Data enhancement

Many thanks to Bill Wulfert of the Illinois Railway Museum who passed along to me a roster book produced around 1981 by the late Jim Johnson and H. George Friedman. This 40-page book made it to the proofing stage (this is one of an unknown number of proof copies, a fact noted at the bottom of the front cover) but was never published. It's an interesting document from the pre-Internet age when information was significantly tougher to gather from disparate sources.

The book features rosters from 29 different organizations, though the title is a bit of a misnomer as a few museums that never ran electric cars (such as the Snoqualmie group, "Colorado Railway Museum," and Kentucky Railway Museum) are featured as are a few groups that wouldn't commence electric operation until years later like Northern Ohio and Edmonton. A few groups no longer around (TWERHS, listed simply as East Troy Trolley Museum; Trolleyville, listed as Columbia Park & Southwestern; and of course IMOTAC) and some have changed names ("Relic Trolley Museum" is now Fox River Trolley Museum, California Railway Museum is now Western Railway Museum, Railways to Yesterday is now Rockhill, and "Arden Trolley Museum" is now Pennsylvania Trolley Museum). For groups included, not only electrics are listed but also steam railroad equipment.

As luck would have it, combing through these rosters has produced quite a few pieces of information I formerly didn't have in the PNAERC roster. The height and width of the Fresno hobbleskirt car; dimensional information on the Yakima Master Units; motors for Montreal Tramways 1; and air compressor type for Ohio Public Service 21 are just a few of the myriad tidbits of data I was able to mine from this document. Many of the rosters were incomplete, some more so than others (Arden's in particular only listed 14 cars, far fewer than they owned at the time - perhaps they only submitted their core historic collection?), but the information that was there was quite interesting. It was also a reminder of the sizable influx of equipment into many trolley museums during the 1980s and 1990s. There were surprisingly few car bodies owned by trolley museums back in 1981.

Anyway, I'm always grateful for bits of information that fill in gaps in the PNAERC roster. There's still a lot of mechanical and electrical information that is missing from the list and even more missing dimensional information. If you come across an old roster that can help fill in the gaps, I hope you'll send along any information that I'm missing or that I've got wrong. Thank you!