lines distributed in 9 routes. And all in spite of difficulties like the militarisation of the trams during the Civil War, power cuts and supply failures during the post-war period, or the slow but unstoppable proliferation of buses, driven by the automobile lobby and supported by the press, which had harshly criticised the tram in the last years, considering it to be outdated.

The arrival of the tram propitiated the expansion of peripheral neighbourhoods such as Son Roca, Establiments, S’Arenal, Coll d'en Rabassa, La Soledad, Pont d’Inca or Cas Català, communicating them with the city centre and definitively changing the city’s physiognomy.

As he blew the whistle on that day in March of 1958, Tomeu could not know that [...]

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