PCC for Sale?

An intriguing post showed up a couple of days ago on the Facebook page for Aumann Vintage Power, which I'll confess I'd never heard of before. They are evidently auctioning off a huge collection of tractors, trucks, and other miscellaneous equipment (including the school bus involved in the Chowchilla kidnapping, of all things) sometime this summer. Why is this of interest? Because what's being auctioned off is (apparently) the entire collection of Bright's Pioneer Exhibit in Merced, California - and Bright's appears on the PNAERC roster! Tucked way back among all the random machinery is the ex-St. Louis Public Service, ex-Muni PCC pictured above in a photo taken in 2011. The car is Muni 1150, which was built in 1946 as St. Louis Public Service 1140 and ended its service career in 1979, from what I can tell. According to one source familiar with the Muni fleet, the car was taken out of service and moved to Merced right away, likely being put into indoor storage as soon as it got there. As such, it's probably in better shape than just about any other ex-SLPS Muni car out there except for the two or three that have been fully restored.

Now, I have to admit, the PCC doesn't appear in any of the photos on the Facebook post, so I can't be certain it's included in the auction. But it seems likely. Aumann says they will add a full listing to their website soon, so that should answer any questions. If car 1150 goes up for auction, hopefully it finds a good home.

On a totally unrelated subject, I've removed the above car, Companhia Municipal de Transportes Coletivos 1791, from the PNAERC roster. It's an ex-Third Avenue Railway System "Huffliner" built by TARS in 1938 and sold to the Sao Paolo, Brazil, system in 1947. Until sometime in the last couple of decades it was on display under a shelter at the Clube Esportivo Nautico de Guarapiranga, located near Sao Paolo, but I cannot find any evidence that it's still there despite the club being very well documented in online photographs. Until I can find some evidence that the car still exists, it's off the list.

Atlanta Car Added to List

Thanks again go to Nate Wells, who has sent along information and photos that allow me to add another car to the PNAERC list.

The car in question, shown here in photos taken last fall, is Georgia Power Company 903. It's a typical Atlanta 900-series car essentially identical to car 948, restored and operating today at Branford. For its part, car 903 was built in 1926 at almost exactly the same time as car 948. It's been kept under a roof for many decades, meaning the body actually looks like it's in decent shape except for an area near one end where the roof failed. It even appears to still wear its original paint (in fact some vestiges of its as-built livery, including pin-striping and "front entrance" lettering on the car side, are in evidence even though they were painted over later in the car's service career).

These photos were taken in car 903's longtime home in Georgia, but it was recently purchased by a collector near Montgomery, Alabama, and moved there. I can only hope it's being stored inside. Any additional information, including mechanical/electrical equipment (was the 900-939 series equipped identically to the 940-999 series?) and any plans the new owner might have for the car, would be appreciated. This is the seventh Georgia Power car on the PNAERC list, and overall the list now has a total of 2,086 cars.

Charlotte Trolleys

A huge thank you goes out to Nate Wells, who provided me with some updates on electric car preservation in North Carolina. The first update involves Carolina Power & Light 117, a longer-than-typical Birney built by Brill in 1927 for the Asheville system. This car was owned by Charlotte Trolley, and in fact was the last car on the PNAERC roster still listed under Charlotte Trolley ownership. But Nate reports that the car has, in fact, been acquired by the owner of the Savona Mill in northwest Charlotte. This is an historic mill complex that is being redeveloped as office and commercial space.

The more surprising update, at least for me, is that the two Charleston center-entrance car bodies have resurfaced! These are unusual cars built by Cincinnati in 1918 for wartime service in Charleston (there's a whole article about them in a July 1918 issue of Electric Railway Journal). There were two orders, one for trailers numbered 301-310 and one for motors numbered 311-316, and I believe both of these cars are trailers. One car is numbered 302 and the second is thought to be numbered 306 but I'm not positive of that.

Regardless, the cars were exhumed from a house back in 2006 and then spent a few years stored outdoors in Charleston before vanishing. I removed car 302 (at the time I hadn't included the second car on the list) from PNAERC back in 2021. Well, it turns out these two were bought by the Savona Mill owner and moved to Charlotte way back in 2013 as described here. They were briefly stored indoors but have been stored outside since 2015; the above photo is from this article. Google Street View shows them stored at the corner of Turner and Coxe, in steadily deteriorating condition, until about 2021 or 2022, when they were moved to (what I believe is) their current location behind a building at the southwest corner of Chamberlain and Gardner. Aerial photos suggest both cars' roofs have disintegrated, but the cars still exist and they've apparently been moved into a storage building within the last year, so they're back on the PNAERC list.

Just as a final note, I'll point out that it's a bit of a milestone to no longer have Charlotte Trolley on the PNAERC list as an owner, even though this is a bit overdue - from what I can tell, the organization was largely defunct by about 2017. But during the 1990s and early 2000s, it was quite a going concern, and played a big role in raising the profile of streetcars and light rail in Charlotte during that period. I recall visiting their barn in 2001, at which time they had car 85 in service (using a towed generator), Birney 25 on hand and purportedly under restoration, the aforementioned car 117 in storage, Red Arrow 13 being repainted, and a car from Greece on hand in good repair. But like Old Pueblo Trolley in Tucson, Charlotte Trolley was arguably a victim of its own success in publicizing electric traction, and they lost their right-of-way to a new light rail system. Unlike OPT, they disbanded as an organization, but fortunately their collection is faring well elsewhere.

Manufacturer Order Lists

For quite a while, I've had a page on this blog site with links to manufacturer order lists. If you view the website on desktop, or use "website view" on mobile, it's at the bottom of the right column with a few other interesting links. Anyway, most of the manufacturer order lists have always been lists that were posted back around 2004 by the late Dr. Harold E. Cox, a well-known traction historian. He had posted lists of quite a few builders, and from what I could tell, he was going alphabetically but stopped partway through the alphabet.

Anyway, Dr. Cox passed away in 2021 at the age of 90 after a period of declining health. I had figured that his order list site might go away at some point, so I copied and saved all the information locally. At least, I thought I did. Within the past few weeks, his old website finally went dark. It was then that I discovered I had missed a few builders! I copied the lists for ACF, American, Brill, CCF, Cincinnati, Kuhlman, LaClede, and Perley Thomas, and I've now put that information back online, linked from the page above.

But I'm missing several others, most notably Danville, Jackson & Sharp, and Laconia (the Laconia list was in PDF format; the others were HTML tables). There were also lists for Barber and Federal that I didn't save, though Barber was a very small builder and Federal went out of business very early.

UPDATE: I'd like to extend a huge THANK YOU to Mark Sims, who saved the Barber, Danville, Jackson & Sharp, and Laconia order lists, and sent them to me to add to the web page linked above. These are now available for use as well. Thanks, Mark!

Fewer Highliners

The Heritage Rail Alliance spring conference was this past weekend in Boone, Iowa, and it was reported back to me that there were fewer ex-Illinois Central "Highliner" cars there than the PNAERC list may have suggested. Some digging revealed that, sure enough, the Boone & Scenic Valley has disposed of three out of the five "Highliners" that were on the property in fall of 2023. Most likely, these cars were cut up later that year or in early 2024, though I'm not exactly sure.

Anyway, Metra cars 1511 (shown above), 1551, and 1628 (shown below) have now all been removed from the PNAERC list. This leaves a total of 15 electric cars at Boone, including cars 1506 and 1523. Like the three scrapped cars, these two were built by St. Louis Car Company in 1971 and retired from service in 2007.

There are now 16 "Highliners" still on the PNAERC list: the remaining two at Boone, four at IRM, and 10 at the Museum of the American Railroad in Texas. The entire list currently stands at 2,083 pieces.

EDIT: A few weeks after this post, I received updated information indicating that the two cars retained by B&SV were not 1506 and 1523, as I had supposed, but 1511 and 1628. Cars 1506 and 1523 have apparently been scrapped. The PNAERC list has been updated with this corrected information.