Tram Car Emoji

The tram car emoji (🚋) is a tram or streetcar shown from the side. It's the companion to 🚊 tram (front view). Both are the same vehicle family, the difference is just the angle. Approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010) as U+1F68B TRAM CAR.

🚋 carries a specifically older, more historic energy than 🚊. Most platforms render it as a vintage-looking streetcar, often with wooden paneling or a single door. It's the emoji you'd pick for New Orleans' St. Charles line, San Francisco's F-Line heritage streetcars, or Lisbon's 1936 Remodelado trams. Where 🚊 is the modern tram on its tracks, 🚋 is the historic streetcar you'd ride for the experience.

Three main patterns. One, heritage-streetcar tourism: "🚋 on St. Charles," "🚋 the F-Market in SF," "🚋 ride in Porto." Two, vintage urban aesthetic posts, sepia-toned tram photography, slow-travel carousels, quaint-old-city content. Three, as an alternative to 🚊 when the specific look of the side view matters. It's used less than 🚊 overall but has a devoted audience in urbanist and travel-photography circles. Often chained with 🚋🚋 to represent multi-car streetcars.

Historic streetcars, the kind 🚋 evokes, built most major cities. Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco, New Orleans, Chicago, all had extensive streetcar networks by 1900. San Francisco's PCC (Presidents' Conference Committee) streetcars, designed in the 1930s, ran across 30+ US cities. Then came the rip-out era: by 1960 most US cities had replaced streetcars with buses. Two cities kept their heritage systems continuously: New Orleans (St. Charles line, opened 1835, the oldest continuously operating streetcar line in the world) and San Francisco (F-Line, not continuous but restored vintage cars). Portland brought streetcars back in 2001. Europe kept theirs running through the 20th century intact. The 🚋 emoji arrived in Unicode 6.0 (2010), officially denoting this specific side view of the streetcar, whether vintage or modern.

1. 1835New Orleans' St. Charles streetcar line opens, the world's oldest continuously operating streetcar.
2. 1924Perley Thomas streetcars introduced in New Orleans. Still in service today.
3. 1936PCC streetcars designed by a US industry committee; adopted across 30+ US cities.
4. 1947"A Streetcar Named Desire" by Tennessee Williams premieres, winning the 1948 Pulitzer.
5. 1995San Francisco's F-Market & Wharves line opens using restored vintage streetcars from Milan, Philadelphia, and other cities.
6. 2001Portland Streetcar opens as first new US streetcar in decades.
7. 2010🚋 approved in Unicode 6.0 as U+1F68B TRAM CAR.
8. 2023New Orleans' St. Charles Line celebrates 188 years of continuous operation.

In the US, 🚋 reads as "heritage streetcar", New Orleans, San Francisco, and the handful of revival systems. New Orleans' St. Charles Line is the world's oldest continuously operating streetcar system, running green Perley Thomas cars from 1923-1924. In Europe, "tram car" and "tram" are used interchangeably; 🚋 just means "tram from the side." In Russia and Eastern Europe, side-view streetcar imagery is extremely common (many trams in Prague, Budapest, Warsaw, Kyiv are photographed from the platform side). In Japan, trams are mostly gone except a few cities like Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Sapporo, 🚋 is used for their heritage-tram experiences.

• •New Orleans' St. Charles Line has run continuously since 1835, the oldest operating streetcar system on earth. The green Perley Thomas cars date to 1923-1924 and are still in daily service.
• •Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire" named the Desire Line, a real New Orleans streetcar route that stopped running in 1948, one year after the play premiered. The play made the streetcar globally iconic at the exact moment it was disappearing.
• •San Francisco's F-Line runs restored vintage streetcars from 15+ different cities, each in its original paint. Milan's orange cars, Philadelphia's PCC cars, and Newark's blue ones all share the same tracks.
• •Philadelphia has the largest operating PCC streetcar fleet still in service. The SEPTA Route 15 runs 18 restored PCC cars across 8 miles of track. The design dates to 1936.
• •Lisbon's Remodelado streetcars date to 1936. They're still in service on Tram 28 and other historic routes, sharing tracks with modern low-floor cars. Tourists aggressively prefer the old ones.
• •Portland's 2001 streetcar was the first new US streetcar system in decades. The city treated it as urban-planning signal as much as transit, an announcement that car-centric American cities could course-correct.
• •Memphis' Main Street Trolley uses replica Melbourne W-class cars, chosen specifically for their vintage aesthetic to complement the Beale Street district.