Waiting Room and Trolley Stations

Guests enter into the Trolley Station through the Waiting Room.  We don’t have any original photographs of the interior of the station, however we have added elements which represent some of the station function.

The waiting room features benches, a phone, stove, and a desk.  In this room we also offer scavenger hunts for younger visitors.

The stove in the center of the room is a cooking stove from an iron furnace near Ski Liberty.  The station would have likely used a pot belly stove instead.

The phone is believed to have belonged to the Bowman family of Boonsboro. At one time, the station may have been a place for community communication. With this style phone, someone making a call would

Other locally donated items include the safe from the Warrenfeltz store, an old typewriter and a cash register.

The walls of the station are lined with trolley artwork. and the two benches inside the room are reported by their donors to have been from the railway, though no photographs have been found to confirm this.  The darker Braddock Heights bench is all original, while the Hagerstown bench was restored by the National Park Service and only the seat and back are original while the ends have been replaced.

The desk in the corner is similar to what may have been in use by a station agent in some of the stations.  Atop this desk we have a display of replica tickets and copies of rate pages.  The original documents are stored in an archive in the National Road Museum building.  There were many other ticket designs over the years.

Above the desk, a display on the wall discusses the function of the station and some of the employee roles involved with stations and tickets.  At the bottom of this panel, a series of photographs shows four other station designs along the trolley route.