National Capital Trolley Museum

The National Capital Trolley Museum records two founding dates, 1959 and 1969, before it incorporated as the National Capital Historical Museum of Transportation, Inc. on January 4 1961. After an early stint in Lake Roland Park, the organization split its collections in 1966, moving the National Capital Trolley Museum to its present Colesville site; groundbreaking for the new location occurs on November 20 1965. The museum ran its first streetcar in October 1969, and in 1970 O. Roy Chalk donated several historic Washington streetcars, although that same year the museum’s unique air‑conditioned PCC car 1512 was damaged by arson and later scrapped. A serious collision damaged cars 1053 and 766 in 1987, and a catastrophic carbarn fire on September 28 2003 destroyed roughly one‑third of the collection. New visitor, display, and maintenance buildings are constructed during the winter of 2008–2009, allowing the museum to reopen on January 16 2010, and in July 2020 it acquired Capital Transit 1470 from the Virginia Museum of Transportation, further expanding the world’s largest surviving Washington, D.C., street‑car collection.