Whatever happened to the good old American trolley?
A few weeks ago, my wife and I took a day trip to Maryland, where we visited the National Capital Trolley Museum. It’s an unassuming building with an ornamented facade — a little like a Main Street building in a rural small town — and the gift shop, exhibits and ticket prices are all modest. There’s an interactive electricity exhibit for kids (and adults like me), where you can power a tiny trolley in a diorama of an old streetcar-suburb scene. One of the windows in a house even lights up. It’s simple and fun, a small, lean museum run by a dedicated group of people. An older man who worked there explained the old DC trolley map to me, recalling all the different lines he used to ride as a kid. That’s something you can’t get from a book.
