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William B. Young was an avid fan, enthusiast and historian of the\u00a0Connecticut Company, particularly its trolley cars, which controlled the\u00a0street railroad system that provided public transportation in the state’s towns and cities from 1905 to 1948.\u00a0 Mr. Young, born in 1942, spent much of his youth in Stamford and Roxbury, Connecticut, where he explored local trolley right-of-ways, collected railroad documents and memorabilia, took photographs, and rode the trains at every opportunity, not just in the state but across the country.\u00a0 While earning a degree in history (focusing\u00a0many of his term papers on transportation history) at Yale University he worked summers as\u00a0a Conductor on the Chicago Transit Authority.\u00a0 After he graduated in 1966 he\u00a0was commissioned as an Ensign in the U.S. Navy, serving as a Naval Aviator during the Vietnam War, and continued as a flight instructor after the war, when he left active duty in 1977.\u00a0 After his service he became a database programmer and lived in\u00a0North Carolina until his death in December 2010.<\/p>\n
Mr. Young compiled an enormous and extraordinarily\u00a0comprehensive collection of materials about the trolley system which includes publications, photographs, timetables, maps, postcards, manuals, and reports.\u00a0 He corresponded with an extensive network of other knowledgeable railroad and trolley historians, where the minutiae of the cars and the broad history of the company were discussed and dissected with equal interest and regard.\u00a0 His ultimate goal in amassing this information was the creation of a car roster database, which classified each car in the system by number, owner, purchase cost, weight, roof, type, builder, first year in service, accident history, motor type, compressor type, and controller.<\/p>\n
In\u00a0February 2011 Mr. Young’s sister, Mary Young, contacted the archives about donating the collection.\u00a0 In the time between this initial contact and its ultimate donation in June 2012, Ms. Young and\u00a0 her sister Lucy gathered the materials from Mr. Young’s home in\u00a0North Carolina, separated those materials most appropriate for donation, boxed and organized the materials by format, created “finding guides” and other descriptions to ease discovery of the materials, and\u00a0provided much of the written information about Mr. Young and the company that helped place it all in\u00a0context.\u00a0This comprehensive collection is now available for use by the general public, and its finding aid, which includes long descriptions of the life of Mr. Young and the Connecticut Company,\u00a0is available at http:\/\/doddcenter.uconn.edu\/asc\/findaids\/wbyoung\/MSS20120077.html<\/a>.\u00a0 An electronic version of the database will be made available by the Shore Line Trolley Museum, but an extensive printout of the database can be found with the collection here in Archives & Special Collections.<\/p>\n The Connecticut Company, which by 1907 was controlled by the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad,\u00a0operated most of the trolleys and buses in Connecticut, with fourteen divisions and, at its peak in the 1910s, a roster of over 2200 cars and nearly 800 miles of track that either ran in or connected twelve major Connecticut cities.\u00a0\u00a0Ridership started to drop in the 1920s and systems were\u00a0abandoned by the 1930s.\u00a0 The last trolley ran on September 25, 1948, in New Haven, as the post-war boom of personal ownership of the automobile became widespread.<\/p>\n Connecticut is lucky to have two trolley museums to preserve this important aspect of transportation, including\u00a0the Shore Line Trolley Museum in East Haven\u00a0(http:\/\/www.shorelinetrolley.com\/<\/a>) and the Connecticut Trolley Museum in East Windsor (http:\/\/www.ct-trolley.org\/<\/a>).<\/p>\n The archive is deeply grateful to the family of William B. Young for this valuable collection that will serve as a vital resource for this corner of the state’s transportation history.<\/p>\n Laura Smith, Curator of Business, Railroad and Labor Collections<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [slideshow_deploy id=3086] William B. Young was an avid fan, enthusiast and historian of the\u00a0Connecticut Company, particularly its trolley cars, which controlled the\u00a0street railroad system that provided public transportation in the state’s towns and cities from 1905 to 1948.\u00a0 Mr. Young, … Continue reading