Streetcar tracks in Marietta, Ohio -- an opportunity to restore streetcar service as an attraction?

In one of those serendipitous outcomes of a Google search (I was looking for a URL of an old article, and came across this student presentation about how to get their college's students to spend money Downtown).

So I was spurred to figure out how far away from Marietta College is the Downtown--not far at all--and noticed that there are still streetcar tracks embedded in Putnam Street, in Downtown Marietta, Ohio.

The streetcar stopped running there in 1931.

Marietta was the first settlement in what became Ohio, has a small college, a Downtown with decent historic building stock, and is on the Ohio River--across the river lies West Virginia, has a bunch of cultural attractions like the Ohio River Museum, and is about 110 miles from Columbus.  

It has a steamboat cruise attraction, and river cruise excursions stop at the town on trips from Pittsburgh to St. Louis.

Photo: JT Bell.

A small town in Oklahoma, El Reno, brought a streetcar back to life for tourism purposes--it runs on propane (which means it doesn't need an overhead wire infrastructure).

Fortunately, the town is but 30 miles from Oklahoma City, so it is easily accessible to visitors and the city leveraged the streetcar resuscitation as a way to get grant money to pursue multiple improvement projects simultaneously.

Maybe Marietta has a similar kind of opportunity.

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The Jon Bell website has a great set of resources on urban rail transit, including postcard images, even trolley "railway post office" stamp covers.  Pretty cool.