Wednesday, January 19, 2022

Pittsburgh PCC off list

Well, apparently it's Pittsburgh PCC Week. The latest update following the updated information on Pittsburgh 4006 is that a different PCC car from that city, car 1705, has been scrapped. This was another one of the 1700-series cars built by St. Louis in 1949. It was sold in 1996 to Power Superconductor Applications in New Castle, PA, where it joined several other Pittsburgh PCC cars. In 2013, as PSA was getting rid of its last PCCs, this car was acquired by the Midwest Electric Railway Museum in Mt. Pleasant, IA. The photo above is a screen grab from this video of the car shortly after acquisition. MERM had hoped to add an all-electric, and therefore all-weather, car to their fleet, but the car's attractive appearance belied its true condition and it turned out to have been extensively stripped of parts. A proposed sale to an ill-fated start-up railway museum in California in 2018 fell through and car 1705 was sold to a scrapyard in 2019. It has been removed from the list.

The Pittsburgh 1700s, while still not exactly uncommon in preservation, are certainly seeing their ranks thinned. Not counting cars rebuilt as 4000s, and excluding six cars in deplorable condition at VESCO, there are now only six 1700s left.

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