The museum is operated by the Australian Electric Transport Museum Inc., a not-for-profit volunteer organisation affiliated with the Council of Tramway Museums of Australasia. It is dedicated to the study, restoration and operation of trams and trolleybuses that were used in Adelaide or built there. It is one of very few transport museums in the world holding at least one example of every principal tram type to have been in service on a city street system. From an initial collection of five trams stored on a vacant site at St Kilda in 1957, the museum in 2019 had twenty-six electric trams, two horse trams, a tram-hauled horsebox, four trolleybuses, and a diesel bus of the type that operated when the street tram network was closed in 1958. Museum features include an entrance gallery, bookshop, archive and interpretative displays. Maintenance and construction facilities include two workshops, a wheel lathe building, ancillary storage sheds and a "travelling workshop", a former Melbourne W2 class tram. Staffed by volunteers, the museum relies mainly on visitor admissions to fund its work. Major projects are supported by donations from museum members and occasional grants from South Australian Government museum assistance programs and the Salisbury Council. The council crucially secured funding from a 1972 state government unemployment relief scheme to lay a 1.6 km tramway from museum site alongside St Kilda Road towards the sea, and to erect poles for overhead wiring.
Development
In 1958 work started at the 5.3 hectare museum site with the arrival of donated vehicles: the first was a trolleybus from Adelaide's Municipal Tramways Trust, which that year had closed its street tram network leaving only the mainly enclosed Glenelg tram line intact. The museum was opened as a static display by Leader of the OppositionSteele Hall on 22 July 1967. The tramway opened for trials in 1973 and was officially opened on 23 March 1974 to coincide with St Kilda's centenary. Workshops were built to restore trams to operating condition; in 2001 the increasing number of trams necessitated a large building to house them.
Fleet
The pre-electric era, from 1878 to 1917, is represented by horse tram no. 18 of the Adelaide and Suburban Tramway Company, the largest of 11 companies that operated more than 150 vehicles on a network of about 120 km of standard gauge lines. Displayed next to it is derelict tram no. 15 of the Adelaide, Unley and Mitcham Tramway Company, demonstrating the starting point for many restoration tasks. The electric era, which started in 1909, was under the management of the MTT, a body established in late 1907 and governed mainly by councillors nominated by local governments. From then until 1958, when the street tram system was closed down, the trust had owned more than 300 trams and operated over a network of about 100 km. There remained only the 10.8 kmline from Glenelg to the geographic centre of Adelaide after 1958, about 85% of which occupied its own reserved corridor. It was to be another 47 years before a tramways renaissance began. The museum owns at least one tram of each main type from the MTT era. Its collection also includes two Melbourne trams: one was built by Holden's Body Builders in Adelaide; the other has been modified for convenient wheelchair access and offers an interesting comparison with the MTT's fast-loading Type F cars. A third fast-loader is a Sydney R1 Class tram, lent by the Sydney Tramway Museum. Trolleybuses preserved are a 1925 Garford, a 1937 AEC 661T and a 1952 Sunbeam MF2B. A 1954 AEC Regal IV motor bus is also preserved.
