Tarped Cars on Truck Trailers in the Northeast

Thanks to Bill Wall for supplying news and photos regarding the conveyance of New Jersey Transit 5221, a utility/line car built in 1912, to Branford today. The car was moved by Silk Road from its recent home at the Kinkisharyo plant in Piscataway, New Jersey, and was unloaded in East Haven.

Car 5221 was built by Russell in 1912 as a snow plow and freight motor for the Trenton Terminal Railroad (later Public Service Railroad, then Public Service Coordinated Transport) system in New Jersey. At some point it was rebuilt as a line car, and in that guise it stayed in service on the Newark subway until it was transferred off the property in 2009. The car bounced around: it went to the Baltimore Streetcar Museum for a while, then was at Lyons Industries in Pennsylvania for truck rebuilding c2016-2017, and afterward ended up in Piscataway. The photo above, from this blog, was taken around 2018, but in 2019 the car was tarped and put outside. (The four photos below were all taken by Bill Wall.)

For five years or so, the car looked like this, tarped with a shrink-wrap "boat tarp" next to the Kinkisharyo building.

But through whatever means, the car was acquired by Branford. Above, it's shown loaded on a trailer.

And these last two photos, taken today, show the car on the line at Branford.

This is only the second line car in Branford's collection, and their first double-truck line car. (Oddly enough, among the "three sisters" that started the traction preservation movement in New England - Seashore, Warehouse Point, and Branford - there are only six line cars preserved among them, and 5221 is one of only two that are double-truck cars.) Car 5221 is one of six intact cars from the PSCT system before the PCC era, and four of those cars are now preserved at Branford.

The second car on the move is shown below (apologies for the thumbnail-sized image, which is a screen grab from a video posted by Seashore). You'd be hard pressed to tell from the tarp, but this is the famous Berkshire Hills, the business car from the Berkshire Street Railway that is the only survivor from that storied system.

This car was built by Wason in 1903, retired way back in 1922, and sold in 1932 for use as a diner. Following a 1994 fire that caused substantial damage, the body was acquired by Seashore in 1995, where it has been stored ever since. The car is now en route to its new home at the Shelburne Falls Trolley Museum, a transfer that has been planned for over a year. This is the second car on Seashore's "re-homing lists" to go to a new home; the first, MBTA line car 3283, also went to Shelburne Falls. The SFTM collection now totals five cars on PNAERC; Seashore's stands at 189 pieces; and the NJERHS is down to six cars while Branford is up one to 91 cars.