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Russ Thompson wipes the excess stain off of the cherry wood transom window frames at the trolley barn Wednesday, as, from left, Donna Thompson, John Cheuvront and Carl Abraham watch.
LORI ASSA — The Daily Astorian |
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LORI ASSA — The Daily Astorian
The 22 windows of the trolley have had their brass seals polished. |
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‘We now own the trolley’
Astoria group pays off Old 300’s mortgage, starts repairs and restoration
By SANDRA SWAIN
The Daily Astorian
“We’ve burned the mortgage. We now own the trolley,” a beaming Mayor Willis Van Dusen recently announced to the Astoria City Council.
Known as Old 300, the Astoria Riverfront Trolley is the mayor’s pride and joy and a favorite of visitors and residents alike. The Astoria Riverfront Trolley Association (ARTA) had been leasing it from the San Antonio Art Museum for $1 a year.
But with concerns rising that someone else might come along and buy it, last August the Trolley Association borrowed $50,000 from the Bank of Astoria and made the trolley its own.
In the short time since then, the community came forward with enough money to pay off the loan and then some. “Everyone was more than generous,” said Van Dusen, who besides being mayor is president of ARTA. The trolley is insured for $450,000, he said, so ARTA got a very good deal.
The $57,000 included about $8,000 in donations of $10 to $100 from community members in response to an ad in The Daily Astorian, according to ARTA member Cindy Howe, executive director of the Sunset Empire Transportation District, who took charge of collecting the money. “People are so in love with that trolley,” Howe said. “People just said, ‘Yeah.’ They brought in checks and cash and said, ‘Here.’”
In addition, ARTA allocated $5,000 from its operations budget, the city of Astoria gave $5,000, the Astoria Sunday Market chipped in $1,000 and the Astoria-Warrenton Area Chamber of Commerce put up $150. The rest came in the form of $5,000 donations from a number of local businesses, individual benefactors and family foundations, said Howe.
Fares offset by costsSince passengers pay $1 to ride the trolley, and it’s operated mainly by volunteers, Howe said some people wonder why ARTA couldn’t just use the fare money to buy Old 300.
But in fact, there are plenty of expenses to offset that income, Howe explained. There’s the $13,500 annual payment on the loan that helped finance the trolley barn, a $500 annual administrative fee to ODOT’s rail division, fuel for the diesel generator that powers the trolley, the phone bill, heat and electricity for the barn, janitorial service by Coast Rehabilitation Service, and repairing and maintaining the 93-year-old trolley.
Repairs last year added up to $6,300. Also, ARTA has two employees; a scheduler who is paid a “pittance” and fills in himself when there’s no one else to cover a shift; and a mechanic who helps maintain and repair the trolley.
“We try to keep costs down, but it still breaks even, plus a little,” Howe said.
Dan Bartlett, Astoria’s former city manager, said it’s a good thing ARTA acted when it did to purchase the trolley. “Heritage trolleys have become popular across the nation. We were in a five-year lease for a buck a year that could be broken,” he said.
But for a long time, the San Antonio Art Museum, wasn’t interested in selling. “They were in the midst of a major museum expansion. The trolley was a ‘buzzillion’ miles away. It was not a priority for them,” Bartlett explained.
But then a serendipitous encounter between Astoria City Council member Russ Warr and an influential Texan with ties to Gearhart kicked the trolley’s priority up a notch. Warr said the man came into his business, Astoria Granite Works, to talk about putting a marker in the dunes to memorialize his dead son, who had loved the North Coast.
At some point, the conversation turned to the trolley and the Texan, who had contacts on the San Antonio Museum board, said he’d try to help Astorians make Old 300 their own. Warr said he didn’t really expect anything to come of it, but six weeks later the man called with a name and a private line to call.
Warr gave the information to Bartlett, who made the call and sealed the deal.
Bartlett said the running joke is that the museum board finally let the trolley stay in Astoria because they couldn’t find a way to hang it on the wall. In fact, the museum used ARTA’s $50,000 to buy a piece of art.
Loyal supportersWhatever the mechanism that secured the trolley for the long haul, Old 300 has a huge contingent of dedicated fans.
“This trolley’s one of the best things that’s happened to Astoria since they built the Column. It had almost 60,000 riders during 2005,” said Carl Abraham, a retired optician who spends much of his free time driving the trolley and puttering around in the trolley barn.
“Now that we own it, we can fix it right and well, so we don’t have to do this every year. We were skeptical before we owned the trolley,” added Ken Lockett, also a trolley motorman.
Abraham, Lockett and Russ Thompson, another motorman and trolley aficionado, have been logging long hours at the trolley barn for weeks, as the latest round of repair and restoration goes forward. Many others are also taking part, and some have lent tools for the project. The goal is to have Old 300 back on the tracks by Thursday.
That will give ARTA time to recertify the dozens of motormen (and motorwomen) and conductors who pilot the 20-ton machine up and down the riverfront. A large pool of certified volunteers is needed to fill schedules for daily runs during spring break, which starts at the end of the month and always brings an influx of visitors. When spring break ends, the trolley will cut back to weekends until May 1, when the daily schedule resumes and continues through summer and into fall.
But for now, Old 300 stands in the trolley barn on a siding over the pit, looking woebegone without its side windows, like someone whose false teeth are still in a glass on the nightstand. The windows’ uprights, made of white oak, remain. They have already been repaired, with new pieces cut out and glued into place to replace wood that has rotted. The new frames for the transom windows, each one running the length of the trolley’s passenger area, are made of cherry wood, carefully crafted by Kevin Palo, a local artisan who specializes in historic work.
“If the epoxy’s done right, this work will last 100 years,” said Palo.
The frames, stained and varnished, will hold the 22 small windows with decorative etching and rounded tops, which are carefully stacked on a table. The larger windows that fit below them and can be opened and closed, lean against a wall, their brass seals newly polished, waiting to be installed between the uprights.
Their brass guides, worn out from decades of friction with wood frames going up and down, have been repaired and some will be replaced by replicas being made by a sheet metal company in Gearhart. Most of the windows are original to the 93-year-old trolley.
The trolley’s roof, which like airplane wings of old is made of canvas, will be washed with Woolite. The rest of the trolley’s body is made of wood.
Inside the trolley, the seats have been sanded and will be coated with urethane varnish. They and the trolley’s other wooden components are getting most of the attention this time around, as volunteers prepare the trolley for the spring season according to Lockett.
Right now, he said, “It’s nothing major mechanically. It’s all major wood.”
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