Portland Vintage Trolley - The Cars

The Cars

The four streetcars/trolleys—these two terms are synonyms in most parts of the United States—were built by the Gomaco Trolley Company, of Ida Grove, Iowa, in 1991 and early 1992. They were designed to replicate, as closely as practicable, a design of streetcar which the J. G. Brill Company supplied to Portland in 1904. Those ten cars were originally numbered 201–210, but were renumbered 501–510 in 1905 and kept those numbers for the remainder of their working lives, which ended in 1950 with the abandonment of Portland's last three city streetcar lines. Although Brill cars 501–510 were not restricted to the Council Crest route, they provided all of the service on that line, and so came to be known by Portlanders as the "Council Crest cars". Two of the original Council Crest streetcars, 503 and 506, are preserved by the Oregon Electric Railway Historical Society at its museum in Brooks, Oregon, and Gomaco was able to use those cars as patterns for the replicas.

The four cars built in 1991–92 by Gomaco have the same red-and-cream colors as the original 1904 cars and include most of the latter's features, such as padded rattan seats with reversible backrests, carved oak interiors, brass handrails, pull-down window shades and doors which can only be manually opened and closed, by the motorman (operator) or conductor. They were given fleet numbers 511–514 as a continuation of the earlier cars' number series, and in tribute to them. On the front of the new Vintage Trolleys is painted a slogan that once adorned the ends of their antecedents, See Portland from Council Crest, a reference to the views of the city available from the route's upper terminus, atop Council Crest. The old trolleys had all-wood bodies, whereas the replicas have steel frames, concealed by wood, for better safety and durability. Because they share the same route as MAX, they also use a more modern style of current-collector to draw power from the overhead wires, a cross between a pantograph (the type of collector used by MAX) and a bow collector, instead of the trolley poles which the city's original trolley cars used.