The Very Early Days at Trolleyville
All photos from the Krambles-Peterson Archive
It's February 1955 and Columbia Park is in its infancy. The quartet of ex-Fox River Electric lightweights have been on the property less than a year, and they comprise the entire electric collection. It looks like the building at the front of the trailer park is under construction. Car 302 would end up getting scrapped in the 1980s; the car in the background is unidentified. JWV photo.
Later that year, on August 6, 1955, the same scene looks quite different. The parking lot is now paved and car 306 is on display at the end of track, lettered Columbia Park & Southwestern - "The Mobile Home Route." The sign on the end reads "Trailer Mart, Inc. and Columbia Park Welcomes [sic] the Kroger Co." The destination sign reads Columbia Park Limited. Note that there is no trolley wire up yet. HMS photo.
Fast-forward seven years to August 18, 1962, and Columbia Park is now a real trolley museum, complete with 600V overhead. Here we see the two ex-Shaker Heights center-door cars that had arrived the previous year, 18 nearest the camera and 1225 behind it, with 303 (restored to Fox River Electric livery) in the distance. This is the same location as the earlier photos, just looking northwest instead of northeast.
The size of Gerald Brookins' trolley museum increased substantially in the early 1960s. Between 1961 and 1964 he acquired the two Shaker center-door cars, two Veracruz open cars, one car each from Cincinnati and Toledo, and of course an octet of CA&E cars. Here, we see half the CA&E fleet on a siding off the NYC main: 451 followed by 36, 319, and another curve-sider, likely 453 or 458.
Fox River/Shaker Heights car 303 is out on the Columbia Park line in August 1963 in this JWV photo. This is near the east end of the line: the building visible behind the van is the same building at the front of the trailer park shown in the first couple of photos above. Note the double overhead - I'm not sure what the story is with that.
We're back up front on October 12, 1963, with a view of recently painted CA&E 319. For many years, several of the CA&E cars at Trolleyville wore "loose" interpretations of past CA&E paint schemes. At far right is car 36, which briefly wore this olive green paint before acquiring the "Christmas color" dark green and red livery it wore until IRM repainted it in the 2010s.
On the same day, CA&E 460 is spotted outside the new carbarn. Gerald Brookins planned for the future and built a sturdy barn for his collection at a time when many museums were hard-pressed simply to build track. Around this time IRM was planning to evacuate its rented space at the Chicago Hardware Foundry - buildings would have seemed to be in the distant future for our organization.
Here we are inside the Brookins barn on August 22, 1964, in a Tom Desnoyers photo. Car 303 was beautifully preserved in end-of-service condition up until a "restoration" of questionable veracity was done around the early 1990s. At far left the 302 is peeking into the frame, then 453 (with "Sold to Museum - CP&SW Ry" chalked on the end window); behind the 303 is the 451, then the 306 and the 319 at the door; on the right track the 18 is closest to the camera followed by the 1225 and 304.
Here's a September 1964 JWV view of CA&E 36 in its fanciful CP&SW paint scheme at the end of track at the front of the trailer park.
Here's another JWV shot taken on the same day.
It's October 3, 1964, and car 319 is out on the "railroad" in this William C. Janssen photo.
As far as I can tell, as varied as have been the liveries worn by CA&E cars in preservation (and some have been pretty odd), only two cars were ever painted in color schemes that didn't even mildly resemble an authentic CA&E livery. One was the 318, painted orange by Westport; the other was 451, shown here on May 30, 1965, which Brookins painted in Cleveland & Southwestern colors.
It's August 28, 1965, and car 409 is spotted in the usual location at the end of track. Like 36 and 319, this car wore a variation of an actual CA&E livery, in this case a loose interpretation of the 1930s coffee-with-cream color scheme. Unlike the two wood cars, though, it was lettered for the CA&E, albeit with "Mobile Home Route" stickers next to the doors complete with a Conestoga wagon image.
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