It's impossible to explain a child's boundless fascination with trains, says Bob Clarke, a volunteer with the National Capitol Trolley Museum.
The attraction spans everything from Thomas the Tank Engine to slapstick silent films to historic street cars, nearly two dozen of which will be on display at the colorful museum when it reopens Nov. 28 at its new $5.63 million facility at 1313 Bonifant Road in the Colesville area of Silver Spring.
Children of all ages flock to the museum and often are amazed when they first see the display of a built-to-scale version of a trolley line that ran from downtown Washington to Chevy Chase in the early 1900s, Clarke said.
"It's quite interesting to see that model trolley layout, and they go absolutely nuts," he said. "They just stand there, and the parents have to literally drag the kids away."
When the museum opens on Thanksgiving weekend, it will be roughly three times larger than the former facility. It will feature an auditorium playing clips of Harold Lloyd silent films with trolley cars in the background and an all-you-can-ride, three-quarter-mile external track with a rotation of classic street cars, Clarke said.
It also will showcase the museum's extensive collection, which includes a 1918 green-and-white streetcar built by the G.C. Kuhlman Company and a sunshine yellow 1970s trolley from the Netherlands. New additions include a rare 1934 yellow-and-blue boat-shaped car from an oceanfront resort in England, a 1950s streetcar from Toronto and a clunker from Boston that hasn't been used in decades, Paulson said.
Trolley lovers eagerly have awaited the reopening of the popular museum, which closed last December to make way for construction of the Intercounty Connector highway across from its former site, said museum Director of Development Wesley Paulson. It will reopen next door to its old site, and although the old museum charged for every trolley trip, the new museum features an admission fee of $4 for children and $7 for adults, which will include unlimited rides, Clarke said.
The new museum will consist of three buildings: a roomy one-floor visitors center including two auditoriums, a classroom, model trolley cars and historical exhibits; a car barn large enough to house roughly 25 streetcars; and a maintenance and restoration facility that can be used to repair clunkers, Clarke said.
The reopening has been delayed twice, largely due to the complexity of constructing old-fashioned overhead trolley wiring, which supplies electricity to the cars, Paulson said. Experts and volunteers also have been working on finishing the external track so visitors can get the full experience of riding a classic street car, he said. Issues with managing groundwater runoff in the parking lot have further delayed progress, Clarke said.
"We're just as anxious as everybody else and we get a little annoyed that we have to keep changing the date," Paulson said.
When the museum finally opens, the experience will be worth the wait, museum organizers said.
"We're doing a lot of the nitty-gritty that's going to make things run right and look good," Clarke said. "It's going to be a beautiful facility."
