Washington Junction on the Port Authority's light-rail line owes its name to history. That's where the old Pittsburgh Interurban streetcar tracks split into a Y with the main route continuing to Washington, Pa., until service ended in 1953.

Fresh bread, ice cream and other goods made in Pittsburgh were delivered nightly to scores of communities outside the city by Fast Freight Trolley Service on tracks that spread north, south, east and west of Downtown.

You don't have to travel to New Orleans to see the authentic Streetcar Named Desire or to walk through the trolley that appeared on "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood."

And you can still ride vintage, restored streetcars such as Car 14, discarded by Philadelphia Suburban Transportation but meticulously restored over the past six years by more than two dozen train enthusiasts, retired technicians and engineers who volunteered more than 12,000 hours of time.

Those are but a small sample of things a visitor learns, sees and does at the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum, one of the nation's largest, which is off Interstate 79 in Washington County, an easy 25-mile drive from Pittsburgh.

I visited the facility last week.

If this sounds as if I was impressed, I was. A half-century has passed since three well-worn trolleys limped to the site where Washington County once ran a "poor house" for indigent men. The trolleys were left in the middle of nowhere, and the old tracks were ripped up behind them.

Today, the museum boasts 45 rail vehicles, two miles of track, 30 acres, restoration building, trolley display building, education center, generous benefactors and more than 100 volunteers.

If you think the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum is only for train buffs, old-timers or a transportation writer with nothing better to do, you're wrong. It is fascinating to experience how most people got around not very long ago. You realize, maybe dread, what the nation forsook for cars, trucks, $2 a gallon gas and interstate highways.

Furthermore, if this reads like a "plug," it is. The 21,000 people who visited the museum last year were hardly enough to pay the electric bill, let alone buy TV and billboard advertising for next weekend's 50th anniversary, a milestone deserving of public recognition.

At 11 a.m. Saturday as part of the celebration, the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum will roll out Car 14, awash in 20 gallons of new paint, looking as good and running as well as it did in 1949, when it was built.

At 11:45 a.m., members will dedicate the McClane Loop, where streetcars will now be able to turn around and go back the way they came. That project is a story in itself. It was built from old rails, signals and other equipment salvaged by volunteers over a two-year period from the Overbrook line that the Port Authority abandoned in 1993.

A Chartiers business, Fife Moving & Storage, hauled track to Philadelphia, where the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority had the special equipment to bend it into curved rail. The museum group, which has to beg, borrow and work for free, has 15 other businesses and agencies on its "thank you" list for the McClane Loop, plus 16 volunteers who came from rail museums in Baltimore and Illinois to help put the pieces together in March.

I can't imagine how the group will raise $6.75 million for its next dream: a 37,000-square-foot visitors center to create "a premier trolley museum unlike any other in the United States." Then again, who would have believed it would raise $2 million for a 28,000-square-foot Trolley Display Building, opening soon?

"Rather than throwing things in the scrap pile, the Port Authority and SEPTA give them to us to support their transit heritage," said Scott Becker, whom the nonprofit group hired away from a trolley museum in Connecticut a decade ago to become full-time director of the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum, which used to be known as the Arden Trolley Museum. "Elected officials, the community, businesses who provide materials and services ... they've all been just wonderful."

Obviously.

Japanese TV and people from Australia, Germany and China have visited the museum at the Meadowlands.

It's your turn to look at the old photos and other archives. To hear the clang of the trolley bell and clatter of steel wheels over steel rails. To climb aboard for a ride into the past. And to preserve an earlier mode of travel for future generations.

Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays through Labor Day, and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekends through December. Admission prices: $6 for adults, $5 for seniors over 65, $3.50 for children 2 to 15, and free for younger children.

In conjunction with the Car 14 and McClane Loop ceremonies, vintage cars and trucks will be featured as part of a "Cruizin' with Trolleys" promotion Saturday and next Sunday. Parking is always free and a picnic area is available.

For information, call 724-228-9256 or (toll-free) 1-877-728-7655. The organization's Web site is www.pa-trolley.org.

To get to the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum, take I-79 to either Exit 40 or 41 north of Washington, Pa. Follow the blue "Trolley Museum" signs directing you over several miles of two-lane road. Allow 90 minutes for the guided tour but at least two hours for the visit.

Unfortunately, you are unable to hop a trolley to get there.

Believe it! More trucks are riding trains. The nation's freight railroads moved a record 9.9 million tractor-trailers piggyback-style last year over 173,000 miles of track, making intermodal transport the fastest growing part of the railroad business.

Plate du jour. Warren E. Sheppick, of Fallowfield, Washington County, spotted the Pennsylvania personalized license plate ABOXCAR on an old Volvo station wagon driving on Interstate 70. I'd like to see ATROLLY again.