I am posting this because I think the exhibit is a very well done teaching tool on a modest budget, it focuses appropriately on the history of local trolley car systems, and is featured and augmented on the Maine Historical Society's online museum, The Maine Memory Network, and thus it teaches more than those who visit it.

My review is here.

Given this quick overview, what do you think?

Hi Marty, et al. I just spent two days at Seashore over the Labor Day weekend. And, you are correct--the display in Seashore's visitors center is very well done.

For those who don't recognize the interurban front in one of Marty's photos, it is a very rare artifact. It is the front of a former Providence & Burrillville Street Railway interurban that was built (By Cincinnati Car Co. ca. 1905?) for service on the high-speed line between Providence and Woonsocket, Rhode Island. This line was absorbed into the Rhode Island Company which later became the United Electric Railways.

The Prov-Woonsocket line was abandoned in the late 1920s and No. 1703 was initially saved IIRC by George King who lived in Walpole, Massachusetts. But eventually the car rotted to the point that the front was cut off from the remaining body and was used as an entrance to a hobby shop somewhere in Providence or the near suburbs (Cranston? Warwick?). I'm sure someone on this board might have more accurate info on No. 1703 after the line for which it was built was shut down.

There are only four Rhode Island electric cars extant right now: Shore Line Trolley Museum has two cars which includes a beautifully restored emergency/tool car (No. 1504) and a single truck passenger car from the early 1890s (No. 61); Seashore has a single-truck snow plough (No. 16); and, then there's the fellow who cosmetically restored an Osgood Bradley double truck passenger car (No. 1058?) all by himself that as far as I know sits in a specially built building in Providence.