New York Museum of Transportation

The New York Museum of Transportation traces its roots to the Mage & Co. street‑car collection that was auctioned in 1973 after Hurricane Agnes flooded the Magee Transportation Museum in 1972, and to a 1973 lease of an abandoned dairy barn in West Henrietta where Rochester Transit Corporation car 157 was placed on 5 October 1973 and car 107 followed a month later. A formal nonprofit charter issued in 1975 gave the museum its official name, the same year it acquired the former Philadelphia‑based snow‑sweeper C‑130 (January 1975) and began salvaging track material from the western end of the Rochester Subway. Construction of the demonstration railroad starts in 1976, reaches nearly three‑quarters of a mile by 1979, and by 1980 the museum offers rides on Fairmont track cars; the line connects to the Rochester & Genesee Valley Railroad Museum in 1993 after a joint effort that began in the late‑1990s. After installing the first quarter‑mile of overhead trolley wire in 2001, NYMT runs the only electric trolley rides in New York State, extending electrification to the Midway station in 2006 and receiving additional historic bodies in 1996 (Northern Texas Traction car 409), 1997 (NY State Railways car 437), 2009 (PTC snow‑sweeper C‑125) and 2014 (NJ Transit PPC 7). Earlier street‑car donations—Rochester Transit Corporation car 1246 in 1941 (scrapped 1950) and Rochester Subway car 60 in 1956—illustrate the museum’s long‑standing preservation effort.