Since 1835: The Story of New Orleans' St. Charles Streetcar

The oldest continuously operating street railway in the world does not run in Paris or London. It rattles down a live oak lined avenue in New Orleans, and it has been running for nearly two centuries. 

Back in 1835, the New Orleans and Carrollton Rail Road opened a line connecting the city to the then separate town of Carrollton upriver, following the route we now know as the St. Charles Avenue streetcar. The first cars were pulled by steam locomotives shipped from England, but the soot and the noise wore on the households springing up along the route, and within a few years horses and mules took over — carrying passengers past the grand homes and gardens of the American sector. The line was electrified in 1893, and it has run under those wires ever since, surviving wars, the rise of the automobile, and the near total disappearance of streetcars across America. Katrina finally stopped it in 2005, the first real break in its history; the cars were back on the full route by June 2008.

To ride it today is to travel through living history. The dark green cars with their mahogany seats and brass fittings are not a tourist reproduction but the genuine article, built in North Carolina in 1923 and 1924 and now past their hundredth year, clattering along under the same oaks that have shaded the avenue for generations. 

For New Orleanians it is not a museum piece at all. It is how you get to school, to work, to the parades. It is the sound of the city, the rumble and the clang woven into countless childhood memories.

A handful of other cities kept a legacy line or two — Philadelphia, Boston, Pittsburgh, San Francisco. But nowhere else has one been running as long. New Orleans held on, and in doing so kept a thread reaching all the way back to 1835.

Louisiana Uncovered. (2026, July 9). The oldest continuously operating street railway in the world does not run in Paris or London [Status update]. Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=122120041688881462&id=61576443867701