Message from the President

February 2014

By Bob Newhouser

Happy and prosperous New Year to all our members! We are making great progress toward managing our costs while maintaining our focus on the numerous offerings valued by our members — publishing our monthly Bulletin and Headlights, hosting our informative and entertaining meetings, and sponsoring our numerous local traction trips and our acclaimed international and domestic traction tours.

In the last three months, our board of directors has successfully:

1. Completed vacating our Grand Central Terminal office facilities. The Sprague Library will be relocated to the Shore Line Trolley Museum within the next 18 months while they identify and develop the new site for the collection;
2. Begun our monthly meetings in the iconic Roosevelt Hotel, which will offer our members, for the first time, hotel amenities associated with conferences meetings (coat racks, water stations, proper vendor tables, in-house restaurant and bar) while reducing our meeting expenses;
3. Begun the process of consolidating our three scattered storerooms to two large modern rooms in upper Manhattan. We have completed closing down two of the old rooms and are making rapid progress toward closing the third room by end of first quarter 2014.

Our reduction in office and library facilities necessitates that we clarify to our members our policy on donations to the ERA. While ERA still welcomes and encourages cash/check donations as well as donations of photos, slides and digital images and pre-1950 issues of Headlights, we no longer accept donations of:

1. Hard copy publications, maps, brochures, or books;
2. Issues of Headlights published after 1950. We just completed a comprehensive inventory of our collection and it is complete from 1950 to date.

For those of you who wish to donate hard copy publications, maps, brochures or books, we suggest that you contact trolley museums around the country, in particular the Shore Line Trolley Museum, that specialize in traction in our region. You should call or email them first to discuss your donation before sending to them. They can be reached at 203-467-6927 or by email at: [email protected].

• A Message from ERA President Bob Newhouser