Forgotten Americana at the Windber Trolley Graveyard (part 1)
[image error]Where 19th Street ends in Windber is where a frightening, fascinating journey begins.
With permission, you drive past the gated entrance to a long 20-acre piece of private property. You bounce around as you make your way back into a forest on the rutted dirt road. About 100 yards back, you see a rusted hulk of a streetcar laying on its side.
Besides wondering what caused the streetcar to look like it had been discarded by a gigantic child, another question arises: Where did it come from because Windber hasn’t had a trolley since the 1936 flood washed out the Johnstown to Windber trolley line.
You move around the streetcar, only to see more streetcars—some on their roofs, others on their sides, a few still upright. Had some massive unreported accident happened here years ago?
Across from the streetcars are buildings that Berwind Coal used to use to build and repair coal cars used for the shipment of coal from the Windber area. In between the buildings and the streetcars is a parking area for what is called the Windber Trolley Graveyard.
The trolley graveyard[image error]
Nearly four dozen streetcars have found their final resting place here, but they used to run in cities like Philadelphia, Boston, Kansas City, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland.
“The MBTA in Boston still uses some of the same type of cars that I have here,” Ed said. “They are running into problems finding spare parts that are no longer manufactured. That’s where I come in.”
The trolleys are spread throughout the property along more than a mile of rail track. Their windows are busted. Leaves and debris litter the interiors. Many of the cars are covered in graffiti.
“Mother Nature has taken its toll as you can well imagine because some of these cars have been here since the mid-90s,” said Ed Metka, president of the Vintage Electric Streetcar Company and owner of the graveyard.
The cars sit there, seemingly forgotten, but Ed, remembers. He can tell you the story behind just about every streetcar on the property. The streetcars from Boston used to run on a suburban trolley line. The ones from Chicago were part of the L system, the elevated tracks that run through the city. Two 1912 streetcars from Grand Rapids, Mich., had previously been used for a lakefront cabin.
Ed can even tell you about the parts of some of his streetcars that wound up in trolleys in places like Dubai, Aruba, and San Francisco. He has even sold entire streetcars to a small trolley system in Kenosha, Wis.
[image error]Trolley attraction
Ed grew up in Chicago in the 1940s. Trolleys were starting to lose ridership to cars, but they saw a temporary resurgence during WWII. The large vehicles running along streets powered by a thin pole connected to a wire caught Ed’s attention.
“I was five years old, and it always fascinated me to see these things come down the street on a track,” he said.
Ed would ride on the streetcars with his mother and stand next to the motorman and pretend to be driving the trolley.
As a teenager living near San Francisco, he discovered that trolley museums existed, and he joined one in the Bay Area.
“I had thought I must be the only one who liked that stuff,” Ed said.
Like other trolley museum members, he started taking pictures of streetcars and collecting books and magazines about streetcar systems.
Trolleys were a slower form of transportation, primarily designed for urban areas that provided mass transportation around a city. However, they fell victim to the same problems as trains. After WWII gas rationing ended, people began purchasing and using automobiles, and trolley ridership declined.
So by the 1950s most of the trolley systems in the United States had gone out of business, and their cars had been junked, sent off to museums, or abandoned.
It is because of the streetcars at the Windber Trolley Graveyard that Ed moved to Windber in 1992. Before that, he was living in Thurmont, Md., and working in Washington, DC, with the Army Corps of Engineers. However, he had the opportunity to purchase 10 streetcars from the Philadelphia Transit System (SEPTA). He decided that he needed to buy them to help keep that vanishing era of history from disappearing entirely.
He rented a railroad siding near his home and stored his streetcars there. Then the opportunity came to buy even more streetcars.
“Well I couldn’t fit them all in my driveway, but by then I was retired and flexible about where I lived,” Ed said.[image error]
He began searching for a suitable and affordable piece of property and found the old storage yard in Windber. He rented the property from Berwind Coal.
“It’s kind of amusing,” he said. “The railyard was all covered over with trees and bush, and several local Windber residents didn’t even realize there was a railyard back there.”
That is also the most fascinating part of the trolley graveyard. Once you walk past the buildings, you follow the track through some brush and trees to see lines of trolley cars.
If you climb in them, you need to be careful. Some of the floors are missing, and most of the windows have been broken so there is lots of glass on the floor.
The dozen trolleys that are in decent shape and Ed hopes to see restored are kept in the repair building out of the elements. However, such a restoration project is a massive undertaking and impossible for one man. So he keeps those trolleys protected in the hopes that one day they once again run in one of the communities with whom he works.
His “hobby” of collecting streetcars is now a business. He restores the best of the trolleys, sells parts from the ones that are beyond hope, and lobbies cities to include trolley lines in their tourism and economic development plans.
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