![]() The car in 2013 | |
Established | 1981 |
---|---|
Dissolved | 2021 |
Location | 800-840 Electric Ave, Seal Beach, California 90740 |
Coordinates | 33°44′38″N118°06′17″W / 33.74390°N 118.10462°W |
Founder | Seal Beach Historical Society |
Owner | Seal Beach Lions Club |
The Red Car Museum, also known as the Pacific Electric Museum, was a museum in Old Town Seal Beach, California. It operated in Pacific Electric car #1734 and displayed artifacts relating to the company and local history books. [1] It currently is a landmark for passerby, and claims to be the only Red Car left in Orange County. [2] Located on the city's "Greenbelt," it borders the Mary Wilson Library and Seal Beach Centennial House.
Red Cars first appeared in Seal Beach on July 4, 1904, just three years after Henry E. Huntington first formed Pacific Electric. The streetcars were popular until the 50s when automobiles took over. The Seal Beach Historical Society bought the car in 1976 and started restoring it, opening it in 1981. [1] The streetcar the museum operated in, #1734, was built in 1925. [3]
A petition asking for a change of ownership of the car garnered over 500 signatures in 2020, causing the city to terminate the car's lease in early 2021. It was created due to people noticing the lack of effort in improving and restoring the museum. [4] [5] Work started to be done on the car beginning in November of that year, and the renovations finished soon after. The society removed the items from the museum following the cancellation of the lease [6] before it was repurchased by the Seal Beach Lions Club, a local division of Lions Clubs International, for $1,501. The Lions Club restored the railroad crossing sign in front of the streetcar and completed a cleanup of the vehicle itself. [7] [8]
The museum contained photographs, clothing for its time, seashells, newspapers, and some of Pacific Electric's legal papers. [1] All of the museum's artifacts are currently in possession of the Seal Beach Historical Society, who took them with it when they were bought out. [6]
Seal Beach is a coastal city in Orange County, California, United States. As of the 2020 census, the population was 25,242, up from 24,168 at the 2010 census.
The Pacific Electric Railway Company, nicknamed the Red Cars, was a privately owned mass transit system in Southern California consisting of electrically powered streetcars, interurban cars, and buses and was the largest electric railway system in the world in the 1920s. Organized around the city centers of Los Angeles and San Bernardino, it connected cities in Los Angeles County, Orange County, San Bernardino County and Riverside County.
The Willamette Shore Trolley is a heritage railroad or heritage streetcar that operates along the west bank of the Willamette River between Portland and Lake Oswego in the U.S. state of Oregon. The right-of-way is owned by a group of local-area governments who purchased it in 1988 in order to preserve it for potential future rail transit. Streetcar excursion service began operating on a trial basis in 1987, lasting about three months, and regular operation on a long-term basis began in 1990. The Oregon Electric Railway Historical Society has been the line's operator since 1995.
The San Diego Electric Railway (SDERy) was a mass transit system in Southern California, United States, using 600 volt DC streetcars and buses.
Old Pueblo Trolley is a non-profit, educational corporation based in Tucson, in the U.S. state of Arizona, that is dedicated to the preservation of Arizona's mass transit history. The name also commonly refers to the heritage streetcar line which OPT began operating in 1993, on which service is currently indefinitely suspended. OPT consists of three divisions that each fill a specific role in preserving the state's mass transit history. The divisions are the Street Railway Division, Motor Bus Division and the Museum Division.
The Baltimore Streetcar Museum (BSM) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit museum. It is located at 1911 Falls Road in Baltimore, Maryland. The museum is dedicated to preserving Baltimore's public transportation history, especially the streetcar era.
The Glendale and Montrose Railway Company (G&M) was an interurban electrified railway in Southern California, in the United States. It was unique among the Los Angeles local railways, as it was among the area's only interurban line never absorbed into the expansive Pacific Electric system.
Streetcars or trolley(car)s were once the chief mode of public transit in hundreds of North American cities and towns. Most of the original urban streetcar systems were either dismantled in the mid-20th century or converted to other modes of operation, such as light rail. Today, only Toronto still operates a streetcar network essentially unchanged in layout and mode of operation.
The Jewett Car Company was an early 20th-century American industrial company that manufactured streetcars and interurban cars.
The Hollywood Subway, as it is most commonly known, officially the Belmont Tunnel, was a subway tunnel used by the interurban streetcars of the Pacific Electric Railway. It ran from its northwest entrance in today's Westlake district to the Subway Terminal Building, in the Historic Core, the business and commercial center of Los Angeles from around the 1910s through the 1950s. The Subway Terminal was one of the Pacific Electric Railway’s two main hubs, the other being the Pacific Electric Building at 6th and Main. Numerous lines proceeded from the San Fernando Valley, Glendale, Santa Monica and Hollywood into the tunnel in Westlake and traveled southeast under Crown and Bunker Hill towards the Subway Terminal.
Glendale–Burbank is a defunct Pacific Electric railway line that was operational from 1904 to 1955 in Southern California, running from Downtown Los Angeles to Burbank via Glendale. Short lines terminated Downtown and in North Glendale, including the popular Edendale Local.
The Port of Los Angeles Waterfront Red Car Line was a 1.5-mile (2.4 km) heritage streetcar line for public transit along the waterfront in San Pedro, at the Port of Los Angeles in Los Angeles, California. The line operated between July 2003 and September 2015, when service was discontinued due to major construction projects that resulted in the demolition of a portion of the route.
The Southeastern Railway Museum is a railroad museum located in Duluth, Georgia, in suburban Atlanta.
The Balboa Line was the southernmost route of the Pacific Electric Railway. It ran between Downtown Los Angeles and the Balboa Peninsula in Orange County by way of North Long Beach, though the route was later cut back to the Newport Dock. It was designated as route 17.
5 or the 5 Car was a streetcar line operated by the Los Angeles Railway, later named the Los Angeles Transit Lines, and by the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority. From 1920 to 1932, this route was known as the E Car. This was changed as part of a method to distinguish routes that lacked loops at their termini. Consequently, the 5 Car was unique during the LAMTA era in that it did not use PCC streetcars. It used buses from 1955 to 1964, transferring from LATL in 1958, then splitting the line in two in 1961, until all lines were turned over to SCRTD in August 1964.
Streetcars in Los Angeles over history have included horse-drawn streetcars and cable cars, and later extensive electric streetcar networks of the Los Angeles Railway and Pacific Electric Railway and their predecessors. Also included are modern light rail lines.
The Southern California Railway Museum, formerly known as the Orange Empire Railway Museum, is a railroad museum in Perris, California, United States. It was founded in 1956 at Griffith Park in Los Angeles before moving to the former Pinacate Station as the "Orange Empire Trolley Museum" in 1958. It was renamed "Orange Empire Railway Museum" in 1975 after merging with a museum then known as the California Southern Railroad Museum, and adopted its current name in 2019. The museum also operates a heritage railroad on the museum grounds.
Streetcars in Redlands transported people across the city and region from 1889 until 1936. The city's network of street railways peaked around 1908 before the patchwork of separate companies was consolidated under the Pacific Electric.
The Pacific Electric Railway established streetcar services in Long Beach in 1902. Unlike other cities where Pacific Electric operated local streetcars, Long Beach's system did not predate the company's services. Long Beach's network of streetcars peaked around 1911 with over 30 miles (48 km) of tracks throughout the city. Local services were discontinued in 1940, but interurban service to Los Angeles persisted until 1961. The route of the former main interurban line was rebuilt in the late 1980s as the Metro Blue Line, which operates at-grade with car traffic for a portion of its length.
SBHS/RCM is well known. The museum is in the AAA travel book and on the OC historical map. The museum is a Pacific electric railway red car. It is the only one left in Orange County.