Seashore Trolley Museum: Where Electric Transit Came to Die, Then Live

In nineteen thirty-nine, eight young men from New England heard that the Biddeford and Saco Railway was about to burn and scrap its entire streetcar fleet. They pooled their money, rescued car number thirty-one, and stored it in Kennebunkport. That act of preservation became the world's first electric transit museum.

Today the Seashore Trolley Museum holds more than three hundred transit vehicles from across the United States and many other countries, representing the full arc of the electric streetcar era that transformed American cities between the eighteen eighties and the nineteen fifties. Visitors can ride restored streetcars on a short private line through the Maine woods, essentially the same experience as a city commute in nineteen thirteen. The collection includes cars from Boston, Toronto, San Francisco, and dozens of smaller systems, saved from scrapping by the same impulse that drove eight young men to rescue one car from a bonfire more than eight decades ago.