Showing posts with label Sheridan County Museum. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sheridan County Museum. Show all posts

Saturday, December 13, 2025

Sheridan Streetcar Relocated

Sheridan Railway & Light 115, the only electric car from Wyoming to be preserved in its home state, has been relocated. According to this article on the Sheridan Media site, the car was moved in November from its recent location in a construction company yard along Higby Road to a new site southwest of Sheridan on the property of the Sheridan Community Land Trust's Big Goose Natural Area. There, the plan is to construct a shelter over the car and, presumably fix it up.

I'm really not sure how many electric railways ever operated in Wyoming, but I wouldn't be surprised if they could be numbered on one hand. I believe car 115 is one of only two Wyoming streetcars in existence, the other being an ex-Cheyenne Birney preserved at the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan. It was built by American in 1911 and it's pretty typical of single-truck deck-roof cars American built for a lot of cities. One unusual aspect is that it was built for single-end operation, with doors on only one side, however it was equipped with controllers at both ends and seems to have been operated in double-ended fashion as a necessity, at least initially.

And in unrelated news, thanks to Olin Anderson for passing along word that the Tacoma "turtleback" streetcar body that was located at the Ballard Terminal Railroad in Seattle has been demolished. I was never able to figure out this car's number, and between that and having virtually no solid information on it, it never made it onto the PNAERC list, though I did have on my "non-preserved cars" list. My best guess is that it was a 200-series cars identical to car 202, which is preserved in Arlington.

Monday, May 4, 2020

Where did the Wyoming streetcar go?

There's only one electric car from the great state of Wyoming on the PNAERC list, and it's this one: Sheridan Railway & Light 115. But now it's gone. So where did it go?

Car 115 is definitely an oddity. Besides being the only car I know of from Wyoming that is preserved, it is also a single-trucker that in recent decades has been exhibited atop a pair of Bettendorf freight car trucks. It used to be on display in a small park next to Sheridan's Best Western but at some point (I think in the late 1990s) it was moved to a spot in front of the Sheridan County Museum just off the Interstate. It was there as recently as 2015, though according to photos at this link it was really starting to deteriorate.

But now it's vanished, and it was gone by mid-2018 if Google Street View is to be believed. So where has it gone? Hopefully it hasn't been scrapped, though its condition didn't seem that bad. Hopefully it's just been squirreled away somewhere until it can be fixed up. Anyone know?

UPDATE: Mystery solved - check out the comments!