HistoryNo. 1October 2026
Toads, sausages and Ikaruses. A history of Warsaw’s trams and buses
From the horse-drawn iron road of 1866 to Hyundais and electric buses: vehicles, lines and three days in the life of a Warsaw passenger, in 1930, 1970 and 2000.
The Gdzie Jest Kanar team · Warsaw, · 11 min read
In December 1866 six horses hauled a locomotive through Warsaw. It trundled along the freshly laid rails of the ‘horse-drawn iron road’, from one station to another, and on the slope down towards the Vistula it broke free and rolled downhill on its own. That was the first week of rail transport in a city which, a hundred and sixty years later, has two metro lines and is still arguing about whether a tram should have priority over a car.
Toads
The horse-drawn iron road of 11 December 1866 was above all a siding: it linked Vienna Station (Dworzec Wiedeński) with the St Petersburg and Terespol stations in Praga, across the Kierbedź Bridge. The 86-year concession went to the Main Society of Russian Railways, and the track was laid to the Russian gauge of 1,524 millimetres so that railway wagons could cross from station to station. Passengers rode in red cars, four out of five of them double-deckers: 15 kopecks inside, less on the roof. Standing on the rear platform was forbidden, as were cigars and boarding drunk. A red pennant at the back meant the car was full. The screw brake took many turns of the handle, so a ropucha, a ‘toad’, as Varsovians called these cars, took a long time to stop. Tickets were not introduced until July 1880; before that the conductor collected coins and was not allowed to give change.
Proper trams were brought in by a Belgian company, which won a city tender in 1880. On 18 October 1881, at 1pm, the first car left the depot in Muranów, heading for the Mokotów toll gate. By the end of 1883, 80 cars on 11 lines were carrying 10 million passengers a year. The lines were marked by colour, because more than half the inhabitants could not read. The city bought out the first line in 1892 and the whole company in 1899. The horse tram was the first public transport that Warsaw owned outright.
A spark on Krakowskie Przedmieście
Electricity reached Warsaw late. The electrification contract was signed in 1905, and on 26 March 1908 at 9.35am the first line opened: from Krasiński Square along Miodowa, Krakowskie Przedmieście, Królewska and Marszałkowska to Unii Lubelskiej Square. Power came from the tram power station on Przyokopowa Street, which now houses the Warsaw Rising Museum. On 13 April 1917 its main boiler exploded, killing a worker, Piotr Lędziakowski, and for six weeks Warsaw was carried by horses once again. The last horse trams ran in Wola, from Młynarska Street to the Orthodox cemetery; sources date their end to 1914, 1916 or even 1921.
In 1918 the division into first and second class was abolished; in 1919 the city set up Tramwaje Miejskie (Municipal Trams), and in 1920 a Bus Department. The first buses, Saurers and Benzes from Austria and Germany, were promptly commandeered by the army for the Battle of Warsaw. In 1924 tracks were laid to Bródno, but there was no time to electrify them, so ‘trambuses’ were run on them instead: buses coupled back to back, on chassis adapted for rails. In 1928 the company Tramwaje i Autobusy m.st. Warszawy (Trams and Buses of the Capital City of Warsaw) was founded, and the press pointed out that Warsaw had 14 French Somua buses while Paris had more than a thousand.
A passenger’s day: 1930
Morning on Marszałkowska Street. A tram pulls in, bell ringing, with two open platforms. You get on at the back and off at the front; the conductor shuts the doors and signals to the driver. Over his shoulder he carries a bag of counted tickets, in his hand a punch with its own hole pattern, in his pocket 5 złoty for change. The lines have numbers now, not colours. There have been no classes for twelve years, so the clerk and the washerwoman ride in the same car. A single ticket costs a dozen or so groszy; in 1939 it will cost 20. Buses are rarer and dearer: trams carry 90 per cent of passengers, buses 10. By the end of the decade the fleet stands at about 720 cars and 128 buses, and among the drivers is an Olympian, the runner Józef Noji, photographed in 1937 in the cab of car no. 377. The inspector, if one gets on, has a yellow band on his cap. Passengers call him kanarek, the little canary, which is where kanar, today’s slang for a ticket inspector, comes from.
War and reconstruction
On 8 September 1939 air raids cut services back, and on 17 September the trams stopped. They returned in November, under occupation. By the end of 1939 there were 11 lines running, and by September 1940 there were 113 kilometres of track and 635 repaired cars. The Germans reserved the front platforms for themselves, and on 16 April 1942 they launched line ‘0’, for Germans only, from Theatre Square to Unii Lubelskiej Square. From 15 September 1940 Jews were allowed to ride only in cars with yellow plates; trams passed through the ghetto without stopping. In July 1941 the cars were repainted yellow and red, and in 1942 the first women conductors were taken on, replacing men deported to the Reich.
The tram was the only means of transport the Poles had left. People rode on the buffers and on the steps, which the crews somehow failed to notice. You paid the conductor without taking a ticket, and the tickets went back into circulation. Drivers warned passengers of round-ups. In 1942 the Germans arrested 250 conductors and sent them to Treblinka. By July 1944, only 119 of 660 cars were left. On 1 August services were suspended; the cars went into the barricades.
The first post-war tram ran in Praga on 20 June 1945, and on the left bank on 15 September, from a makeshift depot, ‘Solec’, under the Poniatowski Bridge. A week later the first consignment of recovered type K cars, ordered before the war, left Berlin. On 15 January 1946 the first line on standard gauge, 1,435 millimetres, opened; rebuilt Warsaw turned its back on the Russian gauge. On 22 July 1946 a tram crossed the Vistula for the first time since the war.
Army-surplus lorries with benches in the back, marked with the letter M, ran around the city. UNRRA sent 10 British double-decker Leylands; a year later two were left, then one. In 1947 the Municipal Transport Company (Miejskie Zakłady Komunikacyjne, MZK) bought 40 Chausson buses in France. Their arrival was caught on camera, and they were given a depot in one of the Mirów Halls (Hale Mirowskie). From 1946 the capital also had trolleybuses, French Vetras and Soviet YaTBs, with a depot on Myśliwiecka Street.
Sausage, cucumber, Berliet and Ikarus
In autumn 1959 the first Konstal 13N arrived in Warsaw, built in Chorzów on the model of the Czech Tatra T1 and, through it, of the American PCC streetcar. Its rounded body and noisy gearbox earned it the nickname parówka, ‘the sausage’. Within ten years Warsaw had more than 840 of them. The roads belonged to the ogórek, ‘the cucumber’: the Jelcz 043, built under licence from the Škoda 706 RTO, loud, with exhaust fumes seeping out from under the engine cover; the first articulated one was so long that at a photo shoot it ended up driving onto the Barbican. In the early 1970s came French Berliet PR100s with air suspension, comfortable but fragile: on Warsaw’s road surfaces their frames cracked. Jelcz bought the licence in 1972 and from 1975 built its own PR110s.
In 1978 the first Hungarian Ikarus 280s went into service on route 192 in Ursynów. They leaked, and the windows in the rear section froze over, but in the winter of the century, 1978/79, they started when the Berliets would not, and that settled their career. In 1977 MZK had almost 2,200 vehicles. In the 1980s, when fuel and drivers were both in short supply, roadworthy short Ikarus 260s were cut up and turned into articulated buses, until there were no short ones left. The last scheduled Ikarus run in Warsaw took place on 29 November 2013, on route 705.
A passenger’s day: 1970
The stop by the Rotunda. Two sausages coupled into a set come in from Marszałkowska, red and cream, with the line number in a little window above the windscreen. The driver opens the folding doors; there has been no conductor since 1965. You buy your ticket at a kiosk and, on board, put it into the validator, which punches holes in the little piece of card. If you get on in a crush, you pass your ticket forward over people’s heads with a ‘skasuje pan?’ (‘would you punch that for me?’), and it comes back the same way. The inspector is in plain clothes, with an identity card; nobody knows which of the passengers he is. On the W-Z Route (Trasa W-Z, the East-West thoroughfare) below the Old Town, cucumbers pass the new Jelcz 272s, and anyone coming home late can hear a sausage screeching round a curve from a long way off. This tram will run on these same tracks for another 42 years.
Metro, card, Swing
Warsaw had been planning a metro since 1925. In 1950 the government passed a resolution to build it, in 1953 this was scaled back to a trial section, and in 1957 work stopped. It resumed in 1983. On 7 April 1995 a train with passengers on board set off from Kabaty to Politechnika, 11 kilometres beneath Ursynów and Mokotów. In its first year the metro carried 20 million people; in 2014, 147 million. In 1998 it reached Centrum, in 2001 Ratusz, and on 25 October 2008 Młociny. In 2015 the central section of the second line opened, with the first tunnel under the Vistula.
Above ground, the Public Transport Authority (Zarząd Transportu Miejskiego, ZTM) was set up on 1 September 1992, and on 1 March 1994 MZK was split into Tramwaje Warszawskie (Warsaw Trams) and Miejskie Zakłady Autobusowe (the Municipal Bus Company). Since 1996 the heritage line T has run through the city at weekends in summer. On 29 May 2009 Tramwaje Warszawskie signed a ‘contract of the century’ with Pesa of Bydgoszcz for 186 low-floor Swings. The first arrived on 19 May 2010, and on 31 December 2012 the last sausages pulled into the depot after 53 years of service. Then came the Jazzes, and from 2021 Korean Hyundai 140Ns from a 123-car contract. In 2024 new routes opened along Kasprzaka Street, along Gagarina Street and out to Wilanów.
A passenger’s day: 2000
Centrum, the corner of Marszałkowska and Aleje Jerozolimskie. Below ground, the metro has terminated at Centrum for two years now, so to get to Żoliborz you still take the tram. Boxy 105Nas rule the tracks, yellow and red, with the number in a black frame; among them, fewer and fewer sausages. Articulated Ikaruses glide along Aleje Jerozolimskie, cream and red or already in the new livery, with a concertina in the middle that lets the wind through in winter. The ticket is paper, and you punch it in the validator by the door; in a year’s time the city will bring in the plastic Warsaw City Card (Warszawska Karta Miejska). The inspector is still in plain clothes, with an ID badge, often working in a pair. At the stop, a paper timetable hangs in a glass case, and if you want to know whether the bus is coming, you look in the direction it ought to come from. The phone in your pocket is for making calls.
Twenty-five years later the same passenger checks an app to see where their tram is, pays with a ticket on their phone, and recognises the inspector by the graphite suit, compulsory since November 2017. The city has two metro lines, electric buses, and trams from Bydgoszcz and Korea. The toad from Inżynierska Street, the sausage from Chorzów and the Ikarus from Budapest stand in the depots as heritage vehicles and come out onto the same streets on line T or for the Night of Museums.
Bibliography
- Tramwaje Warszawskie, ‘Historia warszawskich tramwajów’ (History of Warsaw’s trams, timeline)
- Aleksandra Polańska, ‘Tramwaj konny w Warszawie’ (The horse tram in Warsaw), Muzeum Warszawy (PDF)
- dzieje.pl (PAP), ‘150 lat temu w Warszawie ruszył tramwaj konny’ (150 years ago the horse tram started running in Warsaw)
- Blog Tramwajów Warszawskich (Warsaw Trams blog), ‘Konduktorzy i konduktorki’ (Conductors, men and women)
- Miejskie Zakłady Autobusowe w Warszawie, ‘Poruszamy Warszawę. I tak od stu lat!’ (We keep Warsaw moving, and have done for a hundred years)
- Autoblog Spider’s Web, ‘Trambusy, rzeź Ikarusów 260 i inne perypetie warszawskich autobusów’ (Trambuses, the butchering of the Ikarus 260s and other tribulations of Warsaw’s buses; interview)
- Muzeum Warszawy, ‘Pieszo, tramwajem, rikszą, czyli komunikacja w Warszawie w czasie okupacji’ (On foot, by tram, by rickshaw: getting around Warsaw under the occupation)
- dzieje.pl (PAP), ‘Pożegnanie tramwajów 13N w Warszawie’ (Farewell to the 13N trams in Warsaw)
- dzieje.pl (PAP), ‘Kultowy Jelcz PR110 wraca na trasę w Krakowie’ (The cult Jelcz PR110 returns to the road in Kraków)
- Jacek Petrus, ‘20 lat metra w Warszawie’ (20 years of the Warsaw metro), Transport Miejski i Regionalny 7/2015 (PDF)
- NaKolei.pl, ‘Stroje pracowników ZTM w Warszawie: od 1 listopada kontrolera biletów poznamy po mundurku’ (ZTM staff uniforms in Warsaw: from 1 November you will know a ticket inspector by the uniform), 2017
- Omnibusy konne w Warszawie 1822 do 1941 (Horse-drawn omnibuses in Warsaw, 1822 to 1941; hobbyist compilation, to be verified)