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Historic Cars of the Seashore Trolley Museum FIFTH Edition 1967 by Cummings Sof
Historic Cars of the Seashore Trolley Museum by O.R. Cummings
FIFTH Edition Second Printing
Copyright 1970
Soft Cover Stapled
Kennebunkport, Maine
Approx 52 pages
INTRODUCTION
The street car is fast disappearing from the American scene. Only in a dozen large cities in the United States and Canada do trolleys still operate -and even these few remnants will be gone before too many years have passed. Only at such places as the Seashore Trolley Museum will it be possible to see and ride what was once the world's most important-and certainly most interesting-transport vehicle.
It is difficult for many to realize that as recently as four decades ago, in 1921, the electric railway business was America's fifth largest industry. It had more than 300,000 employees, a six billion dollar investment, and carried 15 billion riders-twelve times the number of passengers handled by the steam railroads in the same year.
In the preceding three decades the trolley car had truly made the United States a nation on wheels. In the cities, where the horse and buggy was a luxury, it provided transportation that was fast, comfortable, and priced within the reach of everybody. It made possible large-scale spectator sports such as big league baseball and it opened up suburban living to a large segment of the population. Today, the transit industry is but a shadow of its former self and is faced with near extinction due to the tremendous annual increase in the number of private automobiles and the miles of high speed highways crossing and criss-crossing the North American continent.
Most of the street cars in regular operation today are of the nearly silent, streamlined type developed by the transit industry in the early 1930's in an effort to provide an easy-riding, high passenger capacity vehicle with quick acceleration and a sufficiently fast running speed to cope with modern day traffic problems. A rare thing indeed is the sight of an old time trolley-of the types once so familiar to our parents and grandparents -and which in pre-automobile days provided inexpensive and reliable transportation for all.
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