Century Old Trolley Car Returns To East Haven Museum

EAST HAVEN, CT - The more than century old yellow and red Connecticut Line trolley, car number 855, that ran from New Haven to Branford in its heyday has finally gone home after decades away.

Home is the Shore Line Trolley Museum in East Haven.

Having spent years on Frontage Road outside the Quality Inn, and before that decades at the Trolley Square shopping plaza, the trolley car built in 1905 was loaded onto a flatbed truck last Friday and driven to River Street. There, longtime trolley museum volunteer Michael Hildreth had built a set of tracks for it to be rolled onto.

It was a homecoming welcomed by museum director John Proto and trolley museum board vice president Joe Deko.

“We’re very excited. We were lacking a landmark,” Proto said as he took a reporter on a tour Monday. “It cements the trolley museum.”

Deko, East Haven Town Council chairman and a Guilford firefighter, said the return of the trolley car to the museum is “awesome.”

“We’re so excited to have this car back. We’re preserving history. That’s what we’re all about.”

Deko said there was concern that the hotel, which is set to be rebuilt, “Was going to call and say you have two days to get it out of here. So, before that happened or it was destroyed, we brought it back. It’s awesome to have it back.”

Deko said the trolley was originally owned by the Connecticut Company, who operated the trolley lines until 1947 when the trolleys were turned over to the museum. Now, Car 855 will be on permanent display at the end of River Street on the East Haven portion of the museum.

Deko said the “all volunteer crew will begin restoration work on the car for visitors to enjoy.” He said Car 855 will soon be available for “birthday parties, meetings and children’s reading groups among other things.”

Mayor Joseph A. Carfora said he was “very happy” that car 855 is back at the museum, “a town landmark.”

Trolleys and trains capture imaginations

The trolley museum exhibit is a stroll though 19th and 20th century transit. It maintains several collections which preserve the history and heritage of the Trolley Era including archives that contain nearly 30,000 photographic images, over 4,000 books and documents, and about 1,000 small artifacts such as tokens, hat badges and ticket punches.

The gift shop is filled with trolley and train trinkets and gifts for every aficionado, age 9 to 90.

But it’s the nine Branford Electric Trailway trolley barns where history comes alive. Stored are nearly 100 vintage trains, trolleys, rapid-transit train cars, and work trains. And, the museum owns the oldest continually operating trolley line in the U.S., operated beginning in the early 1900s. The museum boasts the last remaining 1 and ½ miles of the New Haven Trolley Line.

It’s also home to some very famous residents.

One can see the original New Orleans streetcar named Desire. Yes. That ‘Streetcar Named Desire.’

And a train car that’s really a movie star: a New York City subway car built in 1954 that calls the museum its home, appeared in The Amazing Spider-Man 2.

So, visit the Shore Line Trolley Museum in October for its pumpkin patch and it spooky Halloween Haunted Isle. Then come back for a ride back in time at the museum that’s on the National Register of Historic Places.