BGuthrie Photos: MD -- National Capital Trolley Museum

MD -- National Capital Trolley Museum:

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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. DCTROL_140222_016.JPG: Conduit Track Switch and Crossover DC Transit System 1540, shown to the right on the turning loop at 11th and Monroe Streets NW, will soon operate south on 11th Street to east on E Street to south on 9th Street to east on Pennsylvania Avenue. Just east of 7th Street, the car will cross over the westbound track on Pennsylvania into its southern loop eastward along C Street to south on 6th Street to return westward along Pennsylvania Avenue to north on 9th Street. The trackwork before you includes the switch and crossover from Pennsylvania Avenue for this turning loop. This entire route 60 street car line draws its electricity from the underground conduit described in the drawing shown to the left. See a section of this conduit system in Conduit Hall inside the visitor center to your right and learn more about the manner of construction which kept vistas in the Nation's Capital free of overhead wires as shown here with Capital Transit Company 766 passing the Peace monument on its way west along Pennsylvania Avenue.
2. DCTROL_140222_024.JPG: Jim Crow on Streetcars: Southern historic C. Vann Woodward notes, "One of the strangest things about the career of Jim Crow was that the system was born in the North and reached an advanced age before moving South in force." Ten days after Abraham Lincoln's 1860 election, a young man sees a horse-drawn, Sixth Avenue streetcar approaching. While it doesn't have the necessary sign "Colored People Allowed in This Car" in the window, he hurriedly boards the car. The New York Times reports that the conductor, Mr. T.S. Lewis, "told him that he must either get off or ride on the front platform. He said that he would do neither, but he would stay where he was." 23-year-old Charles Sanders resists the conductor's efforts to eject him from the car so they police take him before Justice Welsh who charges him with assault and battery. The New York legislature ends the practice of racial segregation on the horse cars in 1873. Following the Civil War, the owners of street railways may be racists themselves, but they are in business to make a profit. There is not enough market demand for Jim Crow seating in their cars to create it. If the incentives of the economic system will not separate the races, Southern politicians will. Both blacks and whites spend money to ride the streetcars, but when the Supreme Court strikes down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, thus enabling the end of Reconstruction Era voting rights for African Americans, the incentives of the economic system and the incentives of the political system clash. By the first decade of the 20th century, streetcar and railroad companies in the South lobby against the Jim Crow laws while these laws are being written, challenge them in the courts after the laws are passed, and then drag their feet in enforcing these laws after they are upheld by the courts. While black passengers boycott the streetcar lines to protest the laws, some white passengers occupy seats in the section reserved for African Americans. By the end of the second decade, effective opposition to Jim Crow laws is over and companies like Birmingham Railway, Light & Power (BRLPCo) must find ways to implement the Laws. The Electric Railway Journal details BRLPCo efforts to manage its "race problem." One solution is shown on the left.
3. DCTROL_140222_035.JPG: Jim Crow on Streetcars: Street car service in Washington begins in 1862 with horse cars of the Washington and Georgetown Railroad. African Americans must ride on the front platform with the driver. Sojourner Truth challenges the practice, and on March 3, 1865, President Lincoln signs legislation, sponsored by Senator Charles Sumner, which outlaws segregation on the cars. During the first decade of the 20th century, Southern congressmen initiate several attempts to put Jim Crow on Washington's street cars, but a new African American voice from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People keeps him off. Writing in 1906, Mary Church Terrell notes the difference between the street cars of the District of Columbia and those traveling to Virginia. "As a colored woman I cannot visit the tomb of the Father of this country, which owes its very existence to the love of freedom in the human heart and which stands for equal opportunity to all, without being forced to sit in the Jim Crow section of the electric car which starts from the very heart of the city -- midway between the Capitol and the White House. If I refuse thus to be humiliated, I am cast into jail and forced to pay a fine for violating the Virginia laws. Every hour in the day Jim Crow cars filled with colored people, many of whom are intelligent and well to enter [sic] and leave the national capital." The "Street Car Riots" of 1919 put an end to threats of segregation on Washington cars. Numerous gang attacks between blacks and whites from July through November force federal troops to cordon off the city center. Following the mayhem and loss of life, the issue cools as the African American community shows that it will not tolerate Jim Crow on the cars. While seating aboard street cars in the Nation's Capital remains open, access to jobs with a public dimension within Capital Transit Company remain closed. African Americans are only employed as unskilled laborers in the car shops and on the streets. Efforts to expand job opportunities to include street car and bus operators get a boost with a protest march in May, 1943. But the Capital Transit Company (CTCo) still finds that transit union members continue to oppose the plan of the Fair Employment Practice Commission to employ African Americans as platform personnel.
4. DCTROL_140222_078.JPG: Chevy Chase
5. DCTROL_140222_086.JPG: Kensington, MD
6. DCTROL_140222_102.JPG: Glen Echo Amusement Park In 1891, the Glen Echo Railroad begins trolley service to the National Chautauqua Association at Glen Echo from "the junction" (now Wisconsin and Willard Avenues) with the Georgetown and Tenallytown Railway and the Tenallytown and Rockville Railroad. Larger cars a new name greet passengers in 1896, but the Washington and Glen Echo Railroad closes in 1900. The Washington Railway and Electric Company (WRECo) develops a premium trolley park along its Cabin John carline on the Potomac Palisades. Purchasing the National Chautauqua of Glen Echo Park Company to refurbish and operate the Park> During World War I, as many as fifty thousand patronize the Park per week. Three new attractions, such as the Dentzel carousel, draw seventeen thousand on opening day in 1921. Adding the Spanish Ballroom in 1933 and the Crystal Pool in 1936, the Park lures so may to its 1940 art deco entrance that the Capital Transit Company, citing wartime manpower shortages, keeps the Crystal Pool closed in 1945. Reorganization of Capital Transit Company in 1954 transfers ownership of non-transit properties to its shareholder by creating Continental Enterprises, Inc. A year later, Rekab Inc., a New Jersey-based park operator, purchases the Park for $950,000 and invests in new attractions for the 1958 season. On January 3, 1960, the last street cars pass the Glenn Echo Town Hall and the Park entrance. Amid challenges from the Town Council and from new security issues, declining attendance forces closure of the Park in April, 1969. Today, the National Park Service maintains Glen Echo Park.
7. DCTROL_140222_205.JPG: Trolley Power: Most electric street cars obtain their current from an overhead wire. A wheel device, or trolley shown above, is attached to a spring-loaded pole mounted on the roof of the street car. (Curiously, trolley became the word referring to the trolley car, trolley wire, and, eventually, modern diesel-powered reproductions of the old electric cars.) When the motorman moves the controller handle to the first power notch, the electricity flows from the overhead wire, through the trolley, down the pole, through the circuit breaker, and into the controller. In first notch, the controller directs most of the electricity to resistance grids. As the motorman moves the controller handle to second, third, and then fourth notch (no resistance), more electricity flows to the motors and speed increases. Between notches four and five, the controller makes the transition from series connections of the motors (each running on half voltage) to parallel connection (each running on full voltage). Try it; be a Motorman! Move the Reverse Key to either the forward or reverse position. Now move the Controller Handle clockwise to each notch. Remember notch four is "full series" and notch eight is "full parallel." Turn the motor off in one sweeping motion from notch eight to off.
8. DCTROL_140222_233.JPG: Conduit Switch Model: Washington street railway historians Lee Rogers and Bob Truax saved this brass model of a conduit switch. Little is known of the reason for building the model. Some speculate that it was a training tool because the model shows the function of the moveable plate which would guide the conduit plow either straight through or to the right. Others suggest the model was presented to the Capital Transit Company as a token of appreciation by one of the street companies which supplied track components to the Company. In either case, the model provides the surface detail of the conduit track system with running rails, conduit slot, and access hatches. The photograph below at 14th and G Streets, NW illustrates the complexity of the conduit track construction and another of its disadvantages, construction had to be proceed while maintaining car service.
9. DCTROL_140222_236.JPG: Conduit Plows: Two types of plows are standing here in the conduit slot. The larger of the two with the heavy contact shoes below would hang from a bracket under the street car with the shoes pressing against the electrified rails. The two leads at the top would be connected to the street car's wiring to provide the 600 volts DC to operate the traction motors, air compressor, lighting, and heating. Workmen needing electricity could insert the second, smaller plow into the slot and turn it ninety degrees to contact the electrified rails. Connecting heavy duty extension cords to the leads on top would deliver power to their tools. The welder shown on the cover of Capital Transit Company's newsletter, Transit Monthly, may well be using the conduit system to supply the electricity for his work while the man in the center is using an air hammer whose compressor motor could be connected to conduit power as well.
10. DCTROL_140222_240.JPG: The Conduit Story: The most unusual structural feature of the electric street railways in Washington was the underground conduit system for powering the cars. An effective campaign mounted by the Washington Star against overhead wires in the Nation's Capital made electrification of cable and horse car lines with trolley wires an impossibility. In August, 1894, Congress ordered the Metropolitan Railroad to construct a conduit system. Following designs of General Electric, the Metropolitan began conduit-powered service on the 9th Street line on July 29, 1895. Its success made electric traction a reality for the federal city.
11. DCTROL_140222_388.JPG: Power House Exciter Inside the power house behind the carbarn at Chevy Chase Lake, stationary steam engines spun the generators to produce the electricity to power the cars of the Rock Creek Railway Company. The small generator standing here with its permanent magnet produced the electricity to create magnetic fields in the larger coils of the main generators. A large leather belt transferred the mechanical energy of the stream engine's flywheel to spin this "exciter" whose electrical energy magnetized the field coils of the main generators which supplied the trolley power. Early residents of Chevy Chase purchased electricity generated by the Rock Creek Railway power house for lighting their homes between sunset and sunrise. Streetlights along Connecticut Avenue extended directly from the trolley line poles, and the Chevy Chase Land Company provided lights on side streets and for its parks. The Land Company transferred the equipment and rights to supply electric service to the Potomac Electric Power Company around 1910.
12. DCTROL_140222_407.JPG: The Museum carhouse fire on September 28, 2003 destroyed four cars of the Washington Street Car Collection
13. DCTROL_140222_413.JPG: The Museum carhouse fire on September 28, 2003 destroyed four cars of the American Trolley and International Street Car Collections.
14. DCTROL_140222_503.JPG: Car #606 (Boat Car)
Wikipedia Description: National Capital Trolley Museum
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The National Capital Trolley Museum (NCTM) is a non-profit organization that operates historic trolleys (or trams) for the public on a regular schedule. It is located at 1313 Bonifant Road, Colesville, Maryland USA.

History

NCTM was incorporated in 1959 as the National Capital Historical Museum of Transportation. Progress was slow at first, but the Museum eventually combined efforts and streetcar collections with a group from Baltimore. The organization found its first home in Robert E. Lee Park at Lake Roland in Baltimore, Maryland. After efforts were thwarted by adjacent property owners, the group divided the collections in 1966. National Capital Trolley Museum moved to its present site in suburban Washington, DC, while the Baltimore Streetcar Museum was formed to focus on Baltimore transit. NCTM's original intention was to operate streetcars owned by DC Transit president O. Roy Chalk, but it was not until 1970 that Chalk donated several historic Washington streetcars. In the interim, the museum acquired a small fleet of European trams and a car from Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

NCTM ran its first streetcar in October 1969, and since then the museum has operated consistently over its one-mile line.

In the winter of 2008–2009, the Museum moved into three new buildings: a visitors' center, a display building for the streetcars, and a streetcar storage-and-maintenance building. Construction of the Intercounty Connector, (ICC) which crosses the Museum's former location, required the Museum to shift locations in the Park. The Museum reopened on Saturday, January 16, 2010.

Education efforts

The Museum offers a variety of education programs and activities throughout the year. Each spring and fall, the Museum hosts school field trips by advance reservation. On some Saturday afternoons, visitors can also enjoy a story and craft time. Special summer programs are offered on Thursday and Friday from June 15 to August 15. Age-appropriate activities include: story time and craft, story and hands-on experience with trolley artifacts, and a role-playing exercise for older children.
Membership and funding

As of 2008, 125 members and friends support the Museum with dues, donations and volunteer service. The Museum receives most of its money from admission fees and revenues from its gift shop. Other funding for a variety of projects is provided by the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County, the Montgomery County Heritage Tourism Alliance, the Montgomery County Historic Preservation Commission, and the Maryland Historical Trust. The State of Maryland, Montgomery County, and private donors provided capital funding support for the current relocation.

Collection

At one point or another, the NCTM has owned an example of nearly every type of Washington streetcar to be preserved. These include:

DC Transit 0522 and 0509*, pre-1900 wooden streetcars
Washington Railway and Electric 650, a 1912 center door car
Capital Transit 766, a 1918 deck-roof standard car
Capital Transit 1053*, the only complete preserved pre-PCC streamliner
DC Transit 1101, Washington's first PCC streetcar
Capital Transit 07*, 09, and 026*, wooden snow sweepers
Capital Transit 1430, a PCC car built during World War II

The NCTM collection has also included streetcars from Berlin, D�sseldorf, Graz, The Hague, Toronto, Vienna, New York City, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Brussels and Blackpool. NOTE: cars marked with asterisk were lost in the 2003 carbarn fire.
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