Berkshire Hills Arrives Home

Thanks to Jordan Helzer, who has sent the photos shown here of the famous parlor car "Berkshire Hills" being unloaded last week at the Shelburne Falls Trolley Museum. This returns it much closer to its original stomping grounds in western Massachusetts; indeed, SFTM is less than 20 miles as the crow flies from the old Berkshire Street Railway route through North Adams.

As seen above in a Sam Bartlett photo, the car body has been moved inside the SFTM barn, probably the first time it's really been kept under cover since it was sold by BSR back in 1932. It's been placed atop correct-type Brill 27A trucks that were acquired by Seashore in 2022 from IRM, which itself had salvaged them long ago from a North Shore Line snow sweeper that was scrapped back in the 1960s. SFTM obtained the trucks a year or so ago from Seashore and has cleaned them up and painted them in the meantime. With this acquisition, the SFTM traction collection stands at five pieces, all from the Bay State.