The Tyne and Wear Metro is an overground and underground light rail rapid transit system serving Newcastle upon Tyne, Gateshead, North Tyneside, South Tyneside, and the City of Sunderland (together forming Tyne and Wear). The owners Nexus have described it as "Britain’s first light rapid transit system". The system is currently both owned and operated by the Tyne and Wear Passenger Transport Executive (Nexus), thus is fully under public ownership and operation.
The Metro was originally conceived of during the early 1970s, incorporating much of the earlier infrastructure formerly used by the Tyneside Electrics suburban network, with some elements dating back as far as 1834. Construction work began in 1974, the majority of this activity being centred on the building of new tunnels and bridges that linked with several preexisting railway lines that were converted. In parallel, a purpose-built fleet of Metrocars was procured. The first section of the Tyne and Wear Metro was opened during August 1980, and construction of the original network was completed in March 1984. Early on, Metro operations were integrated with local bus services, although this practice ended with the deregulation of the buses during the mid-1980s.