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Trams and trolleybuses in North Korea

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionMay 8, 2026
Entity authorityQ7833207 ↗
Source-derived summary

Trams and trolleybuses in North Korea are forms of public transportation for North Koreans to travel around in urban centres given the fuel shortages and lack of access to cars for average citizens.

Very few details are known about these trolleybuses and trams due to the country's isolation. Pyongyang, Wonsan and Chongjin are the only cities known to have tramways.

For a full list of trolleybus systems in North Korea, see List of trolleybus systems in North Korea.

Trams

Trolleybuses

The Pyongyang trolleybus system has been operating since 1962, with a large fleet serving several routes. Due to the closed nature of North Korea, the existence of trolleybus networks in other North Korean cities was generally unknown outside the country for many years, but it is now known that around 12 to 15 other cities also possess trolleybus systems, among them Sariwon, Wonsan, Chongjin and Pyongsong. A few other places have very small (in some cases only one or two vehicles) systems for transporting workers from a housing area to a nearby coal mine or other industrial site—or at least did at some time within recent years, such as the city of Sangnong. Trolleybuses include both imported and locally made vehicles but are mostly locally made, converted or rebuilt. There are a few local manufacturers of trolleybuses.

The trolleybus network in Wonsan was revived during 2018–19, Sinuiju in 2020, and a new system opened in Manpo in 2019.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Trams and trolleybuses in North Korea” as wikimedia list article. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1962, 2018, 2020, 2019—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. The account is most persuasive where Trams, trolleybuses and North can be independently traced.
Editorial analysis

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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as wikimedia list article. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7833207. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1962, 2018, 2020 and 2019.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Trams and trolleybuses in North Korea” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.