The Ballarat Tramway Museum is working to reinvent Ballarat’s historic floral tram.
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The decorated tram will operate during the 2019 Balarat Begonia Festival.
It will be the first time a floral tram will be used at the Ballarat Begonia Festival since the 1930s.
Trams covered with colourful wax paper flowers were used during the 1938 and 1939 Ballarat Floral Festivals.
Community members and museum volunteers have been working together to create thousands of colourful flowers using plastic that would otherwise go to waste.
We have already made just over 2000 flowers.
- Peter Waugh, Ballarat Tramway Museum
Seth Almaro, 5 and Willow Almario, 2, helped make flowers at a workshop on Sunday.
Ballarat Tramway Museum marketing manager Peter Waugh said the group chose the project hoping more people would become involved with the tramway.
“The response has been unbelievable so far. We have already made just over 2000 flowers,” he said.
Many groups including kindergartens, workplaces and community centres have offered to either collect plastic bottles or make flowers.
Mr Waugh estimates at least 3000 or 4000 flowers will be needed to decorate the tram, but up to 8000 could be used.
“We discovered ways to make plastic flowers on the internet. That got us into the whole recycled and re-purposed scheme. We are hoping the panels we will attach the flowers to will also be made out of recycled plastic containers,” he said.
“The flowers are really bright and colourful. It will be visually stunning when this tram appears.”
Ballarat Tramway Museum volunteers are hoping to have enough flowers to begin decorating the tram by the end of December.
Information about how to get involved is available at the Ballarat Tramway Museum website.
The next flower making workshop will be held on October 2.
Volunteers are asking for collections of grocery plastic bag, plastic bottles with lids, vegetable plastic bags, plastic ties, acrylic wool, string and waterproof ribbon.
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