VENTURA COUNTY NEWS : Trolley Rolls Toward an Unknown Future

The trolley is about to leave and if you don’t hurry, it will leave without you. On Saturday at 5 p.m., it will, in the grand tradition of Ventura trolleys, go clang, clang, kaput.

Once again, the frilly little red-and-green coach that tootles along a route from downtown Ventura to the harbor will languish in storage. You might call it the Streetcar Named Expire.

Hoping to draw tourists, the city bought the trolley in 1995 for more than $90,000 from Molly Trolley of Ogunquit, Maine. Ventura County Shuttle, which runs vans and buses to LAX and elsewhere, operated it until a money crunch forced it off the road in 1997. Now, once again, a lack of revenue is driving Old No. 2995 to the bus barn.

You might think that with its demise near, people would flock to relive trips to the Goodwill or nostalgic visits to the T-shirt shop at the harbor. You would be wrong. Thursday, like every other day, was a slow day on the trolley.

The regular conductor was driving another route, and his replacement, Terry Fox, apologized for not knowing the tourist spiel. Still, he managed to point out a place or two of interest.

On Seaward Avenue near the beach, he gestured toward a Japanese restaurant.

“When John Lennon lived in Ojai, that was a bar and he used to hang out there,” Fox said. He didn’t mention that Elvis used to dish out fish and chips across the street, but I’m sure he did.

For a few minutes, I was the only passenger on the breezy, hourlong loop between downtown Ventura and Ventura Harbor.

But after a while the bus began to fill.

There were a few appreciative clients from the Assn. of Retarded Citizens.

There was a clutch of camera-toting ladies who boarded at the Holiday Inn.

There was Robert Darmer, a computer repairman from L.A. who had just returned from the Burning Man Festival in the Nevada desert.

“A life-changing experience,” said Darmer, who rated the trolley as pretty good, even if it didn’t change his life.

The students of Mary Bergseid’s combined first-second grade class from Sheridan Way School clambered aboard at the Mission downtown and filed two by two onto the trolley’s polished wood benches.

At one point, Mary shushed the excited bunch: “Boys and girls! Manners!”

They cheered when Fox negotiated a tricky curve.

Many of the trolley’s 800 or so monthly riders aren’t tourists or schoolkids, but people who rely on it instead of scarce SCAT buses for basic transportation.

“They’re stopping it? You’re kidding! It will be my undoing!” said a 75-year-old woman who no longer drives and lives in a mobile home park near the harbor. She was returning from a successful hunt downtown for a vintage magazine rack; the trip cost her $1, but will run more than $12 when she reluctantly starts to pay cab fares again next week.

Her dilemma was familiar to Clayton Vail, a onetime investment counselor who owns Ventura County Shuttle.

“We’ve been trying to serve two mistresses, and it’s impossible,” Vail said.

Vail, one of the few women executives in the bus industry, would prefer that the trolley not be a substitute for mass transit but an amenity for tourists.

At this point, it’s unclear what the trolley’s final destination will be --who will operate it, where it will run, when it will start, and how much it will cost. It might ply a regular route for SCAT, it might be leased to another operator, or it might just sit for a while. Aside from all that, it seems like a sure thing.

For her part, Vail is working on a plan that could lead to a network of trolleys or double-decker buses hauling visitors not just around Ventura, but from Ventura to Channel Islands Harbor, to Ojai, to Santa Barbara.

Vail thinks Ventura’s got it all wrong when it comes to tourism. How many tourists, after all, are enchanted with Ventura’s City Hall or the E.P. Foster Library? How many wouldn’t mind paying Ventura hotel prices and hopping up the coast in an old-fangled conveyance for brunch at the Biltmore? Call it a Streetcar Named Aspire.

“Trolleys aren’t just transportation,” insisted Vail. “A trolley ride has as much to do with basic transportation as Disneyland has to do with a rodent.”

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Steve Chawkins may be reached at 653-7561 or by e-mail at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.