A streetcar named nostalgia

Time is a track that runs both ways

The only trolley I knew growing up was the miniature one that ran through Mr. Rogers’ living room. I always found its appearance somewhat unsettling. Maybe this was due in part to the slightly creepy piano riff that presaged its arrival. But more significant, I think, was how it broke the rules of reality that were still so fresh to my childish mind. The ghostly car, which never carried a single passenger, emerged from a dark tunnel in the wall to take us to the Land of Make-Believe, where finely wrought hand puppets popped out from colorful set pieces to teach us lessons about sharing. How the hell did we get to this place? What sort of occult powers did this trolley have? 

It may not have been his intention, but Mr. Rogers got something right by casting the trolley as a liminal form of transport. Most of his young viewers had never seen such a thing. Humble, working-class trolleys and streetcars were mostly decommissioned before we were born, pushed out of business by the insatiable automobile. A few cities operated heritage systems of limited scope, some of which are still in service, but these mostly ran far beyond the margins of everyday life. The trolley was, and remains, a mode of transit that can be down to earth and otherworldly at the same time. 

One place you can still catch a trolley is the Shore Line Trolly Museum in East Haven, Connecticut, about a half-hour from where I grew up. It’s possible that I visited it during my Mr. Rogers days, but if so, I have no memories. Yet I’ve ridden its rails twice this summer, a pair of journeys that brought me far deeper into the past than my own childhood. 

The Shore Line Trolley Museum consists of a lone, 1.5-mile fragment of the Branford Electric Railway, a portion of the “F” line trolley route that ran next to Long Island Sound from 1900 to 1947. To visit, you drive through the sort of everyday suburban neighborhood you encounter in any mid-sized American town - the kind of neighborhood where I grew up - until the street suddenly morphs into two lines of track, where carefully restored old-timey streetcars loom over your car. After buying your tickets in a renovated station house, you can spend time wandering among rail memorabilia as you wait for the next ride. 

When it’s time, a volunteer conductor in full regalia helps you aboard, and you get a chance to look at the facsimiles of old advertisements - Cambria Savings Bank, Frigidaire, Easter Seals - before you take off over a stream and into the woods. Among the many peculiarities of this moving museum, the strangest and most beautiful is that the surrounding wetland it runs through, spanning thick forest and flowing marsh. It’s the sort of marginal space that fills me with a pang - the interstices of wood and yard, where the natural world flourishes between the jutting angles of workaday human life. Instead of clanging through the bustling city streets where you’d expect to find a trolley, we glided through towering reeds and glimmering inlets, the nearest houses hundreds of yards away. I’ve never felt more like a ghost. 

I took my first ride on the trolley with my one-year-old niece. It was the Fourth of July, and my family pretty much had the car to ourselves. It was one of those days so hot and humid that you felt shrink-wrapped in the air, but the breeze through the open windows helped us transcend the weather for a brief but memorable hour. My niece doesn’t have the words to express her opinion, but she seemed to enjoy the ride. 

Exactly 30 days later, I found myself clattering down the same track a second time. This visit was in honor of the older generation - specifically, to celebrate my dad’s 75th birthday. Since he wasn’t part of the first trip, we thought a vintage trolley ride would make a pleasant and unconventional surprise, not to mention an excuse for creaky old-age jokes (“This thing’s almost as ancient as you are, Fred, har har!”). So we booked a private car to toast the old man while he and the trolley were both in operational condition. 

Our volunteer conductor on this trip was an especially elderly man - older certainly than the guest of honor. But despite his prominent hearing aid and deep wrinkles, he sallied forth with the energy and enthusiasm of a child. As he drove us through the marshes of the Farm River Estuary, manmade scaffolding emerged at intervals from the water, with bushy nests spread out on top. “Ospreys!” the conductor shouted out after bringing us to a temporary halt. “See that red house on the other side of the water? I used to live there back in 1945. Every morning I would take out my rowboat to come out and feed them. They live to be 70 years old, and they can breed for 55 of them.”

Looking it up later, I learned that the oldest recorded osprey died at age 25. But time is a shaky conceit on this track. 

After reaching the end of the line - a clearing a few yards down from another unremarkable residential street - our man jumped down to the track to pull some switches, and haul us back in reverse. We sped backward in time until taking a side track about halfway to the station, where we pulled into the shade next to one of a several large sheds. Here, we enjoyed pizza and cupcakes and wine before stepping out to tour a few of the Museum’s 100 or so historic streetcars from various North American cities. 

I had enjoyed this tour on our previous visit, but this second pilgrimage had a more ceremonial air. The conductor described how he had ridden the “F” line trolley - including the very car he had driven us in - every day as a boy, before volunteering to help preserve it after service shut down. He rattled off the provenance and history of each acquisition we walked past, from Toronto, Atlanta, Chicago, and New Orleans (yes, it was on the line that ran to Desire). Most are in healthy operating condition and still taken out from time to time; they fully restore about one car a year. He pointed out one car that was originally from Brooklyn - a sign at the top read “Myrtle Avenue.” Before it arrived in my home state of Connecticut, well before I was born, this car had spent several decades running back and forth just a hundred yards from where I live today. I was the interloper, living its life in reverse.

But the eeriest car on the lot is also the newest. In a darkened barn sits one of the only intact New Jersey PATH train cars pulled from the wreckage of the World Trade Center after 9/11. Its unlit interior has been fully cleaned, with all its 2001-era advertisements fully intact on the walls - you’d never suspect that two decades ago it was salvaged from a scene of abominable wreckage. 

I found this car particularly sobering because I had been quite close it on its final day of operation. That same morning, I passed through the Cortlandt Street R train stop, just one block from the PATH station. The best I can calculate it, we pulled in a few minutes after the first plane hit. I was sitting in the front car that day, and when we pulled into Cortlandt the doors didn’t open - instead, a uniformed MTA employee with a toolbox opened the front door with a special key and closed it again before walking alone down the empty platform. No announcement was made, and I had no idea what had happened until I was prevented from entering my Midtown office building eight stops away. I saw the first tower fall on a storefront TV screen, and then ran to the corner of Sixth Avenue to watch the second. I think about that guy pretty often. 

After heading back to the trolley for the last leg of our journey, everyone disembarked and said our goodbyes, thanking the conductor for a memorable trip. My dad, suitably fawned over and gently mocked for being a relic on a relic, was given an affectionate sendoff. 

On the drive back to NYC - because of course we had to rent a car to make our way to this old trolley - Hope read me a text from the group chat. It turns out my dad had learned that our conductor was 99 years old. When he had told us about rowing that boat and feeding those strangely long-lived ospreys, it wasn’t a boy’s memory but that of a full-grown man - one who, it turns out, had already returned home after fighting in WWII. Doing some quick math, I realized he was 24 years old when my dad was born, 51 when I was. When I had my 9/11 experience - nearly half my lifetime ago - he was older than my dad is now. 

I can only imagine that, in some very literal way, the trolley has been keeping that man alive. Those cars have been running up and down that lonesome, wistful track for his entire life. Instead of letting it die when the cars took over, he was one of the people who kept it going. And he’s stayed committed to it for 77 years - longer than it ever carried commuters, almost all of them long dead. I can’t help but look down the track to my own 99th year. If I’m still alive, what will the world look like? What will I have cared enough to nurture for all that time?

There are, of course, things much older than the trolley. When it was built, Europeans had already dominated the landscape for hundreds of years with their horses and muskets and iron will. Yet even now, there are a few moments on the track when there are no buildings in sight, and you can imagine what the area looked like when the Quinnipiacs hunted and fished along the shore. Long Island Sound itself was formed when the ocean rushed in after retreating Ice Age glaciers scraped the ground clean. The ospreys, it seems, evolved millions of years before that. 

Geological history, the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, your own small but precious past: The trolley may run on its own fixed track, but you never know where it might take you.