To improve the responsiveness, system efficiency and operation economy of a fuel cell/supercar-pacitor/lithium-ion battery hybrid energy storage system for trams, a multi-threshold energy management strategy for the hybrid energy storage system based on the operation states of trains is proposed. First, according to the actual operation states oftrains, different working conditions of tram driving are divided and multiple thresholds are set, so as to realize multi-media and multi-scenario power exchange and achieve real-time control of power allocation among energy sources of the energy storage system. At the same time, according to the physical characteristics of each energy storage medium, the supercapacitor is set to start as priority, thus reducing the number of cycles of lithium-ion batteries and extending the service life of the energy storage system. Second, the life cycle cost of the hybrid energy storage system is taken as an optimization objective, and the power of the energy storage system, energy demand and state-of-charge (SOC) of the lithium-ion battery and supercapacitor are used as constraints, so as to optimize the capacity configuration of the energy storage system and obtain the optimized capacity configuration parameters. Finally, the proposed strategy is compared with the fixed-threshold strategy and traditional equivalent consumption minimization strategy (ECMS). Results show that the proposed strategy is more reasonable in terms of power allocation of the hybrid energy storage system, and it can improve the system response speed. The SOC offset ranges of lithium-ion battery and supercapacitor are significantly improved. The hydrogen consumption is reduced by 1.47 kg and 0.81 kg compared with those under the fixed-threshold and ECMS strategies, respectively, indicating that the fuel economy is improved.