Near the south end of Falls Road, there’s a dilapidated relic of the past in which Matt Nawn sees a bright future.

The old Maryland and Pennsylvania Railroad roundhouse is where railroad workers once maintained sooty steam locomotives in the early 1900s, back when public transit was profitable and trains in Baltimore were a melting pot of every social class. It’s just the kind of history that Nawn, director of the nearby Baltimore Streetcar Museum, and his team of volunteers preserve — so it’s where they want to move the museum.

“We are the story of how Baltimore moves,” said Nawn, standing next to the stone roundhouse on a recent Saturday. Its rehabilitation, he said, will serve as “just one element of what will be an entirely new campus.”

The Streetcar Museum, located a little further south at 1901 Falls Road, delights kids (and those who are kids at heart) with its working streetcar and the history of the city’s now-gone streetcar network, which reached from downtown out to Towson, Ellicott City and beyond Sparrows Point.

Baltimore recently gave the museum roughly $165,000 in grants, enough to pay for phase one of the museum’s ambitious, six-phase plan for its future. Though just a drop in the $28 million bucket that Nawn says his team needs to fill with grants and private donations, it’s a first step in future-proofing the museum from extinction.

At its core, the museum is a “group of enthusiasts,” Nawn said. But as it grows, they want it to morph from “just something in the neighborhood” to a true community asset.

A 10-year vision

At its current location, patrons can walk through exhibits that tell the story of how public transportation allowed Baltimore to grow and develop.

It’s home to a collection of vehicles that span almost 100 years of history, from some of the first streetcars to operate in the mid-19th century to more modern trackless trolleys. Patrons can even take a short ride on car 7407, the last streetcar to operate on Baltimore’s roads.

But as Nawn’s team finds new (old) vehicles to add to its collection, the scrappy museum is outgrowing its tracks. The vehicles are actually held in a jam-packed car house and must be brought outside one at a time for display, and the museum space is also prone to flooding when rain swells the nearby Jones Falls.

Nawn said the museum will use the city grant to remove collapsed sections of the roundhouse roof, and some additional work to preserve its walls and foundation.

Subsequent phases include environmental work to put the new campus at a “safe elevation above predictable flood danger,” according to the plan, and rehabilitation of the roundhouse, which will one day house the museum’s exhibits and offer display area for up to 10 vehicles.

Baltimore’s transportation department has been using the roundhouse and its surrounding area to store sand, asphalt and stone and to park vehicles for some time, but it is engaged in talks with the museum about transferring ownership of the space or leasing it to them, according to department spokesperson Kathy Dominick. The department is working on transferring materials and equipment to other department facilities, she said.

Nawn said the transportation department has been a “true partner” in helping realize the vision.

The museum also plans to build a new car house and outfit the area with the electrical and track infrastructure necessary to keep streetcar rides going and move their vehicles around the new campus. The current exhibit space will become a “swing space” for events like weddings or other needs that arise in the future.

Restoring what once was

Streetcars weren’t glamorous, rather, purely functional infrastructure — the Maryland Transit Administration buses of the time. The first commercially operated electric streetcar in America began service in Baltimore 140 years ago Sunday — on Aug. 10, 1885.

After streetcars were desegregated in 1871, they served everyone — “from the bank president to the janitor, they got there on the streetcar,” Nawn said.

That means they were an important piece of the social fabric that still offers lessons for today, Nawn and his crew agree.

It’s why volunteers like Mike Lawson and Dave Wilson devote their Saturdays to “trolley archeology.”

“The people that knew all this stuff, they’re dead and gone,” Wilson said — a comment that drew laughs from the group of gray- and white-haired men milling around the car barn.

Lawson was painting an old Brownell streetcar a shade of red that was as close as he could determine to the one probably used on it in the late 1890s; other volunteers were doing structural restoration on another car’s wood panels.

“So we’ll teach you what we know,” he said. “The rest we’ll figure out together.”

Historical research and artistic liberty collide in the work, creating educated guesses. They scour internet rabbit holes to find anything — an old book, news article or photograph — that confirms a detail of how a car looked. Sometimes they make their own parts in a machine shop.

“It helps that we’re all kind of nuts,” Lawson cracked.

Streetcars made living farther away from city centers feasible, meaning they actually paved the way for their demise. They made suburban sprawl possible, and as private automobiles became a household norm, public transit companies quickly became less profitable. Then bus companies nudged already teetering streetcar systems into the historical dustbin in the mid-20th century, with a little help from General Motors and the highway lobby.

The 7407, Baltimore’s last streetcar, made its last trip on Route 8 between Towson and Catonsville in November 1963.

The museum ride on car 7407 feels like a trek to somewhere forgotten. Running along Falls Road, the route passes the machine shop that Lawson and Wilson talked about, which appears popular for graffiti artists, DIY music videos and dumping old couches. The car turns around in a loop just beyond the roundhouse, where a buzzard pecked at something in the grass.

The bones are still good — the steel rail and overhead wiring meticulously maintained by one of Nawn’s colleagues. The roundhouse foundation is still sound, architectural consultants say. And with $28 million and some elbow grease, the team can make it something new again.

Nawn believes that rejuvenating public transit will be integral to the future of cities, and Baltimore won’t have to go far to learn how what once traveled its streets could inform the city’s tomorrow.

Roland Park to Highlandtown. Druid Hill to Federal Hill. The old streetcars carry the names of neighborhoods not often mentioned in the same sentence together.

“They connected various neighborhoods in the socioeconomic spectrum,” Nawn said. “That story has played out before, and we can help explain the why so it makes sense for the future.”

The Baltimore Streetcar Museum is open from noon to 5 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays through the end of August, and then on Sundays only through Dec. 1. Admission is $15 for adults, and $10 for seniors and children ages 4 to 11. Kids under 4 are free.