North Shore car acquired by IRM

The Illinois Railway Museum has announced that it has acquired North Shore 172, a standard steel coach built by Cincinnati in 1920. This is the fourth-oldest North Shore coach in existence and the only one from that line's 1920 order for cars. IRM is the car's fourth owner; after the North Shore it was very briefly owned by the Hyman-Michaels scrap company but since mid-1963 it has been owned by an ex-North Shore employee. Since the late 1960s it has been stored in Noblesville at the Indiana Transportation Museum, where in the early 1970s it was one of two cars that inaugurated public operations at that site (the other car, CA&E 308, is also at IRM). It was operated regularly until about the early 1990s at which point its deteriorating condition saw it removed from public service. Since 2000 or so it has been stored in the barn at the ITM site as shown above.

The car was moved out of Noblesville in October (for photos and more info see our sister blog, Hicks Car Works) and has been at a temporary storage location in the interim. IRM's intention is to restore the car and operate it along with the museum's fleet of other North Shore cars. With the transfer of car 172 to IRM, there are only three electrics listed on the PNAERC roster under ITM ownership: the three derelict Lackawanna MU trailers stored on the siding in Cicero.