As buses and automobiles began to replace streetcars more than a half century ago, a small group of people with a dream came together to form an organization dedicated to collecting, preserving, exhibiting and interpreting the historical significance of urban and interurban mass transportation.
The Pennsylvania Trolley Museum has evolved over the past 50 years from a handful of volunteers and a few trolleys to over 600 members and currently 45 trolleys preserved a its museum in Washington, Pennsylvania. It is unique in that visitors actually experience the Trolley Era first hand by riding the Museum's beautifully restored streetcars for a scenic four-mile ride into the past.
Pittsburgh Railways Company M1 at the Manchester car house in 1947. Built circa 1890 by Pullman's Palace Car Co., M1 may be the oldest electric streetcar in existence today. It was the first car acquired by the museum.
In the beginning ...
During the early 1940s the museum's founders realized that older streetcars were in danger of disappearing without a trace. After World War II, interest in a preservation effort grew as changes in the American lifestyle forced many streetcar lines into oblivion. In 1949 the organization acquired a small four-wheeled trolley that was about to be scrapped Pittsburgh Railways Company provided storage for that car and two others that were subsequently acquired until a site could be found.
In 1953, the group formally organized as a nonprofit corporation. They purchased a 2,000-foot section of railway line of the Pittsburgh Railways Company's recently abandoned Washington interurban trolley line near the Washington County Home in Chartiers Township. On February 7, 1954, the museum's first three cars were moved to the site. During the next nine years museum volunteers constructed storage tracks and a car house to protect the trolley cars, rebuilt nearly a half mile of track, and set up a diesel generator to provide the 550-volt overhead power necessary to operate the cars. The museum opened to the public in June 1963, providing visitors with short demonstration trolley rides and an informal tour of the car house.
Since that time ...
Over the next three decades the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum added a gift shop- museum area, a restoration shop to provide additional indoor storage for the trolley collection and an area for trolley car restoration The Museum's Visitor Education Center was a second addition to the restoration shop building and opened to the public in November 1993. This allows the public to begin their visit in a pleasant, climate-controlled area housing exhibits, restrooms, a theatre/classroom and a gift shop.
It wasn't until 1993 that the Museum hired its first full-time Executive Director and in the years since, its interpretive efforts, growth, educational outreach programs and visibility have improved greatly. To more accurately reflect the scope of the Museum's collection and establish a fully descriptive public identity, both the Museum and the corporation were renamed Pennsylvania Trolley Museum. In 1999, a professional Educator was hired to improve the educational outreach to the community. In its two years of existence, the educational outreach program has grown to serve more than 6000 students of all ages from the western Pennsylvania and nearby West Virginia and Ohio areas.