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Jeremy Whiteman photo, all rights reserved. Used with permission.
Car 861, representing the Milwaukee & Suburban Transport Corporation, was built by St. Louis Car Company in 1920 for the Milwaukee Electric Railway & Light Company. The company shops had produced a pilot car in 1919 as an in-house project to develop a lighter car to reduce power consumption. Altogether, some 200 similar cars were the typical Milwaukee streetcar for nearly four decades. No. 861 represents a specialized adaptation of lightweight design to the tastes of a large system and has wide, oblique windows on either side of a small center window at each end, giving wrap-around vision without the expense of curved glass. Car 861 was donated to Seashore by The Transport Company in 1958, after the last car line, No. 10 - Wells Street, was discontinued. This company, incidentally, later became the last private firm to operate the entire system in a major metropolitan area in this country without being subsidized. It was not taken over by a transit authority until 1975, and much of management stayed on under public ownership.
History from Historic Cars: The National Collection at the Seashore Trolley Museum by Ben Minnich
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