The Yokohama City Tram, affectionately known as the "Chin Chin Train," served as a vital means of transportation for the city's residents for approximately 70 years from 1904 to 1972.
The Yokohama City Tram Museum has seven of these trams preserved and exhibited exactly as they were at the time. In addition, there are historical exhibits that teach about the development of Yokohama and the history of transportation, a tram simulator where you can experience driving a tram, O-gauge and N-gauge railway dioramas, and a precious collection of handmade O-gauge model trains, making this a facility where children and adults alike can learn while having fun.
Inside the museum, seven streetcars, stop signs, and paving stones have been preserved in their original form, recreating the "time" and "atmosphere" of the time when the streetcars were in operation.
The history exhibition corner has the theme of "Yokohama's Development and Transportation," and provides easy-to-understand explanations of the reclamation of Yoshida Shinden, which was the foundation of Yokohama's development, the opening of the Port of Yokohama, the Great Kanto Earthquake, postwar reconstruction, the heyday of the city tram and its abolition, the six major projects that formed the basis of Yokohama's subsequent urban planning, and the transition to the subway.
