National Capital Trolley Museum

The NCTM Visitor Center is the embodiement of the Museum's mission - to collect and preserve artifacts of electrical street railways and to interpret their impact upon the development of communities in the Washington DC region.

The NCTM Visitor Center, the street car rides through Northwest Branch Park, and our Educational Program are all designed to fulfill the Museum's mission to collect and preserve objects related to the electric railway systems of the region and to use these objects to interpret the role of these transportation systems in the growth and development of the region and the impact of this technology on people's everyday lives.

Visitor Center

Although brand new in 2009, the Visitor Center evokes street car history in some of the design features of the building and the car houses, taking the visitor back into the times when the building, operation, and maintenance of street car systems occupied a substantial portion of the nation's workforce. Some of our oldest communities were actually the first suburbs - cool oases far away from the center of the hot humid city (when transportation was by foot or horseback) - developed by entrepreneurs who not only sold the land for the homes but built the street car lines to get people and goods back and forth.

The Main Hall provides several glimpses back into history, about the street car's influence on various local communities, about the ubiquity of the street car in urban environments as portrayed in early movies, and a working model of street cars, automobiles, and pedestrians in Chevy Chase during the 1930's.

Conduit from a Washington Street

Conduit Hall showcases some of the "hardware" associated with street cars and the generation and transmission of electricity to power them.

Street Car Hall exhibits several different street cars from the region and from Europe. Not all of these are the beauties they once were - some are sadly in need of attention - but they still represent a signficant segment of street car history.

Finally, the ride on the street car (from the Main Hall) is the living interpretation of bygone days - a ride into the woods as Maryland and Virginia would have looked more than 100 years ago when the first electrical street cars went out beyond Washington DC city limits.

Fees for Museum Entry and Street Car Rides are collected by the cashier at the entrance to the Vistor Center.

March 23, 2013