The Heritage Streetcar of Fort Collins, Colorado

Originally operating from 1919 to 1951, the Fort Collins Municipal Railway reopened in 1984 as a seasonal “heritage” line, carrying passengers along a former service route in one of the original “Birney” cars.

The Fort Collins Municipal Railway’s car depot is situated on Oak Street, near City Park in northwestern Fort Collins. Once a regularly functioning city trolley in its own right, the Municipal Railway is now a seasonal “heritage streetcar,” a living exhibition of Fort Collins’s streetcar history. Birney Safety Car No. 21, one of the original cars manufactured for the Railway by the American Car Company, features prominently.

Fort Collins first acquired its own streetcar network in 1907, when the Denver & Interurban Company (D&I) built three lines of track that together carried three cars through the city’s burgeoning downtown. The D&I system did not last long, however; with the conclusion of World War I and the post-war boom in automobile sales, D&I was unable to compete. The company went bankrupt in 1918, and the Fort Collins streetcar abruptly ceased operation in July of that year.

Many citizens of Fort Collins came to rely on the streetcar as a means of transportation, and so voted for the city to acquire D&I’s defunct assets in January of 1919. Because the older cars used by D&I were too expensive to upgrade, the city purchased four affordable and efficient Birney cars from the American Car Company. The city acquired five more between 1920 and 1946. The Birney cars provided service on the Municipal Railway every ten to twenty minutes, with a fare of one nickel that was kept artificially low for the Railway’s operating duration.

The Municipal Railway was highly effective. Providing service from residential areas to the city center, as well as to nearby schools and amusement venues, the residents of Fort Collins loved the system. However, the rising popularity of automobiles on city streets proved inexorable, and service was discontinued in June of 1951. With the end of streetcar service, the Municipal Railway decommissioned and sold its Birney cars, all except No. 21, which the city put on display in front of Library Park.

There it sat until 1976, when the Fort Collins Junior Women’s Club began its effort to refurbish the old streetcar as part of a downtown beautification project. During the years-long process, volunteers decided that they wanted to restore No. 21 to operational capacity, which entailed restoring the tracks it had once called home and building a new repository to house it. The city and the beautification volunteers organized the Fort Collins Municipal Railway Society in 1980 to spearhead the new project. In 1984, No. 21 began operating again along Mountain Avenue, and the federal government added it to the National Register of Historic Places. Since then, the Municipal Railway has run No. 21 to and from City Park on spring and summer weekends; a refurbished Birney Car No. 25 joined it in 2020.

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