A move and an addition

The big news for today is that the National Capital Trolley Museum has acquired DC Transit 1470 from the Virginia Museum of Transportation in Roanoke. The news was report in a Facebook post (no log-in required). Car 1470 is a standard postwar Washington DC PCC car, built in 1945 by St. Louis Car Company, and bears some of the unique features of DC postwar cars such as air-electric brakes, taller-than-normal side windows, and a prewar style windshield. It also has an unusual automatic pole-lowering device. It joins the only other DC postwar car preserved domestically, car 1540, in the NCTM collection but it is in much better condition. Despite some 45 years of outdoor display in Roanoke, car 1470 was maintained in generally good condition from all appearances and may be a good candidate for restoration to operational condition. It was always a bit of an oddball display in Roanoke and it's great to see it back home at National Capital.

This is just the latest Washington DC car to be returned to home territory from initial preservation elsewhere. It follows prewar PCC car 1430, acquired from Rockhill in 1997; center-entrance car 650, brought home from Branford in 2002; and sweeper 09, repatriated from Rockhill in 2012. Other than PCC cars sold abroad or heavily rebuilt for service elsewhere, nearly every preserved car from Washington is now preserved in or near DC. EDIT: Many thanks to Wesley Paulson of NCTM for the photos of car 1470 now included in this post.

And on an unrelated topic, I've also added a new car to the list. It's not a newly-preserved car but it has just recently come across my radar as a significant piece of traction history. The car in question is Chicago Transit Authority S314, a work car preserved at the Fox River Trolley Museum. It has recently been cosmetically restored and is apparently in use. I'd seen it before but had been under the mistaken impression that it was essentially a piece of non-traction railroad work equipment. However it turns out that, while not self-propelled, it is fully 600v-powered (including a prominently mounted D3F pump) and has quite the illustrious traction heritage. It was built by Chicago City Railway as a cab-on-flat work car, later sold to the Calumet & South Chicago, and served the Chicago Surface Lines for decades.