Tram, trolleybus, bus: the succession

The end came as a procession. On the night of 26 January 1992, a farewell caravan closed Montevideo's trolleybus service, car number 44 pulling into the Estación Buceo for the last time, more than forty years after trolleybuses first ran in the city. Nothing had broken; the city government had decided to renew the fleet with buses. The open archive, which photographed the system's workshops so often in the fifties, holds no image of that goodbye. Some endings only survive in writing.

Where it started. The inheritance of AMDET, Montevideo's municipal transport agency, was a tram fleet whose cars were numbered up to 887, many of them out of service, along with two bus companies, AMSA and TUSA. The agency was created on 29 December 1947 under Law 10.980, which expropriated the tram concession, and began running the service in January 1948.

Trolleybuses from abroad. The first trolleybuses, British-built, reached the port on 11 February 1951, and in March line 62 began running on Calle Colonia. These were new vehicles bought abroad, not trams rebuilt. The plan behind them had been approved the previous December. The fleet reached 250 by 1955 and sixteen lines had opened by 1959, while the trams were retired route by route until the last of them stopped in 1956–57.

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AMDET's workshops were photographed again and again through those years: tramcars standing among workers in a shop, a main floor of lathes and presses at factory scale, a body panel being shaped by hand at a bench. Keeping a fleet running while it changed, the photographs suggest, took a whole shop floor — machine tools and hands.

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The dismantler, dismantled. AMDET's own turn came in the mid-seventies. The city spun the service out to its workers — three cooperatives, COTSUR, RAINCOOP and COOPTROL, took over the routes in 1975 — and on 1 February 1976 the agency itself was wound up, twenty-eight years after it was created. It had seen the tram off; it did not live to see the trolleybus go.

A tail that reaches 2016. The cooperatives outlived the trolleybus, though not all of them for long. COOPTROL wound down with the trolleybuses in 1992, and its 502 workers crossed to CUTCSA owning one-twelfth of the new buses. COTSUR stopped that same October. RAINCOOP, the last piece of what had been AMDET, stayed on the road until it closed in 2016 — almost a quarter century after the last trolleybus.

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What remains. The buses won. What the archive keeps is the work behind the change: workshops the size of factories, panels worked by hand, and a municipal company that buried the tram and was itself wound up long before the trolleybus it had launched.