Recently I had a chance to visit the Seashore Trolley Museum. Had a very nice ride on a couple of different trolleys. But what amazed me most, was all of the equipment they had on the property. When visitors come to our museum, I often suggest to the uninitiated that they might want to check out the Illinois Railway Museum telling them that it is the largest railroad museum in the country. Now that I have seen what Seashore has, I wonder if I have been misinforming folks. Anyone know how many pieces of equipment are at Seashore, and also at IRM? And am I possibly missing some other museum with a large roster of equipment?

Thanks.

Les

As far as I know, Seashore has more electric equipment than IRM, but IRM has more equipment in total. My recollection is that Seashore has around 200 pieces (not counting buses) while IRM has over 300.

Not exactly sure on either, but I can come up with an educated guess. According to my roster, Seashore has about 195 pieces of equipment that fall under the "electric railway" category. I would speculate they also have maybe 20 (?) railroad freight cars and other miscellaneous non-electrified railway cars. According to their website they also have 16 trolley buses and 47 (!!!) gas/diesel buses. So I'm going to guess they have about 215 pieces of railway equipment and about 280 pieces of equipment altogether.

IRM has something like 380-390 pieces of railway equipment or so (according to the online roster there are about 375 but this has been only sporadically updated over the past 10 years) plus about 26 trolley and motor buses. A current IRM roster is being worked on as we type and will likely show up in an upcoming issue of "Rail & Wire," the museum's newsletter.

I have rosters for both museums and Seashore has around 250 items including buses; the largest collection of all electric cars in the country.

The IRM has over 400 items these days including electric buses and diesel buses. They have just gotten some more from the Orange Empire Railway Museum. They bill themselves as the largest rail museum in the West. They are like IRM ;they collect both electric and main line equipment.

Another museum that has a lot of equipment is the Museum of Transport in St Louis; they have the largest collection of steam locomotives with 33 of them. IRM is close to that with 30.

The Colorado Railroad Museum has about 120 pieces; about 60 of them are narrow gauge which is the largest narrow gauge collection as far as I know.

It will be interesting to see if any of the equipment that is soon to be auctioned in cleveland goes to Seashore or IRM. They are the most likely to be major players.

Ted Miles