Tramway track is used on tramways or light rail operations. Grooved rails (or girder rails) are often used in order to make street running feasible. Like standard rail tracks, tram tracks consist of two parallel steel rails.

Tram rails can be placed in several surfaces, such as with standard rails on sleepers like railway tracks, or with grooved rails on concrete sleepers into street surfaces (pavement) for street running. Another environmentally-friendly or ecologically-friendly alternative is to lay tracks into grass turf surfaces; this is known as grassed track (or track in a lawn), first used in Liverpool in 1924.

The first tramways were laid in 1832 in New York by John Stephenson, to assist horses pulling buses through dirt roads, especially in wet weather when muddy. By laying rails, a horse could easily pull a load of 10 tonnes rather than 1 tonne on a dirt road. The evolution of street tramway tracks paralleled the development from horse power to mechanical, especially electric power. In a dirt road, the rails needed a foundation, usually a mass concrete raft. Highway authorities often made tramway companies pave the rest of the road, usually with granite or similar stone blocks, an extra cost.