In 1977, Carol Tunner was a volunteer with the Fort Collins Junior Women’s Club and on the lookout for a community beautification project.
“Somebody said, ‘Why don’t you take that old trolley in Library Park and fix it up and just put it out on the plaza and make it a tourist information or visitor center or something?’” Tunner said. “So I said, ‘What old trolley?’ And the rest is history.”
Tunner and a group of about 60 members of the fledgling Fort Collins Municipal Railway Society spent seven years restoring Birney Safety Car 21 back to its original working state. They also reinstalled one-and-a-half miles of the original track along Mountain Avenue.
In 1984, the trolley began operations again -- not necessarily as a means of public transportation (although, Tunner said, there are folks who do use the trolley to get to City Park or to bring groceries home from Beaver’s Market). In addition to people drawn to the car’s novelty, it also attracted train and history buffs.
The Denver and Interurban Railroad built the streetcar line in Fort Collins in 1907. Back then, it featured more than six miles of track and a ride was just 5 cents. Cars ran from 5 a.m. to 12 a.m., taking riders to the downtown businesses, as well as the high school and Colorado A&M College (which would later become Colorado State University).
The railway changed hands a few times but that 5 cent fare remained the same until 1951, when the popularity of cars finally made this form of public transportation obsolete. The trolley cars were sold to various museums and collectors -- except Car 21 -- which was placed in the park for children to play on.
The society eventually “sold” the train and the tracks back to the City of Fort Collins. The price for the project, which cost $2.5 million to construct?
“It was supposed to be for $6 -- $1 for each of the six sections (of track) -- but in the end I think it was $1,” Tunner said.
The society operates the trolley each spring and summer at no cost to the city. It is completely volunteer run and funded solely through grants, donations and fares: $2 for adults and $1 for children and seniors.
Tunner said there are two types of people who typically volunteer with the group: historic preservationists and train buffs.
Euan Webb is the later.
“This has been a childhood dream of mine for quite a while to put on a conductor hat and actually conduct a railcar,” said Webb, who attended a recent conductor training session. “This is -- I’m giddy.”
That’s exactly what Dan and Thea Sapienza like to hear -- volunteers who have the same excitement that they did when they began volunteering with the group
Five years ago, the Fort Collins couple were looking for an opportunity to get more involved in their community . That’s when they happened upon the railway society’s ad looking for trolley conductors. Dan was excited -- but also a little confused.
“I told all my friends, ‘I’m going to drive the trolley’ -- which is not what a conductor does,” Dan said. “What it turns out what I do is I talk about the history of the car, and I help the motorman to ensure that the passengers are safe.”
The motorman -- that’s Thea -- is the one who drives the trolley. And yes, ‘motor-MAN’ is still the correct term.
“Technically, motorman is gender neutral, just like a lot of other military titles,” Thea said. “During the world wars, when women actually drove they were called motorettes. But that -- it’s just too silly -- I can’t do it.”
Dan and Thea also train new conductors and motormen. Dan handles the history of the trolley and Thea trains the new drivers. The couple, who are in their mid-30s, also serve on the board (Dan as the society’s vice president and Thea on the Board of Directors) and hope to usher in a new era of volunteers.
“With Dan and I being younger and on the board, we’ve been able to push the boundaries of what the board is willing to do and how they see the work that we’re doing and how we’re promoting it,” Thea said.
That includes increased visibility on social media, and it appears to be working. Of the six new conductor volunteers the society is currently training, four of them found out about it through social media, Dan said.
And who knows where these new volunteers can help take the program? If the original society members are any indication, pretty far.
“I think it’s really cool that a group of volunteers got together 40 years ago to restore such a cool piece of Fort Collins history,” Dan said. “And the original plan was just to turn it into a stationary display, but the volunteers were so over eager and motivated and excited about what they were doing, they made it drive. And so we’re on this car -- which is just a cool piece of Fort Collins history -- because of a bunch of volunteers 40 years ago who got carried away.”
