Pennsylvania Trolley Museum

Old Trolleys Get New Home

May 15, 2005

After 51 years, The Pennsylvania Trolley Museum in Chartiers finally looks like a museum.

Museum officials and volunteers have opened a $2 million Trolley Display Building that presents 30 trolley cars in two spacious corridors, with display stanchions providing histories of each car.

Before the display building opened May 6, the museum, just off North Main Street in Arden, had a limited number of trolleys on display in a cramped 9,000-square-foot trolley barn. A large number of trolleys had to be placed in storage.

"This is a considerably better viewing experience," museum Executive Director Scott Becker said. "This is three times the size of our original display building.

"Two-thirds of the museum is in this building."

The fee to tour the museum and old trolley barn is $6 for adults, $5 for seniors and $4 for children 3 to 15. An additional fee of $2 for adults and $1 for children now will be charged to tour the new display building.

The tour will take 21/2 hours and include archival displays, a video, a tour of the old barn and a trolley ride before the grand finale, a tour through the new 28,000-square-foot Trolley Display Building.

Besides impressing visitors, it will preserve trolleys.

The building has no windows, so paint jobs are safe. Humidity is controlled to prevent condensation, which causes rusting. The building is equipped with a sprinkler system inside, with hydrants outside the building. It also is insulated.

"The cars will not get any worse than they are now," Becker said. "These cars are being preserved."

But the most immediate advantage is the expansive view of the trolley cars with display stanchions providing entertaining stories of each car and how each made its way to the museum.

Inside the front door, visitors are welcomed by the museum's oldest car, a car drawn by horses and mules that operated into the 20th century. It stands side by side with the newest, a 1988 trolley that was one of the last the Port Authority of Allegheny County built. "It looks like the day it was new," Becker said.

Three trolleys were converted into homes, but not mobile homes. An interurban West Penn trolley car that traveled among Uniontown, Connellsville and Greensburg become a home in Jeanette in 1952, "an early version of a single wide," Becker said, jokingly. "It was a home longer than it was a trolley car."

One retired trolley became the Dew Drop Inn in Ellwood City, which straddles the border of Beaver and Lawrence counties. It still has the bar and a door leading to the men's room.

Trolley conditions range from fully restored to motley. "When we get them, they're not always pretty," Becker said.

There are three snow sweepers, including one from Beaver County. One has had its brush recaned with bamboo. Another is a large freight trolley. A milk trolley holds the record for remaining in service for 81 years, but not all hauling milk. "They got their money out of this one," Becker said.

The heaviest is a 54-ton trolley locomotive. The museum also features an electric car built in 1890 and rebuilt in 1897, making it perhaps the oldest electric car in existence in the United States.

A picnic car from Rio de Janeiro, built in 1911, came to America on a coffee freighter.

Some of the museum's trolley cars have grand tales of survival. A Jersey Shore and Antes Fort car built in 1906 and a sister car were retired in 1925 and transformed into a house, chained side by side to a tree beside a creek.

There they remained until Hurricane Agnes' flood waters swept them two miles downstream in June 1972. One came to rest beside a railroad bridge.

While the property owner was preparing to destroy it, a trolley enthusiast saw it while canoeing and made quick arrangements to salvage it. It arrived at the museum in 1999 with many of its ornate windows intact. "By rights, this has no business existing," Becker said.

The stanchions, he said, turn the museum into the trolley version of the television show, "This Old House."

"Those stanchions are what makes this a museum," Becker said. "There are 30 different stories in this building."

David Templeton — Pittsburgh Post-Gazette