[3] Service was provided with replicas of a type of Brill streetcar, nicknamed the "Council Crest" cars, which last served Portland in 1950.

[4][5] The service was managed by Vintage Trolley Inc., a non-profit corporation, and the cars were owned and operated by TriMet, Portland's transit agency.

For 18 of its 23 years, the service followed a 2.3-mile (3.7 km) section of what is now the MAX Blue Line, between Lloyd Center and the west end of downtown.

Introduced in 1991, Vintage Trolley service operated on most weekends or at least most Sundays, from March through December, in all past years through 2010, and ran seven days a week from 1994 through 1999.

[15][16] Portland Vintage Trolley service began operation on November 29, 1991,[4] on a 2.3-mile (3.7 km) section of TriMet's first MAX line, between Lloyd Center and Galleria/SW 10th Avenue station in the West End of downtown, including crossing the Willamette River on the Steel Bridge.

The idea of operating vintage streetcars in Downtown Portland had been proposed at least as early as the mid-1970s,[17] as a way to lure back to the city center shoppers who increasingly preferred suburban shopping malls.

[19] Some of the costs would be paid by TriMet, some by the federal government, and some by Vintage Trolley, Inc. An order for three replica trolleys was placed[21] (a fourth car was added later), a carbarn was built in the Coliseum (now Rose Quarter) area, and a short length of track and overhead wire were built along Northeast 11th Avenue near Lloyd Center mall.

[23] The service was wheelchair-accessible, but with facilities for disabled riders limited to two stops along the route: a section of high-level boarding platform at the Lloyd Center terminus and, in downtown, a wheelchair lift at the Yamhill District MAX station.

However, midday service (10 a.m. to 3 p.m.) on weekdays was usually provided during the month of December to entice more shoppers to downtown and the Lloyd Center during the holiday shopping season.

An additional reason was that a trust fund originally set up to pay for the operation had become mostly depleted by this time; TriMet took over most financial responsibility for the service in 2000.

[28] It was used for the first test trips on the line's first completed section (in Northwest Portland) later that month, because the first modern Škoda car had not yet been delivered.

[29] It was then decided that the two replica-vintage streetcars should receive a few modifications before entering service, primarily the addition of exterior mirrors and turn signals, which had been omitted when they were built in 1991 because the 1903 cars on which they were based had lacked them.

[30] On this route, one Vintage Trolley car (of two available) was used at any given time, providing hourly service and replacing a regularly scheduled modern Škoda streetcar.

On December 6, 2013, TriMet announced that it had tentatively decided to sell the two remaining cars (511 and 512) to a group in St. Louis, Missouri, which was planning to build a heritage streetcar line there, the Delmar Loop Trolley.

[9] At that time, TriMet indicated that the two trolleys were expected to be moved to St. Louis in mid-2014,[37] but in April 2014 TriMet posted a more precise date for the planned move, of August 2014, and noted on its newly reinstated Vintage Trolley web page that the service would operate on two dates in 2014, May 25 and July 6, with the latter being the (revised) final day of service.

[16] The four streetcars/trolleys—these two terms are synonyms in most parts of the United States[38]—were built by the Gomaco Trolley Company, of Ida Grove, Iowa, in 1991 and early 1992.

Two of the original Council Crest streetcars, 503 and 506, are preserved by the Oregon Electric Railway Historical Society at its museum in Brooks,[40] and Gomaco was able to use those cars as patterns for the replicas.