Kingston, New York has not one, but two museums dedicated to transportation history, with the Trolley Museum of New York sitting Just down the road from the Hudson River Maritime Museum. In fact, you could ride the trolley from one to the other, although the distance is just a couple of blocks.
While the Maritime Museum is a true Kingston native, the Trolley Museum is an incomer with its roots in Brooklyn, where it started as a way to preserve some of Brooklyn’s last trolleys in 1955.
It wasn’t until 1983 that it found a permanent home in Kingston, after storing its growing collection of vehicle all over the New York City area. In Kingston, it found a home in a former maintenance yard of the Ulster and Delaware railroad, and a piece of track along the waterfront that had previously handled freight cars.
The museum’s collection, much of it still under restoration in shops below the museum’s display area, includes quite a variety of trolleys and subway cars, including some from New York, Boston, Oslo, Hamburg and Jamestown, PA. Jamestown’s Car 358, at top, runs the museum’s mile-and-change excursion route to a riverfront park.
George G recognized the scene from this photo—Congratulations!
It has a guilty secret: It’s no longer an electric trolley; the museum can’t use an overhead power line, and converted the car to diesel operation. It will be joined on the tracks next year by the recently-restored New York City subway car 6398, an R16 model. Below it, an older R4.
Inside the museum, there’s an amazing collection of trolley and subway memorabilia of all kinds, ranging from models to photos to bits and pieces of conductor’s equipment and more. And, for the subway fans, the now-retired control board for New York City’s Rockaway Beach line, complete with journal memories of the men who operated it.
There’s also a small model railroad layout that shows Ulster and Delaware operations in the Kingston area. The layout also includes what we hope is not an actual memory…check out the foreground of the picture.
And, of course, there’s a souvenir shop…complete with a model tram that circles the inside of the museum building.
Planning a visit? The museum’s 2019 season starts on April 27, and runs through the last Sunday in October. It’s open weekends and holidays only, from 12 to 5 pm. If you buy a ticket at the Maritime Museum, you get a discount when you pay for your Trolley Museum ticket.
