June 2013 Main Line vol5 No4 - Seashore Trolley Museum

collection including many that were not in our holdings. It was great fun to talk with George as
our common memories overlap many of the major and especially minor players in the intercity
bus industry of 60-odd years ago. As George’s wife noted - bus nuts can talk forever.
The Collection -
The several levels of inventorying of the overall New England Electric Railway Historical
Society (NEERHS) collection also continue. Specific materials such as albums and individual
photos continue to be transported to York County Community College (YCCC) for individual
identification, inventory, scanning and packing in protective sleeves, etc. as needed. Additional
movement of materials to the storage containers from both the old library and boxcar are
stalled at the moment as the receipt of the OR Cummings Collection plus the more recent
noted above have overloaded our space. We need to accelerate our processing effort to free
up additional space.
Funding -
The NEERHS has incorporated results of the Feasibility Study into the Strategic Plan. The
Trustees are currently evaluating the new information and as part of revisions to the Strategic
Plan the overall site plan and development goals are being reviewed. The Feasibility Study
identified and recommended a preference for coordinated planning and development for the
museum campus. To that end the Executive Director has established a Site Planning Team as
discussed previously. The NEERHS Development Committee is looking into other near and
longer term grant possibilities for the Library.
Please remember when sending donations for the library to note that it is for Library
Development – Fund 951.
Do You Recognize?
Last Month’s Do You Recognize -
I went a bit afield for the May “Do You Recognize”.
The city, St. Petersburg, Russia (nee Petrograd/Leningrad) was founded by Swedish settlers
who built a fortress there in 1611. Unfortunately for these settlers it was an attractive location
for control of trade and in 1703 the fortress was captured by Tsar Peter the Great of Russia. A
new city was built at the location, partially through the labor of the Swedish prisoners. In
1712/13 the new city became Russia’s capital and, other than a brief interlude from 1728 to
1732, remained the capital until the 1918 revolution.
St. Petersburg, Leningrad at the time, once had the largest tram network in the world,
consisting of about 340 kilometers of unduplicated track into the late 1980s. Street railways
arrived in the 1860s in form of horse-drawn rail carriages. Electrification was experimented
with in 1880 but dropped as the conversion was considered too expensive. In the winter of
1894 electrification was attempted for temporary service with track laid on the adjacent river’s
ice. This resulted in a drawn out legal battle with the horse railway that possessed a monopoly