The Electric Railway Consortium Lodz (KEL) won a tender for construction the line.

Julius Kunitzer signed the contract in St. Petersburg in front of Nicholas II on behalf of the KEL.

Initially, there were two fairly short tram lines that both served the city centre area; by February 1899 their number was doubled.

Trams quickly paid off the cost of line construction, and the project brought considerable profits to its shareholders, whereas traffic in the center of the city decreased.

After World War II, the network of suburban and urban trams was nationalized and transferred to the Miejskie Przedsiębiorstwo Komunikacyjne – Łódź [pl] (MPK Łódź), which, as the city expanded, expanded the number and length of both urban and suburban lines.

Today, the cemetery plot where old tram drivers would have been laid to rest is occupied by the Lodz University Press and a language school.

[citation needed] In 2008, a teenager, described by his teachers as an "electronic genius", was arrested after using a remote control device he had assembled to cause several derailments and other accidents in the Łódź tramway system.