I always have a good time in Vienna, the gorgeous, self-satisfied, monstrously overwrought imperial core of an empire that no longer exists: a gloss of modern-day tourist nostalgia layered on postwar trauma layered on fascist mid-century horrors layered on even worse postwar trauma layered on centuries and centuries of further fascinating history.* Last week, for the first time, I actually went to its tram museum, which was an unexpected treat for both personal and OUBLIETTE reasons. I (and my long-suffering partner) were ready for a big hangar full of red trams which I would run excitedly across, which is broadly what we got, but among its splendid displays (half with English translations and the rest easily translatable with phone cameras, a modern form of witchcraft) was a section on the tram system in the Great War.

Virtually everything that could move cargo (in those days, principally horses, with a few steam and motor lorries) was requisitioned for military service, leaving a city of two million reliant on its passenger tram system for logistics. Trams carried grain, coal, potatoes; some served as mobile hospitals and one photo shows a refrigerated car for moving bodies to the morgue.

The system itself gradually fell apart during the war (the coal that powered the tram network was also needed for heating, electricity, and everything else) but without it Vienna would likely have suffered far more.

It did not at all not escape me that, as I’m writing a comic involving a public logistics system being pressed into passenger service, I’m reading about a passenger service being pressed into doing logistics. Systems adapting and eroding under pressure and neglect. I would recommend the Vienna tram museum to anyone (there’s also a huge hangar full of red trams to enjoy.)

* Much of which is represented in museums by an immense number of portraits of men in wigs so stupid it makes it hard to engage with them as real people, which is a terrible shame.