About FolkCity
The official digital platform of Arizona Street Railway Museum — making American streetcar and railway history available to researchers, historians, and students.
A museum collection, opened as a public archive
Arizona Street Railway Museum was founded in 1976 to preserve the physical and documentary record of street railways in Arizona and the wider American West. FolkCity is the museum’s online educational layer: a place where catalogs, historical context, and teaching materials can reach people who may never visit the Chandler facility in person.
The name FolkCity reflects a simple idea. Public transportation is a folk history of everyday movement — workers, students, shoppers, and neighborhoods connected by rails and later by buses. Digitizing that story is a conservation task as much as a publishing task.
“FolkCity exists so streetcar history is not locked in a storeroom. It should be readable, citable, and useful to the next generation of students.”
Arizona Street Railway Museum · Educational mission statementLegal identity
Folkcity.com is sponsored and operated by Arizona Street Railway Museum, a registered Arizona non-profit organization founded in 1976. Entity ID: 0090400. Corporate headquarters and museum facility: 330 E Ryan Rd, Chandler, AZ 85225, United States.
What we are not
We do not run municipal transit, sell tickets, broker transportation, or offer commercial construction services. Consulting work is limited to archival methods, interpretive planning, and heritage documentation for cultural and educational organizations.
Who the archive serves
FolkCity is written for three overlapping audiences. Students and teachers need accurate, classroom-safe explanations of how U.S. cities grew around streetcar corridors. Independent historians and genealogists need dated, sourced descriptions of lines, cars, and companies. Cultural organizations need practical help organizing their own transit-related collections.
Every public page is educational. We avoid sensational claims, paid “listings,” and consumer sales funnels. If you are looking for current bus or light-rail schedules, contact your local transit agency. If you are looking for how those systems came to exist — and what was lost when earlier railways were removed — you are in the right place.