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.