This weekend, a former streetcar from Hampton/Newport News, Va. began its journey home, over seventy years after it left town in the first place.
Newport News & Hampton Railway, Gas & Electric Co. 390, built by J.G. Brill & Co. of Philadelphia in 1917. was loaded onto a trailer at the Baltimore Streetcar Museum on Sunday, July 30th and departed for Fort Monroe, Va. via the Baltimore Beltway on the morning of the 31st. The Hampton Streetcar 390 Project will restore the car over the next several years for future static display at a location in downtown Hampton.
The 390 was the first of 24 such wood-and-steel "semi-convertible" cars, with large window sashes that raised into the roof to create a semi-open car function in hot weather, ordered from Brill in 1917-18 by the Virginia railway. The cars were built to the same exact design as the 885 such cars ordered by Baltimore's United Railways & Electric Co. between 1905 and 1919, and used until the mid-1950s. NN&H's 390 was retired in 1945 and sold in 1946 for use as a house near Yorktown, Va. BSM member Paul Dimler discovered the then-derelict "house" along U.S. 17 near Yorktown in the summer of 1977, and rallied volunteers to acquire and rescue the car body later that year, hoping to restore it to functionally replace the sole surviving Baltimore semi-convertible, 5748, that the Museum had failed to save twenty years earlier. (While being transferred to the Md. Historical Society along with other cars in 1957, the 5748 would not fit through the doors of a temporary storage site in a former carbarn, and was then "rescued" by the Seashore Trolley Museum in Maine, where it remains today). The car body was assigned the number "5885" by the BSM, representing the next car that would have been on the United Railways roster from that order.
Restoration of the wheelless, seatless car body continued in fits and starts over forty years, but no Brill trucks of the odd Baltimore gauge of 5' 4 1/2" could be found. With other priorities and projects at hand, including the arrival of Philadelphia PCCs, eventually the Baltimore Streetcar Museum made the decision to offer the car back to a historical group in the car's home area. The 390 Project was formed to assume custody of the car and raise funds for movement and restoration, and a pair of de-motorized PCC trucks were included by the BSM to give the car at least some wheels for display.
More information on the project is available at http://www.hamptonstreetcar390.com
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