The Motorman's Friends

"Granddaddy, how did people get around before there were buses?"

"Well, we had sort of trains called trolleys that ran on tracks in the middle of the street . . ."

"Granddaddy, why did they call them trolleys?"

"Well, they had these long things at the back, and when the motorman . . ."

"Granddaddy, what's a motorman?"

Don't despair, Granddad. As of right now, from Maine to California, the lit tle blister can be scooped up and taken out to any one of more than a dozen trolley museums. He can see the long, spring-mounted pole that held the round grooved wheel ^That's the trolley") against the overhead electric wire. He can see where the motorman stood, his foot on the button that rang the bell ("One clang for stopping, two for starting"). He will also learn, if he listens, that by 1918 the bobbed-hair and spats set had their pick of some 100,000 trolleys and 45,000 miles of track to take them out to the ball game or off to the amusement park, or even to tea dances at Philadephia's Bellevue-Stratford.

Really enterprising trolleyers could get aboard in Maine and, by switching from one connecting interurban to the next, go all the way to Delaware, or, starting from upstate New York, they could reach Wisconsin.

Up to Biddeford. Today, only eight cities in the U.S. and Canada still have Toonervilles* clang-clanging through the streets. But in odd meadows and on discarded old cross-country rails, U.S. trolley buffs have put some 300 relics back into mint condition and occasional service. The revival started in Maine back in 1939. For old times' sake, three Bostonians rode up to Biddeford one Fourth of July to be aboard the last run of the Biddeford & Saco Street Railroad's Car 31. At the end of the line, they spontaneously passed the hat among the passengers, added enough of their own money to make $250, and bought the car at the price it would have brought for scrap. They moved it into some pasture land in nearby Kennebunkport, and thus began the Seashore Trolley Museum, the nation's oldest and largest. Today it has nearly 100 cars, annually attracts 30,000 visitors who pay 35-c- to ride along the museum's 1 1/2 miles of track.

The Branford Trolley Museum in East Haven, Conn., got going in 1947, when New Haven decided to abandon trolleys. A handful of enthusiasts saw a chance to take over 1 1/2 miles of the Branford line. Today Branford ranks as the second largest trolley trove in the country, is stocked with 75 cars, ranging from a John Stephenson horsecar, vintage 1893, to a wicker-chaired private parlor car in mint condition.

Third largest collection in the nation is at the grandly titled Orange Empire Trolley Museum in Ferris, Calif., 70 miles southeast of Los Angeles. Only eleven years old, it has ten acres of track and 60 cars, all of them out in the open. "We had to get the trolleys while the getting was good, and worry about fixing them later," apologizes Museum Secretary James Walker Jr. "It's not much of a show place now, but it will be one day."

Histories & Memories. Finding them and fixing them up is what fascinates the hard-core members. The rumor of a car line going out of business in backwoods Brazil will send a streetcar buff scurrying off to bid, buy and bring the bedraggled relics home. Every weekend, they turn out to scrape, clean, paint, repair the cars, dig holes for new poles or lay track. "So much of the world is impersonal today," explains Dwight Minnich, 40, who got interested in trolleys as a Harvard undergraduate. "These cars are real. They have histories, memories." Emmanuel Mohr, a San Francisco engineering draftsman, spends a weekend a month working on the Orange Empire cars, says: "Anything with moving wheels has always fascinated me. As a boy my idea of heaven was riding in a trolley right up front near the motorman."

For the visitors, the fun is just what it's always been, riding in the swaying trolleys while the wheels screech around curves and rumble over switches. At the Orange Empire, the favorite is No. 913, sister to New Orleans' streetcar called Desire (now retired). At Branford it's No. 1414, a 1911 Osgood-Bradley open-bench "breezer" that until 1947 groaned its way to the Yale Bowl on football weekends, loaded to the roof with undergraduates.

-- The Toonerville Trolley in Fontaine Fox's popular comic strip was inspired by the four-wheeler Fox saw on the Brook Street route in Louisville; its cantankerous skipper was patterned after a motorman on the Pelham Manor, N.Y., route.

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