Introducing: The Old Trolley Barn

Now that I have you hanging out in the North End with yesterday's column on Kings Avenue, let's take a look at the large warehouse that borders Kings Avenue to the north.

It is a 46,000-square-foot building with four loading bays in front (see the photograph shown here). It was built about 1895 for use as a barn for the local trolley company, the Middletown Street Railway, which used the space to store trolley cars. A few years later, it became the property of the Consolidated Railway Co. of New Haven, which took over the local trolley company in 1903.

Transportation hubs were always focused in the northern end of the city. The New Haven and Hartford Railroads, the Airline, and the Shoreline Railroad shared the depot on Rapallo Avenue during the 19th century, and both railroad and passenger bridges were located in the northern part of the city.

Prior to the construction of this trolley barn for the electrical cars, the horses for the street railway had been housed in stables on the same site, according to research done by the Greater Middletown Preservation Trust in 1978.

Trolleys were a popular mode of transportation as far back as the 1880s. The first public mode of transportation within the city was provided by horse-drawn trolleys, which were primarily restricted to Main Street. The trolley was upgraded to electrical cars in 1894. Lines for these new cars were set up all over town, providing city folks with a way of getting out into the country, and giving rural folks an easier way of getting into downtown.

The trolley eventually connected Middletown to Cromwell, Berlin, Meriden (through Middlefield and Westfield), Hartford and Portland. The trolleys continued to run until they were replaced with buses in the mid-1930s which, logically, were more flexible in the routes they could establish.

Stay tuned: More on the trolleys and on the Trolley Barn in this evening's edition of the Buzz from Around the Bend.