The Brisbane Tramway Museum Society was founded in 1968, the moment it became clear the Brisbane City Council meant to close the system down. There was an urgency to it; trams that were scrapped would be gone forever, and the volunteers were racing the cutting torches. In 1972 a site at Ferny Grove was secured, and after eight years of weekend labour the museum opened in June 1980. The collection that survived is substantial: 25 trams, 24 of them Brisbane's own, plus a single Sydney car for good measure. There are also two single-deck trolley-buses, built in Wolverhampton, England, on Sunbeam chassis and given Brisbane-made bodies, a reminder that for a while the city ran on overhead wires of more than one kind.

The fleet reads like a roll call of a vanished daily life. The oldest runner is No. 47, a "California Combination" or "Matchbox" tram from 1901, with open and enclosed sections so passengers could choose breeze or shelter. There is a ten-bench "Toastrack," open to the air on every side; a stubby centre-aisle car nicknamed the "Baby Dreadnought"; and elegant "Dropcentre" cars that sat low to the road for easy boarding. The newest, No. 554, carries a darker story in its timber. It is one of the "Phoenix" trams, rebuilt by the council in the 1960s from the wreckage of cars destroyed in a catastrophic depot fire, and it entered service in 1964. A selection of these veterans takes passengers down the demonstration track each Sunday, weather permitting, the way they always stopped for the weather.

That fire shadows the whole story. On the night of 28 September 1962, one of Brisbane's fiercest blazes tore through the Paddington tram depot and destroyed 67 trams, roughly a fifth of the entire fleet, in a single night. The council rebuilt some as the Phoenix cars, but the disaster handed momentum to those who already wanted the trams gone. Within seven years the network was finished. The museum, in a sense, is the long answer to that fire: a deliberate act of rescue set against an accidental act of destruction. To watch No. 554 glide past today is to see a survivor twice over, once from the flames, and once from the scrapyard.

What makes Ferny Grove special is that almost nothing here is a replica. The depot sheds are built from bays salvaged from the old Ipswich Road tram depot. The substation that feeds direct current to the overhead wires was assembled from equipment pulled out of Brisbane's original tramway substations. An elevated signal cabin that once stood at a Fortitude Valley street corner has been carried here and preserved. Even the short track is genuine Brisbane practice, laid in solid mass concrete rather than on sleepers, and outside the main shed sits a rare three-way set of points rescued from the Light Street depot. Inside are the conductors' tickets, the uniforms, and the distinctive kepi caps the crews wore into the 1960s. It is less a display than a working fragment of the city, reassembled piece by piece by people who refused to let it disappear.