KENNEBUNKPORT — One of Southern Maine’s favorite destinations is throwing a birthday party this weekend with all the bells and whistles and everyone is invited.

The Seashore Trolley Museum is celebrating its 80th Anniversary with festivities continuing through Monday with a bevy of activities including a trolley parade, model railroad layouts, evening trolley rides and more. Two new items in the museum’s collection, a newly restored Toronto Transit Commission 2890 trolley and an Eastern Massachusetts Street Railway 4387 car will be dedicated during the weekend events.

Founded in 1939, the trolley museum is the oldest historic transportation organization of its kind in the world and curates the largest streetcar collection.

Guests can take a three-mile round trip on the museum’s heritage railway, a 330-unit collection of trolleys, buses and more transit history than possible to absorb in one day guided by docents willing to unravel the mysteries of the last century’s transit modes.

The museum was launched when a group of Boston-area college students visited Maine to ride the dwindling number of streetcar lines here. While enjoying an outing, they learned that the Biddeford and Saco Railroad had ordered replacement buses for its weary trolleys, said Kate Orlando, executive director of the Seashore Trolley Museum.

One open-sided car, No. 31, was a favorite with the group and on the spot, they agreed to save the little car.

“In doing so, the college students made history,” Orlando said. “This was the first time a non-company group saved a street railway or railroad car for historic purposes and armed with this idea, other groups sprang up in New England and around the United States.”

The collection continues to grow and today it includes artifacts from coast to coast in America.

Through the years, museum curators have added to the collection of streetcars from Los Angeles, New Orleans, Chicago, and even from Maine’s northernmost county, Aroostook. In addition to rail cars, exhibits include diesel and gas buses and 19 electrically-powered trackless trolleys, like those running around Cambridge’s Harvard Square.

Its Canadian collection is the largest outside of that country and there’s also transit equipment from Australia, France, Japan, Germany, Great Britain, Italy and New Zealand. And Bostonians will enjoy refreshing their memories of familiar rapid transit cars with all four subway lines including Red, Green, Blue and Orange represented.

Orlando says that the oldest piece of equipment in the museum is a Suffolk County Sheriff’s prisoner wagon, circa 1830.

“Although it is not a passenger vehicle, it represents the omnibuses, which clattered over the Boston Hub’s cobblestone streets, until horse cars arrived,” she said.

At 1 p.m. Saturday, visitors can watch the 80th Anniversary Trolley Parade, featuring the ribbon cutting of newly restored Toronto Transit Commission 2890 and Eastern Massachusetts Street Railway 4387. And all day Saturday and Sunday, model railroad layouts will be displayed in the museum’s exhibit room.

Guests seeking a challenge may operate Seashore Trolley Museum’s own Pump Car all day Sunday and Monday and the Massachusetts collection items will be featured all day Monday, for the Museum’s inaugural Massachusetts Day festivities.

Last summer, the museum launched a 5,600-square-foot expansion of Seashore Trolley Museum’s Fairview Carbarn and that followed a 4,200-square-foot expansion of Fairview Carbrans completed in January 2018. In 2016, the museum also made major improvements at its Donald G. Curry Town House Shop.

“The Seashore Trolley Museum is the operating entity of New England Electric Railway Historical Society and is the world’s oldest and largest electric railway and public transit museum,” Orlando said.

Visitors to the museum tour carbarns full of passenger streetcars, work cars, inter-urbans and freight equipment. It has more than 250 transit vehicles in its collection, most of them trolleys, from all over the United States, Canada, and many other countries.

According to Orlando, the mission of the New England Electric Railway Historical Society is to share connections between the past and present by collecting, restoring, operating, and exhibiting significant public transit vehicles and artifacts for the knowledge, context, and resources for future generations.

Located at 195 Log Cabin Road in Kennebunkport, Seashore Trolley Museum is dog-friendly, with plenty of parking and picnic areas.

For more information, visit www.trolleymuseum.org.

— Executive Editor Ed Pierce can be reached at 282-1535 or by email at editor@journaltribune.com