Pelotas is a river port near the south end of Lagoa dos Patos, 60 km from Rio Grande, 270 km from Porto Alegre [see state map], 130 km from the Uruguayan border, and about 5,000 km south of Brazil's northernmost tramway systems in Manaus and Belém. The city's population was 30,000 in 1910 and is about 350,000 today.
Like Rio Grande and Porto Alegre, Pelotas had an animal-powered street railway before it was reached by steam railroad - in this case, 11 years earlier. Domingo Rodrigues Cordeiro secured a franchise on 3 February 1870 to build a tramway in Pelotas, formed the Ferro Carril e Cais de Pelotas and opened the first line on 9 November 1873: from Praça Pedro II (later called Praça da República, today called Praça Coronel Pedro Osório) down Rua Imperador (today called Rua Félix da Cunha) to the PORTO [see city map]. A second line, from Praça Pedro II north on Rua São Miguel (today called Rua 15 de Novembro) to the CATEDRAL, opened soon after, and a third line, west on Rua Marechal Floriano across the canal to FRAGATA, in 1874. The latter route was extended a few kilometers to PARQUE (Parque Pelotense, later renamed Parque Souza Soares) when that park was dedicated in February 1883. Pelotas horsetrams ran on narrow gauge tracks.
At the advent of World War I, the 31 passenger cars and seven freight cars of the Ferro Carril e Caes de Pelotas were still being pulled by mules. Tram lines in Porto Alegre, the state capital, had been electrified in 1908, and those in nearby Rio Grande in 1912.
Parque Souza Soares was a large area that was once the location of the Souza Soares family estate, a pharmaceutical plant, homes for its employees, a school, chapel, restaurant, recreation area, gymnasium, skating rink and a lake with rowboats. No trace of it remains today [see the same spot in 2011 and article by Ivelise Alves Nunes noted in the BIBLIOGRAPHY].
Not much is known of Pelotas tramway development after 1940. The Anuario Estatístico of Brazil's Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística [see BIBLIOGRAPHY, below] reported 28 trams operating on 25 km of track in Pelotas throughout the 1940s. But there was a steady decline in passengers carried: 8.8 million in 1948, 6.8 million in 1949, 4.5 million in 1950 and 3.2 million in 1951 [the date of IBGE's last report on Pelotas].
[No author or publisher] Planta da Cidade de Pelotas - 1909. Scale 1:5,000. Large street map shows track detail of the animal tramway system.
Brazil. Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística. Anuario Estatístico do Brasil: Meios deTransporte, Ferro-Carris de Uso Público, 1912-59. Rio de Janeiro, 1917-59. Annual reports of Brazilian tramways: system length, fleet size, passengers carried, etc. – but only of state capitals after 1951.
"Rio Grande do Sul" in Brazil-Ferro-Carril (Rio de Janeiro), 13/8/1913. Arrival at Pelotas of materials for the construction and operation of the electric tramway.
Brill Magazine (Philadelphia), 6/1921. An article on Birney streetcars includes two photographs and a drawing of the Pelotas model, pp. 342-343.
Intendência Municipal de Pelotas. Relatório, 1922. A 7-page section on "Tracção, luz e força" describes the development of the electric plant. Good details of the tramway, including how the double-deckers were reduced to one floor. But no mention of their origin.
Fernando Luiz Osório. A Cidade de Pelotas. Rio de Janeiro, 1962. A long paragraph on pp. 220-221 describes the development of the animal tramway.
Lizabel Gonçalves Dias da Costa, Gerência Regional de Pelotas. História da energia elétrica no município de Pelotas. Pelotas, 1976. Development of the city's electric power. Short paragraph on the tramway, which says that there were five Brush cars and five double-deckers - but no mention of their origin.
Ivelise Alves Nunes. "Cultura: Injeção de ânimo no resgate da história" in Diário Popular (Pelotas), 9 XII 2007. The Viscount of Souza Soares, the development of the pharmaceutical industry in Pelotas, and the construction and destruction of the fantastic Parque Souza Soares.
Rogério Franck da Silveira. Fotos do meu vô. Flickr page displays four photographs taken by Alberto Franck, Sr. Franck da Silveira's grandfather, of passengers attacking Pelotas trams during the protests of the 1930s.
The author would like to thank the late J. H. Price of Cambridge (England), the Leicestershire Record Office in Leicester (England), Wanderley Duck of São Paulo, Henrique Carlos de Morais and Rogério Franck da Silveira of Pelotas, and Carmen Souza Soares Reis of West Palm Beach for the valuable information and materials that they provided for this page.