This paper describes a comparative study of two control schemes for the energy management system of a hybrid tramway powered by a Polymer Electrolyte Membrane (PEM) Fuel Cell (FC) and an Ni-MH battery. The hybrid system was designed for a real surface tramway of 400 kW. It is composed of a PEM FC system with a unidirectional dc/dc boost converter (FC converter) and a rechargeable Ni-MH battery with a bidirectional dc/dc converter (battery converter), both of which are coupled to a traction dc bus. The PEM FC and Ni-MH battery models were designed from commercially available components. The function of the two control architectures was to effectively distribute the power of the electrical sources. One of these control architectures was a state machine control strategy, based on eight states. The other was a cascade control strategy which was used to validate the results obtained. The simulation results for the real driving cycle of the tramway reflected the optimal performance of the control systems compared in this study. (C) 2010 Professor T. Nejat Veziroglu. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.