National Museum of Transportation: A Rescued Streetcar Became This

In nineteen forty-four, St. Louis physician John Payne Roberts learned that a local transit company was sending a horse-drawn streetcar, the mule-drawn Bellefontaine Number Thirty-Three, to a wartime scrap drive. Roberts organized other citizens to rescue it and founded the St.

Louis Railway Historical Society. The collection grew into the National Museum of Transportation, now spread across forty-two acres in Kirkwood, Missouri. Today it holds one of the country's largest collections of locomotives, including some famous examples.

One doctor's decision to save a single old streetcar from the melting pot created one of the country's great transportation archives.