Trams and Trolleys

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

Geoff wrote in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPFGU-OTChatter/message/39541>:
>
> --- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "anne_t_squires" <tfaucette6387@> wrote:

> Tramway=street car/trolley car?

I once spent a day looking up the words 'trolley' and 'tram', and they basically mean whatever the speaker wants them to mean. It is widely said that some electric-powered vehicles are called trolleys as short for 'trolley car' (on rails) or 'trolley bus' (on rubber tires on the road), because 'trolley' is that long metal stick on top of them that draws electricity from that overhead wire mentioned by Carol.

There are other electric trains which draw their power from a 'third rail', a wire on the same level as the track rather than overhead. Unless they are called 'heavy rail' and the overhead ones are called 'light rail', I don't know terminology to distinguish them, but I thought 'light rail' means it runs on the streets with automobiles and 'heavy rail' means it is subway or elevated or on a dedicated railroad right-of-way. 

However, San Francisco's trademark cable cars, often called trolleys, are not electric trains. They are mechanically pulled by an underground metal cable (chain). They hook onto the chain at one end and unhook at the other end, where they re-hook onto the chain on other direction. I believe it is the same chain going both directions, because it is a loop/circle of chain.

And a million companies offer gas or diesel powered, rubber tires on the road, 'trolleys' that earned that name by being open-sided and having a paint job reminiscent of a San Francisco cable car. Other than the cable car paint job, I would call those 'trams', like the parking lot trams, a gas or diesel powered front end that pulls several open-sided passenger cars, all on rubber tires on the parking lot asphalt, that travel a loop route through the distant edges of the parking lot to the front gate of the attraction, so people who parked distantly don't have to walk the whole way.

But it seems roughly that Brits say 'tram' when I would say 'trolley' and say 'trolley' when I would say 'tram' (and also, which is canon related, when I would say 'grocery cart', 'baggage cart', or 'vending cart', which is human powered and not on rails).