Omaha Forums

Brad wrote:14th street Coffee is 2 blocks away.

KETV wrote:An Omaha neighborhood landmark is getting a new address. For the past 50 years, a street car has sat in the back yard of a house near 73rd and Miami streets. On Tuesday, crews began moving it downtown to 14th and Leavenworth streets for its new job as a coffee shop. The car is one of Omaha's last remaining streetcars. It used to run on the Benson Line until it was decommissioned.

Coyote wrote:There is a junk yard along Hwy 32 just west of Tekamah that may be the place you are thinking about.

TEKAMAH, NE-  For forty years Robert Sklenar was the one purchasing old vehicles from Auctions, but on the 29th all those items will be sold at his own estate auction.  

After living in the Tekamah area his entire life, he started his business by working on vehicles, manufacturing truck boxes, and buying and selling vehicles on his own time which started in the early 1950s and was then later licensed as an auto dealer in 1964.  He was also a farmer until the early 1980s.  According to family members, when he started in the business, he named the vehicles in his inventory. The first was named Gazelle, he ended up trading back for it years later.

With 40 years of buying vehicles Sklenar came up with an inventory of approximately 2,000 vehicles spread over sixty plus acres.  One of the vehicles Sklenar used to own, and is now selling the remains too is on display in the America On the Move exhibition at the Smithsonian. This bus section that is now in the Smithsonian was part of the Omaha Transit Company bus #1210.  The bus was purchased in February 2003 by the Smithsonian.  

A year later Sklenar was in the news again when Metro Area Transit, the Omaha bus company, bought back a dozen buses it had sold him decades before.  These buses are still in use on downtown circular routes.  Sklenar also collected many military vehicles, among those  is a Military trailer that was in World War II.  Other vehicles that are being sold are classic cars, construction equipment, farm equipment, in the midst of many others.

PotatoeEatsFish wrote:I just had a good idea, you know how they did those O! things. Well instead have streetcars with artwork on them around town. That would be a cool new art project.

Coyote wrote:There used to be a scrap yard between Tekamah and Oakland which may have had a selection of cars to get a project going, but that is now gone. There was supposed to be a camp site that was going to use street cars in Nebraska's Loess Hills somewhere, but I haven't heard about them in a long time... The Spaghetti Works car is in someone's backyard. It would be hard to find a local stockpile to easily do a project like you imagine...

Coyote wrote:According to Richard Orr's O&CB Streetcars of Omaha and Council Bluffs in 1955 30 cars were purchased for the Twin Brooks Bible Camp and were scattered over the hills in a rural setting where some were converted to meeting rooms and dorms while others wer vandalized. That was were Durham got #1014. I tried looking up "Twin Brooks Bible Camp" and only can find it was a 123 acre camp north of Omaha run by the Presbyterian Church. That is all that I found.

According to the Roster of Preserved North American Electric Railway Cars there are two other preserved streetcars in Nebraska one in Pioneer Village in Minden and the other at Union College in Lincoln.