Connections and Coincidences

Alice Kay left a comment on the recent entry about riding a trolley car with my dad saying, "I've got a story to tell you someday. It's about an old trolley car that was being restored in an old building in Dushore quite a few years ago by a guy my dad knew. He had Steamtown connections."

So when time permitted, Alice Kay told me about a friend of her father's named Ed Blossom that had a trolley car renovation and repair shop in Dushore, Pennsylvania. As you might know, her father owned a short-line railroad called the Towanda Monroeton Shippers Lifeline, which was part of a branch line of the Lehigh Valley Railroad that ran to Dushore, Pennsylvania and further south.


Ed Blossom, with the help from some friends, purchased the remains of the Lehigh Valley Transit Company's trolley car #801 as well as some other train and trolley cars, and established the Dushore Car Company in the small Sullivan County, Pennsylvania town. Ed was well known in the trolley restoration world from coast to coast and he was recognized as an authority on the value of transit vehicles.


After some rumination, Alice Kay decided that in 1976, shortly after she married her husband Terri but before her oldest child was born, she and Terri visited Ed's repair shop in Dushore and saw LVT #801 upclose and firsthand.

In 1977, the Dushore Car Co. restoration shop was moved to a two-track car barn built adjacent to the Topton-Kutztown branch of the former Reading Railroad in Berks County, Pennsylvania now the tourist Hawk Mountain Line running a steam engine.


On September 24, 2000, after spending 33 years seeing to it that the (then) 88-year-old trolley car built in 1912 by the Jewett Car Company in Newark, Ohio would be preserved for future generations, 71 year old Ed, watched the trolley car loaded onto a a flat-bed trailer near a rail car barn on the outskirts of Topton to begin a new chapter of its life in the Electric City Trolley Station & Museum in Scranton.


Its exterior restored, right down the the distinctive LVT Co. gold-leaf lettering and arched "stained-glass" windows, the 65-passenger, 41-ton car is undergoing mechanical and interior restoration in the museum's car shop where I saw it on May 1, 2010.

The power of people behind the blogosphere and the Internet awe me.

We are all connected to each other in many ways and many ways in which we are not aware.

Something prompted me to take a closer look at LVT #801 - I couldn't put my finger on the "what caused me to do that?" and it was only later, harnessing the power of Internet searching, that this connection - this link between me and someone else - surfaced.

In memory of Edward Henry Blossom, October 20, 1930 - November 22, 2004. I think I would have greatly enjoyed sharing a lunch hour or two with the man.

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