National Capital Trolley Museum opened quietly on January 16, 2010. Our visitors pay a $4 admission fee to the museum that includes the exhibits in the Main Hall, a guided tour of Street Car Hall, the new Harold Lloyd exhibit "street Cars Go to the Movies", and a short ride on the visitor center loop. Currently TTC 4603 provides car service for the ride. Volunteers continue to prepare TTC 4602 (from Lake Shore) to join TTC 4603 in service. The car ride will be extended later this spring when the weather finally permits volunteers to make final adjustments to the overhead wire on the new line. In the meantime, attendance compares with previous patterns at the old facility. This is encouraging based on the fact that we opened with no publicity beyond information provided on our website.

Two photos attached here show TTC 4603 in the yard and NJT 5221 in operation on the loop.

Wesley Paulson

You need a snowsweeper this weekend.

No. You may not borrow Baltimore's.

Once, we had two. :-(

Wes, Erik, Ken and everyone else at NCTM:

Great job and congratulations! I'm really looking forward to our trip to your museum for the next ARM annual meeting.

Thanks!

That should be credit to Wes and Ken--none worth mentioning to me. But I will say thank YOU and you will be very welcome here this fall.

My brother in law lives about two blocks away from the museum. He hasn't been home in two days, snowed in at work.

You need more than a street sweeper, try a rotary.

Brother Stationary -

Amen to that! I live about two miles from the Museum. We have two feet of snow. I am still digging out my driveway. I have memories of running the late CTCo 07 after a storm like this one in the 1980s. And somewhere there is great video of this event.

Wesley

Thanks for the memories.....

Congrats on the new facility! It looks really good. Can you tell the story about its construction?

I see a pan on the Boston line car. Do you have any other pantograph equipment that operates, and what adaptations were needed for the trolley wire?

The line car is from the Newark subway in NJ. It has a pan and a pole. We have three other pantograph cars: HTM 1329 (Hague PCC), STIB 17 (Brussels single truck work car) and RbG 955 (Dusseldorf single truck car). HTM 1329 was operated regularly and should return to service on the new railway at some point soon.

We have operated cars with pans and trolley poles since opening in 1969. Hardware failure of pans on two European cars (Graz and Berlin cars) led to eventual replacement with poles. The decision to convert the cars to poles was consistent with earlier operating practices for these cars in their home cities.

The wire is grooved "8" wire and uses regular hardware. Art Schwartz from PTM designed the new installation and I'll defer to him for further technical details.

Wesley

Wesley,

The big snow you remember was in February 1983. Several of us got out the snow sweeper on Sunday 13 Feb. and opened the entire museum line. I took (regular 8 mm) movies and slides which I still have. It was a couple of years later when I bought my first video camera. I don't remember if someone else was taking video. I will have to see if I can copy these movies onto video.

We were all amused that we had our line open using an old sweeper and METRO was closed down for several days.

Mac Palmer
Missoula, MT

Wesley,

This is quite a milestone for a project that has been in the works for years. Congratulations to everyone involved and I look forward to visiting the new museum . . . in better weather.

Alan Maples

Regarding converting 8 mm movies to DVD's: it can be done. There are several on-line services that can do this. I take my "flicks" to the local camera store, where one of their suppliers offers this service. Since this particular company started out as a film-processing lab, they probably have plenty of time to do movie to video conversions now. The major downside is that it isn't cheap, but most of the scenes in those old films can't be repeated. I've contributed DVD conversions of movies from the 60's and 70's to Orange Empire and Market Street Ry. I sent one copy to an old SP railroader who was thrilled to see some of his crewmates from long ago on former Pacific Electric routes in action.

Yes, 8mm to DVD can be done, the question is how "archival" you want to get. I believe the resolution of 8mm is actually better than that of traditional television, and DVD. Nowadays you have a variety of HD video formats to work with.

What's more if you have a newer computer, chances are it comes with software that lets you easily assemble this stuff into interesting DVDs that let you add supplemental info, add chapters for easy navigation, etc.