The question that won the latest round of reader voting sent me on a quest, so thank you, Chris Gaber.
He asked: “What was the farthest you could travel by street car in each direction at the height of the Port Authority’s history?” It was the winning question with 53% of the votes.
The answer — provided by the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum in Chartiers, Washington County — is: In 1964, when PAT was founded, the longest trolley ride possible (with a transfer) would have been Library to Wilmerding, a 27-mile trip. You would have taken 35 Shannon-Library to Downtown and then transferred to an 87 Ardmore.
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The question got me thinking … I had never visited the museum that is just a 40-minute ride, give or take, from Downtown Pittsburgh.
Hometown Tourist time!
There is a lot to see. The museum and neighbor to the Washington County Fairgrounds houses some 60 cars and is divided into 5 acres at the West Campus and the 30 acres now in development at the East Campus, plus a trolley line to Arden. And it is nearly ready for an overhaul, with more than $12 million collected toward a $13.5 million goal. Plans are for a new multipurpose visitors center, including rooms for classes or parties, a full-scale virtual-reality simulator, and friendlier grounds for parking, picnics and a playground.
That project is expected to be up and running in two years.
I needed to see what I had been missing and how far the museum, founded in 1954, had come before it took the planned leap into the future.
With more than 31,000 visitors annually in the past five years, the museum is overdue for the expansion and updates, says executive director Scott Becker.
It was a humid Saturday morning in May, before the hours expanded to weekdays, when I first walked into the current visitors center, where you are greeted by a life-size photograph of Fred Rogers sitting on the steps of a museum trolley and looking up at its “Pittsburgh” sign while leaning on a model of his own iconic Neighborhood of Make-Believe trolley. He had visited in 1983 to film an episode of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” in which he is given a chance to man the controls of a real streetcar.
The photo is from the old Pittsburgh Regional Airport that closed in 1992.
“When I came to Pittsburgh in ’91 for the first time, this is what I saw coming off the plane,” says Mr. Becker, my guide for the day. “When they closed the airport, they gave it to us, because it was taken here at the Trolley Museum.”
The center also includes a sign of things to come: You can take a virtual reality turn as a driver, controlling the streetcar’s breaks and speed, but watch out for that cow! … There’s more of that in the museum’s future, even as it continues its mission to preserve the past.
The day started as we joined a tour aboard a 1911 “breezer” — an open-air trolley — getting a good idea of the scope and landscape of the museum on the 4-mile Arden loop. The tracks wind past industrial sites, the wooded area along Arden Creek and right up to the entrance of the Washington County Fairgrounds. The museum provides shuttles from nearby parking to events such as the Washington County Agricultural Fair, Aug. 11-18.
The trolley returned to home base, and we walked through the building that houses some working trolleys and works in progress. Volunteers come for the love of the machines of their youth and give thousands of hours to restoring and maintaining cars from all over the country.
“We not only preserve the cars; we preserved the skills,” Mr. Becker says, pointing out the “hot riveting technique” used on a streetcar, before welding was a thing.
Dave Hamley of Rostraver in Westmoreland County, a recent retiree from the transportation company Bombardier, was working on the 1923 car, which was getting an overhaul that will include a canvas roof.
The car was a gift from Lackawanna County in 2005. The trolley where Mister Rogers was pictured “is the double-end, two-control version of this single-engine model,” says Mr. Becker.
Stuff like that rolls off his tongue as easily as breathing, it seems. He and Mr. Hamley are clearly both in their element.
Mr. Hamley has been a volunteer at the museum since the 1960s and a project manager on three restorations.
“We are very fortunate. We have a number of volunteers who have been here since the ’60s and even the ’50s,” Mr. Becker says. “They tend to stick around.”
“It’s so much fun,” says Mr. Hamley, whose expertise is PCC — Presidents Conference Committee — cars, first built in the 1930s to include a seated operator and to upgrade speed and comfort, with less noise.
My camera and tape recorder were working overtime as Becker dropped a lifetime of knowledge on me — I am from Brooklyn, birthplace of the streetcar as public transportation, and I was an editor on the book “Moving Millions: An Inside Look at Mass Transit,” which is in Becker’s collection, so perhaps he thought I could absorb all of the details.
Much of what he had to say is available on the museum’s website, patrolley.org, and in a glossy little book, subtitled “Preserving Pennsylvania’s Transit Heritage” and funded by the National Road Corridor. But that’s not nearly as much fun or intriguing as seeing the accommodations that took steelworkers to the the Edgar Thomson Works or coal miners to the nearby Arden mines, or the private “Toledo” car, with kitchen, bathroom and restored oval stained glass windows. In 1908, the latter transported dignitaries from Toledo to Detroit for the World Series.
And wait, is that …
Yes, it is the streetcar named “Desire!” In 1964, car 832 arrived from New Orleans. It had been among 40 cars retired from service that year and was offered for $1 to museums nationwide. The PA museum got its pick because it was first to ask for cars of a certain era, and the car labeled “DESIRE” — Desire being a New Orleans neighborhood — was selected because it was featured in Life Magazine in 1947, when the Tennessee Williams classic opened on Broadway.
The website includes a full roster of the museum’s cars and locomotives, mostly in use from here to Philadelphia, and perhaps you can find a car that was in service close to your home, as I did.
The 88 Frankstown that in 1911 ran through Wilkinsburg and East Liberty has signage that spells Pittsburgh without the “h,” so you know it’s old.
It was a major line, says Mr. Becker, who uses the car to tell the “kind of untold story” of the importance of our region in the trolley era. The trolley, he says, is 90% made in Western Pennsylvania.
His list includes the car body (McKees Rocks by the Press Steel Car Co.); the under-carriages, or trucks (Standard Motorcar Co. in New Castle); the electric motor propulsion equipment (Westinghouse); the air-brake system (Westinghouse) and even the nearby trolley signals (Union Switch and Signal on Technology Drive along the Monongahela River).
“And you have Brookville Equipment two hours north of us that actually is the only domestic manufacturer of trolley cars — they build them from the ground up,” Mr. Becker says. “So here we are, Western Pennsylvania, to this day, is still an important center for transit.”
After our tour through the Trolley Display Building on the West Campus — where Thomas the Tank Engine tables are set up for young fans — we finish at the Wexford Station building that had been the Wexford Post Office Deli in Pine, following its beginnings as a 1908 trolley station. It was donated by the Brooker family, moved whole to the site, then restored and opened to the public in October 2016.
The new welcome and education center will be across Trolley Street from Wexford Station, with the former center becoming another restoration space for the museum.
Although the mission of the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum is to preserve the trolley era, “the exciting thing is, the trolley era is not over,” says Mr. Becker. “You can ride a street car in Pittsburgh today — have you ever been to Beechview? That’s a streetcar! There’s over 30 cities in the United States that have streetcar systems. Forty years ago, when I first started volunteering, I thought the trolley was going to disappear. And look how it turned around. To us, that makes it very relevant. Trolleys are green. They don’t pollute. They carry a lot of people in a small space. They’ve got a lot of attributes, and it’s an American invention …”
Mr. Becker then launched into the tale of Frank Sprague, a Naval Academy graduate in 1888, who invented the trolley.
“It’s a great story,” he says. And it’s being told at the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum.
Sharon Eberson: seberson@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1960. Twitter: @SEberson_pg.
First Published: June 18, 2019, 12:00 p.m.
Updated: June 18, 2019, 1:22 p.m.