On Tuesday, the District Department of Transportation released the above images of the city’s three streetcars being loaded up for shipping. That’s good news, considering D.C. taxpayers have been paying to store the streetcars in the Czech Republic for over four years now. DDOT says these images show the streetcars being loaded onto flatbed trucks in the Czech Republic and then arriving in Hamburg, Germany. They are expected to make it to D.C., by ship, in mid-December.

But as with seemingly all things streetcars, it’s once again our job to warn you not to get too excited. As Tommy Wells’ office rightly points out, “there’s still a lot of work left before they are running up and down H Street and Benning Road.” The city is busy working on laying the tracks for these two lines, but they aren’t expected to be up and running until 2012 at the earliest, and even that date assumes that all the relevant zoning and funding issues get sorted out in a timely manner.

DDOT took some heat for having spent $10 million on these streetcars so many years ago without any place to put them, so where exactly are they going to put them now? They’ll be stored at the Greenbelt rail yard, DDOT spokesperson John Lisle said, and DDOT will pay WMATA to maintain them there. Sounds like a good enough plan, but if that was always a possibility, couldn’t the city have moved the streetcars to Greenbelt years ago?