Union Traction 429 Runs

This news has been pretty widely disseminated, but I finally got around to updating the PNAERC list. Union Traction 429 ran for the first time a few weeks ago, moving a few feet on a (very) short piece of track laid inside its barn in Russiaville, Indiana. This is quite an impressive feat given that the car was acquired by its current owner, Hoosier Heartland Trolley Company, in 2018 as a car body, and given that HHTC has pretty minimal facilities to work with by most museums' standards. But the organization has a very dedicated group of people all concentrating on this one car, and the results are apparent.

Intriguingly, car 429 is no longer on the correct-type C80P trucks it had when it left its former home, the Indiana Transportation Museum in Noblesville, in 2018. It's now on generally similar C60 trucks from CRANDIC 55, which was scrapped for parts in 2019. Car 429 is running on two motors, and I'm guessing those may be WH 562D3's from the CRANDIC steeplecab, but I'm not sure. Anyway, there's plenty of work left to do on car 429, but the rapid pace of progress is commendable.

In unrelated news that I also happened to come across today, Los Angeles Railway 936 - shown above in a recent photo posted to Facebook by Murphy Zane Jenkins-Henson - appears to be the focus of a restoration effort at the Southern California Railway Museum, née Orange Empire. This is a center-entrance car built in 1914 by St. Louis and known on LARy as a "Sowbelly." Though one of three surviving, all car bodies, this is thought to be by far the best of the three. I'm not sure whether this is a cosmetic restoration or is the start of a full operational restoration; if the latter, it should be quite impressive, as this is one of the most distinctive LARy designs. Any information is appreciated.