Car 56 was built by St. Louis in 1916 for Wisconsin Railway Light & Power, which was later combined with the city system in Winona, MN and rechristened Mississippi Valley Public Service. It's a pretty interesting car - it strongly resembles cars built by St. Louis for Evanston Railway and Johnstown Traction, but this series was fitted with unusual St. Louis 109A maximum traction trucks. It also had K-51 controllers, a type which doesn't appear anywhere else on my list. It's one of three surviving cars from MVPS, but the only double-truck car - the other two are a La Crosse Birney (which, ironically, was deaccessed by East Troy 20 years ago and I believe is in storage in its hometown) and a Winona single-trucker that was the subject of a major and recently completed restoration in Excelsior, MN.
It's nice to see this car saved for preservation. And it's the first time in a while that one of the larger, established, operating trolley museums has acquired an unrestored car body for preservation. The practice was pretty common in the 1980s and 1990s, with Seashore (the "last roundup") and IRM (the rather less dignified "body snatchers") leading the way, but by my count the last time one of the larger trolley museums acquired an unrestored car body that wasn't already preserved elsewhere was 2013, when Edmonton acquired a Regina single-trucker. A number of bodies have been acquired in the interim by smaller organizations, from Hoosier Heritage and Old Pueblo to a gaggle of local history groups, but the larger museums have largely abandoned the acquisition of car bodies.
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