Tram-Trains
I recently covered the Stadtbahn, a mode of rail transportation running as rapid transit (almost always a subway) in city center and as a tramway farther out. The tram-train is the opposite kind of system: it runs as a tramway within the city, but as rapid transit farther out. There’s a Human Transit blog post about this from 2009, describing how it works in Karlsruhe, which invented this kind of service pattern. Jarrett is bearish on the tram-train in most contexts, giving a list of required patterns that he says is uncommon elsewhere. It’s worth revising this question, because while the tram-train is not very useful in an American context, it is in countries with discontinuous built-up areas, including Germany and the Netherlands but also Israel. Israeli readers may be especially interested in how this technology fits the rail network away from the Tel Aviv region.
What is a tram-train?
Let’s dredge the 2*2 table from the Stadtbahn post:
| Slow in center | Fast in center | |
| Slow in outlying areas | Tramway | Stadtbahn |
| Fast in outlying areas | Tram-train | Rapid transit |
The terms fast and slow are again relative to general traffic. The Paris Métro averages 25 km/h, less than some mixed-traffic buses in small cities, but it still counts as fast because the speed in destinations accessed per hour is very high.
Be aware that I am using the terms Stadtbahn and tram-train to denote two different things, but in Karlsruhe the system is locally called Stadtbahn. German cities use the term Stadtbahn to mean “a tramway that doesn’t suck,” much as American cities call a dazzling variety of distinct things light rail, including lines in all four cells of the above table. Nonetheless, in this post I am keeping my terminology distinct, using the advantage of switching between different languages and dialects.
Tram-trains and regional rail
The Karlsruhe model involves trains running on mainline track alongside mainline trains, diverging to dedicated tramway tracks in the city, to connect Karlsruhe Hauptbahnhof with city center around Marktplatz. This also includes lines that do not touch the mainline, like S2, but still run with higher-quality right-of-way separation outside city center; but most lines run on mainline rail part of the way.
North American light rail lines, with the exception of the Boston, Philadelphia, and San Francisco Stadtbahn systems, tend to run as tram-trains, but never have this regional rail tie-in. They run on entirely dedicated tracks, which has two important effects, both negative. First, it increases construction costs. And second, it means that the shape of the network is much more a skeletal tramway map than the more complicated combination of an S-Bahn and a tramway that one sees in Karlsruhe. San Diego has a short segment sharing tracks with freight with time separation, but the shape of the network isn’t any different from that of other American post-1970s light rail systems, and there’s an ongoing extension parallel to a mainline railroad that nonetheless constructs a new right-of-way.
In this sense, the Karlsruhe model can be likened to a cheaper S-Bahn. S-Bahn systems carve new right-of-way under city center to provide through-service whenever the historic city station is a terminus, such as in Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Munich, or German-inspired Philadelphia. They can also build new lines for more expansive service, higher capacity, or a better connection to city center, like the second S-Bahn trunk in Hamburg; Karlsruhe itself is building a combined road and rail tunnel, the Kombilösung, after a generation of at-grade operation. The tram-train is then a way to achieve some of the same desirable attributes but without spending money on a tunnel.
It follows that the tram-train is best when it can run on actual regional rail tracks, with good integration with the mainline system. It is a lower-speed, lower-cost version of a regional rail tunnel, whereas the North American version running on dedicated tracks is a lower-cost version of a subway. Note also that regional rail can be run at different scales, the shorter and higher-frequency end deserving the moniker S-Bahn; the Karlsruhe version is long-range, with S1 and S11 reaching 30 km south of city center and S5 reaching 70 km east.
Where is a tram-train appropriate?
Jarrett’s 2009 post lays down three criteria for when tram-trains work:
- The travel market must be small enough that an S-Bahn tunnel is not justified.
- The destination to be served isn’t right next to the rail mainline.
- The destination to be served away from the mainline is so dominant that it’s worthwhile running at tramway speeds just to get there and there aren’t too many people riding the line beyond it.
The center of Karlsruhe satisfies the second and third criteria. It is borderline for the first – the region has maybe a million people, depending on definitions, and the city proper has 312,000 people; the Kombilösung is only under-construction now and was not built generations ago, unlike S-Bahn tunnels in larger cities like Munich.
Jarrett points out that in the urban world he’s most familiar with, consisting of the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, it is not common for cities to satisfy these criteria. He does list exceptions, for example Long Beach, where the Blue Line runs in tramway mode before heading into Los Angeles on a mostly grade-separated right-of-way, whereupon it goes back into the surface in Downtown LA before heading into an under-construction tunnel. But overall, this is not common. City centers tend to be near the train station, and in the United States there’s such job sprawl that just serving one downtown destination is not good enough.
That said, the Long Beach example is instructive, because it is not the primary city in its region – Los Angeles is. I went over the issue of outlying S-Bahn tunnels a year ago, specifying some places where they are appropriate in Israel. The tram-train must be a key tool in the planner’s box as a cheaper, lower-capacity, lower-speed version of the same concept, diverging from the mainline in tramway mode in order to serve a secondary center. Karlsruhe itself is a primary urban center – the only time it’s the secondary node is when it connects to Mannheim, and that train doesn’t use the tramway tracks – but a secondary tram-train connection is being built in outlying areas there, namely Heilbronn.
Different models of urban geography
In the American model of urban geography, cities are contiguous blobs. Stare at, for example, Chicago – you’ll see an enormous blob of gray stretching in all directions. Parkland is mostly patches of green in between the gray, or sometimes wedges of green alternating with wedges of gray, the gray following commuter railroads and the green lying in between. Boundaries between municipalities look completely arbitrary on a satellite map.
In the German model of urban geography, it’s different. Look at Cologne, Frankfurt, Mannheim, or Stuttgart – the built-up area is surrounded by green, and then there are various suburban towns with parkland or farmland in between. This goes even beyond the greenbelt around London – there’s real effort at keeping all these municipalities distinct.
I don’t want to give the impression that the United States is the weird one. The contiguous model in the United States is also common in France – Ile-de-France is one contiguous built-up area. That’s how despite being clearly a smaller metropolitan region than London, Paris has the larger contiguous population – see here, WUP 2007, and see also how small the German and Dutch urban areas look on that table. Urban agglomeration in democratic East Asia is contiguous as in the US and France. Canada looks rather American to me too, especially Vancouver, the city both Jarrett and I are the most familiar with, while Toronto has a greenbelt.
This distinction moreover has to be viewed as a spectrum rather than as absolutes. Boston, for example, has some of the German model in it – there’s continuous urbanization with inner suburbs like Cambridge and Newton, but beyond Route 128, there are many small secondary cities with low density between them and the primary center. Conversely, Berlin is mostly American or French; the few suburbs it has outside city limits are mostly contiguous with the city’s built-up area, with the major exception of Potsdam.
The relevance of this distinction is that in the German or Dutch model of urban geography, it’s likely that a railway will pass through a small city rather far from its center, fulfilling the second criterion in Jarrett’s post. Moreover, this model of independent podlike cities means that there is likely to be a significant core, which fulfills the third criterion. The first criterion is fulfilled whenever this is not the center of a large metropolitan area.
It’s not surprising, then, that the Karlsruhe model has spread to the Netherlands. This is not a matter of similarity in transport models: the Netherlands differs from the German-speaking world, for examples it does not have monocentric S-Bahns or S-Bahn tunnels and it builds train stations with bike parking where Germany lets people bring bikes on trains. Nonetheless, the shared model of distinct municipalities makes tram-train technology attractive in South Holland.
Israel and tram-trains
In Israel, there are very few historic railways. A large share of construction is new, and therefore has to either swerve around cities or tunnel to enter them, or in a handful of cases run on elevated alignments. Israel Railways and local NIMBYs have generally preferred swerving.
Moreover, the urban layout in Israel is very podlike. There do exist contiguous areas of adjacent cities; Tel Aviv in particular forms a single blob of gray with Ramat Gan, Givatayim, Bni Brak, Petah Tikva, Bat Yam, and Holon, with a total population of 1.5 million. But for the most part, adjacent cities are buffered with undeveloped areas, and the cities jealously fight to stay this way despite extensive developer pressure.
The final important piece in Israel’s situation is that despite considerable population growth, there is very little rail-adjacent transit-oriented development. The railway was an afterthought until the Ayalon Railway opened in 1993, and even then it took until last decade for mainline rail to be a significant regional mode of transport. The state aggressively builds new pod-towns without any attempt to expand existing towns toward the railway.
The upshot is that all three of Jarrett’s criteria for tram-trains are satisfied in Israel, everywhere except in and around Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv is large enough for a fully grade-separated route, i.e. the already-existing Ayalon Railway. Moreover, because Tel Aviv needs full-size trains, anything that is planned to run through to Tel Aviv, even as far as Netanya and Ashdod, has to be rapid transit, using short tunnels and els to reach city centers where needed. A tram-train through Ashdod may look like a prudent investment, but if the result is that it feeds a 45 meter long light rail vehicle through the Ayalon Railway then it’s a waste of precious capacity.
But Outside Tel Aviv, the case for tram-trains is strong. One of my mutuals on Twitter brings up the Beer Sheva region as an example. The mainline going north has a station called Lehavim-Rahat, vaguely tangent to Lehavim, a ways away from Rahat. It could get two tramway branches, one diverging to the built-up area of Lehavim, a small suburb that is one of Israel’s richest municipalities, and the other to Rahat, one of Israel’s poorest. There are also interesting options of divergence going south and east, but they suffer from being so far from the mainline the network would look scarcely different from an ordinary tramway.
Beer Sheva itself would benefit from tramways with train through-service as well. The commercial center of the city is close to the train station, but the university and the hospital aren’t, and are not even that close to the subsidiary Beer Sheva North station. The station is also awkwardly off-center, lying southeast of the city’s geographic center, which means that feeding buses into it with timed transfers screws internal connections. So tramway tracks on Rager Boulevard, cutting off Beer Sheva North for regional trains, would do a lot to improve regional connectivity in Beer Sheva; intercity trains should naturally keep using the existing line.
In the North, there are similar examples. Haifa is not going to need the capacity of full-size trains anytime soon, which makes the case for various branches diverging into smaller cities to provide closer service in tramway mode strong. Unlike in Beer Sheva, the case for doing so in the primary center is weak. Haifa’s topography is the stuff of nightmares, up a steep hill with switchback streets. The mainline already serves the Lower City well, and climbing the hill is not possible.
This creates an interesting situation, in which the technology of the tram-train in the North can be used to serve secondary cities like Kiryat Ata and Tirat Carmel and maybe enter the Old City of Acre, but the operational pattern is really that of a Stadtbahn – fast through Haifa and up most of the Krayot, slow through smaller suburbs.
Pedestrian Observations 
Interurbans are sort of the American version of tram-trains, and are of course basically extinct. The one substantial extant operation, the South Shore Line, has a fast, dedicated route into Chicago (which probably explains its survival) and only has a short slow section in Michigan City, which they are planning to speed up by putting the wrecking ball to many of the houses along its route through town.
My question is – with recent FRA reform, would any of the European model EMUs and DMUs that have recently become legal in the US, be appropriate for running on a tramway-grade tracks (on street, but in dedicated lanes) through urban areas?
In theory, yes.
In practice, not really. There aren’t really places in the US that have interesting destinations within tramway range of the train station. Maaaaaaaaybe New Haven and Providence, but in both cases the centers are 500 meters from the station (using State Street, not Union Station) and not Karlsruhe’s 1.5 km, and also the railroads they’re on have a big “why are you putting a smol train on a line this busy?” problem. Then you get cities with a Karlsruhe-like distance, like Toledo, but that raises questions like “what exactly are you connecting Toledo with by regional rail?”.
Toledo would need a region first. The boosters claim the city is the center of a region with a million people. The Census Bureau says the MSA has 641,816 and the CSA has 831,295. Wikipedia says this about the city itself : “The population density was 3,559.4 inhabitants per square mile (1,374.3/km2)”. There’s no congestion, it’s easy to park and everybody who can drive, does. And will unless you want to ban automobiles.
Think of Toledo as a satellite city of Detroit and it makes much more sense. Detroit, however, is weak-centered like LA so it will be very difficult to built any sustainable rail system for Detroit without a dramatic change in land use.
They can use the high speed trains that go to the Northeast from Detroit. Which also gets them the rest of Ohio and the Northeast.
Tramway range of the train station? San Francisco!
But that’s a big city that can support a tunnel, even at American costs!
In fact, San Francisco a few years ago rebuilt the Transbay Terminal bus station with an excavated but unfinished station box for a future downtown train station to support Caltrain and HSR. They have not gotten around to building the tunnel to connect it to the existing train tracks, however.
Re: Transbay Terminal (TBT)
The TBT was built as a train station for the Key System with a transfer hump to SFMuni’s PCC’s in front. The layout was : bus (Mission St.), taxi (plaza entrance), SFMuni (hump entrance), and Key System (elevated w/ link to Bay Bridge). I saw the switches on Market St. for many years that were left behind when they stopped running PCC’s to the TBT. They ripped out the loop tracks on Fremont and Main long before cleaning up the connections.
How about Milwaukee, with a tramway working north from the Amtrak station through downtown (could go as far as UWM as a plausible terminus). Could run 1 or 2 lines, one coming from the west and one coming from the south on the existing Amtrak ROW, meeting at the existing intercity station and together heading to downtown? Would be two intracity lines leveraging existing intercity infrastructure, which seems to be the recipe for success?
How about the Trinity Railway Express? Traditional US commuter rail infrastructure that could be improved with tram extension in the downtowns of Fort Worth and Dallas?
Dallas and Fort Worth already have connections at the train stations.
Right, but are either well placed? The tram extension would extend onwards from the existing rail station to enhance access to the mainline by placing stations within Dallas & Forth Worth downtowns, rather than stopping at the periphery. If Dallas’ rail station has good integration to the new DART tunnel to serve Dallas’ CBD, then yes no need on that end, but I don’t think Fort Worth will ever get a rail tunnel, so can at grade extension through downtown may be an improvement over the existing stations next to the freeway. If you convert both TRE and TEXRail rolling stock, could interline at-grade through downtown and send one west and one south a few stations (it’s a tram, so not far) to create some nice connections to adjacent neighborhoods for relatively low capital cost? Forth Worth seems to fit the sweet spot, vs Denton too small (A-train is fine as-is) and Dallas too large (DART is building a tunnel)
Wikipedia says DART light rail gets 92,000 riders on an average weekday. Somebody is finding it useful.
Yeah, and the Karlsruhe Stadtbahn gets 70 million a year, so around 230,000 a weekday. And Karlsruhe is a small city, whereas Dallas is enormous and its scale is more comparable to that of Berlin or the Ruhr or Madrid or Paris or Randstad. It’s just, all those people drive.
Driving everywhere is the way things were built west of the Susquehanna. It’s not going to change much unless you want to bulldoze Tarrant County and start over. He suggested that Dallas or Fort Worth should build something. They have. People actually use it.
Being from North Carolina, Charlotte is a possible example that comes to mind in the US.
Mainline rail gets no closer than about 1km from the center of the CBD, which is a decently sized concentration of employment for the southeast. In contrast, the light rail route goes right through the thick of it.
In addition, light rail hits the university and the South End TOD district, which isn’t much to phone home about yet in terms of density – but is possibly the best example of TOD south of Rosslyn-Ballston, and is definitely growing.
The Charlotte Light Rail is somewhere between a tramway and rapid transit. It is fully protected at all car grade crossings by signal pre-emption, gates and flashers. But while it isn’t as open for pedestrian crossings as many european tramways, it does does have some street running (again, with pre-emption), quite a few unprotected pedestrian crossings, and slower speeds (25mph top speed I think) in the more built-up areas.
There are decent-ish sized suburban towns along the northeast/south axis (Salisbury, Kannapolis, Concord to the northeast; Rock Hill, Rort Mill, and Pineville to the south) that could be connected to the light rail line with relative ease. Getting people from those outlying locations to a spot 1km closer to the core employment cluster seems like it could make a big difference in terms of ridership – IF rolling stock that allows this could be found.
Of course perhaps this is all moot in a city that, at the moment, has such an insignificant transit mode share…
What about Cincinnati? The natural commuter lines run from Hamilton and High Point to a station that is far to the west of downtown, with a rail yard on one side and low-density neighborhoods on the other.
The natural commuter lines go through such low density territory, in a stagnating city, that I doubt it’s worth building such a project…
Madison. The freight line which would host a natural S-Bahn trunk skirts the periphery of the CBD and doesn’t serve the university at all. Cincinnati and Milwaukee are interesting possibilities, since both have streetcars which in theory would be more useful as S-Bahns extending into the suburbs, but all of these examples have the same land use problem as extant American commuter rail.
The Metrolink IE/OC reverse branch comes to mind – a timed transfer from the Riverside Line might make a tram extension to the built up parts of Santa Ana and Irvine appealing.
Interurbans were never really used for transit within city centers though. In the case of the South Shore Line, they’re not even allowed to take on Chicago-bound passengers inside the state of Illinois!
Denver to some extent revived the Denver->Golden interurban in the form of the W line, but that was never really a mainline railroad so much as a dedicated interurban route.
Not quite true, passengers can board to the Loop at Hegewisch in Chicago.
The Hudson-Bergen Light Rail, while using its own dedicated trackage on the ex-mainline rail corridors, seems to functionally act as a tram-train for Jersey City, deviating from the “back of town” rail corridor to serve the waterfront on a surface tramway alignment. The JC waterfront definitely meets the definition of a minor center, not large enough to justify its own dedicated regional rail tunnel (unless that tunnel is on its way to Manhattan) and is complemented by both PATH on the high-demand corridor into Manhattan and a commuter rail network to more distant burbs centered on Hoboken Terminal.
Milwaukee strikes me as a candidate for a tram-train on mainline track. Lots of mainline rail through-runs the downtown and already nearly intercepts the new little streetcar route.
Minor correction on San Diego: both the Blue Line south of 12th/Imperial and the Orange Line east of 12th/Imperial (all the way to Gillespie Field) are shared with freight, which is a pretty substantial part of the network. The Green Line is new construction in an entirely new ROW, and the line from 12th/Imperial up to Old Town runs parallel to but separate from existing mainline track, a model which the new Blue Line extension to the north will follow. Interestingly, the line further south will likely soon host a mainline regional rail service, from Tijuana to Tecate.
The “not” here seems a like a typo.
Yeah, it is, corrected, thanks!
Interestingly tram line 10 in Zürich would probably qualify – classical tram downtown, separated grade towards the airport.
Yet according to Jarrett’s criteria it is not justified: the airport is served by the main train lines.
Actually, bringing Zürich as an example… to some extent, the Forchbahn could be considered as a TramTrain… From Stadelhofen (second station in Zürich) to Realp, it uses the VBZ network, and then it is on its own.
Another possible example in Zürich would be S17, which is a tramway in Dietikon but has separated grade all the way to Wohlen…
That’s correct… Actually, until a few years ago, the other end (Wohlen – Bremgarten West) had freight and was a 3-rail line. With the end of freight operation, the third rail was removed.
What about networks that are Stadtbahn in their core but Tram-train at the terminus serving a secondary center? Is this common anywhere?
As American light rail networks Stadtbahn-ify their systems by building downtown tunnels (LA & Dallas, soon Portland), could we see the Long Beach model repeated elsewhere in the US?
Sound Transit can use this approach as Seattle merits tunneling but the various secondary cities (Everett, Tacoma, Redmond) that will anchor the termini certainly do not.
I think there might be such lines in Cologne? But it’s never an intention of a Stadtbahn tunnel to be a tram-train at the outer end, it comes out of cobbling together streetcar lines with outer ends that happen to have right-of-way segregation.
What about Bonn – Siegburg? It connects the High Speed Line station with the center of Bonn, although the street running is on the Bonn end…
U76 from Dusseldorf to Krefeld seems like a relatively clear-cut example. More debatable examples include the Keihan Keishin Line from Kyoto to Otsu, the Wiener Lokalbahn from Vienna to Baden, the Green Line from San Diego to Santee, the South Shore Line from Chicago to Michigan City, Line A from Downtown LA to Long Beach and Line E from Downtown LA to Santa Monica after the Downtown LA tunnel opens, etc.
Thanks!
Where are the Line E ‘tram’ segments? I thought it had it’s own ROW (legacy freight) the whole way, with some at-grade crossing but no mixed traffic. Or are you including because it runs at slower spends in Santa Monica vs elsewhere?
It runs in the middle of Colorado Ave from 17th St to 5th St, waiting at stoplights at intersections. It’s true that it has its own lanes on that street but so do lots of trams.
Another interesting project from Germany: Regionalstadtbahn Neckar-Alb
It’s a regional tram-train, having Tramway tracks in Tübingen (91k pop.) and Reutlingen (115k pop.) and using existing or reactivated railway track to connect the region. It’s quite costly with a billion euros for a region of 700k.
Also Ile-de-France is building two tram-trains in the Paris suburbs. Tram Lines 12 and 13.
https://votemanager-wi.ekom21cdn.de/01112020buergerentscheid/06414000/html5/Wahllokaluebersicht.html In light of the pretty clear center city vs suburban divide in Sunday’s vote on a Citybahn Wiesbaden (which failed) will you do a post on public transit referenda some time? https://www.erlangen.de/html/be_2016/index.html See also the split of the vote for the (unsuccessful) attempt to derail the Stadtumlandbahn project in Erlangen
Ooh, thanks for the suggestion! I’ll poll it on Patreon.
Did Karlsruhe really invent this kind of service pattern? A number of tramways innovated outlying grade separation well before the 90s: Gothenburg, Bremen, Brno, Dusseldorf, Cologne, arguably Hiroshima, while Manchester built a very similar system at exactly the same time as Karlsruhe. All of them but the last three do seem to be cities of a middling size as you mention, but Gothenburg in particular doesn’t strike me as the sort of place with one dominant job centre. Isn’t it more accurate to say that Karlsruhe’s innovation was more a technological one – of running tramlike vehicles on the same tracks as mainline trains – rather than a service one – of going fast in outlying areas.
I think Karlsruhe is referenced as the first to share track substantially with mainline trains? Though that’s not quite true either, for example I believe what’s now the west end of Köln line 7 has done so since 1914, and there are also a number of US examples from the interurban era (SP’s Bay Area interurban subsidiaries Peninsular Railway and East Bay Electric Lines come to mind as examples but there were others).
Arguably the New York and Harlem Railroad becamse the very first tram-train when it was extended into the Bronx in 1842 (or even to Harlem in 1837), not too long after becoming the first tram when it opened along Bowery in 1832.
Yes, because Karlsruhe was the first to connect the tram network with the national main line network. In other places, the “mainline” part was owned by the same (or an affiliate) operator.
To be clear here, i’m referring to the service pattern (as is Alon in the first paragraph), i.e. “slow in center, fast in outlying areas”. I know Karlsruhe was the first to run tramlike vehicles on the same tracks as mainline services (though threestationsquare gives exceptions).
There are no tram-trains in the Netherlands, certainly not resembly the Karlsruhe model.
What then was the extension of the Metro to Hoek van Holland?
Full metro or perhaps light metro. The line runs in a tunnel in central Rotterdam and has full priority at all of its handful of grade crossings elsehwere. Its takeover of a former mainline alignment to Hoek van Holland is akin to e.g. the New York Subway’s takeover of former mainline alignments to the Rockaways and to Dyre Ave, the London Central Line’s takeover of former mainline alignments to Epping and to High Barnet, the Sydney Metro’s takeover of the former mainline alignment Chatswood-Epping and soon Sydenham-Bankstown, most of the Tyne & Wear light metro, etc.
Electrifying Austin’s existing Red and forthcoming Green line and running them further into downtown would make them a mainline-track-sharing tram-train system, and seems like a potentially good idea? I could also see a case in Cincinnati given the inconvenient location of the Amtrak station, and maybe Houston?
Austin makes good sense. Electrifying is good but I don’t think it’s a prerequisite for a tram-train, as it looks like the red line already runs at-grade along 5th before entering downtown? Additional tram running along 4th for 1~2 more stations for a direct connect at Republic Square seems like a great improvement for modest cost (seems like plenty of street parking available to create low cost ROW)
An east-west tram alignment through downtown should be good design when paired wit the north-south LRT tunnel funded last week, but does it overlap with the east-west leg of the Blue line tunnel? I’m wondering if an extension of the Green/Red to Republic Square allows for ditching the T-shaped tunnel for a simpler N/S tunnel, and have the Blue turn south of the river rather than north. Rainy Street (towers) would lose service, presumably offset by more service on Riverside (currently no towers). That could be a significantly cheaper tunnel, as it’s shorter, simpler, and has one less portal. Also, the Gold Line could share dedicated ROW with the Red/Blue tram tracks, whereas under the current proposal the Gold is above ground and Blue is below ground when they overlap. Unless I’m misreading the plan and the gold bus line will be in the tunnel?
Another really interesting case in Germany is Nordhausen. A fairly small city with just 40,000 people and a tiny tram network with just two lines. The extended one line over the narrow gauge Harzer Schmalspurbahn, a regularly scheduled tourist railyway that operates steam trains and DMU to the town of Ilfeld. The tram-trains operate electric on the tram lines and using diesel on the train line.
There are already plans for a tram-train from Haifa to Nazareth, the Nofit. They’ve already been approved and a tender accepted.