Third Avenue Railway Car Lost

This one came as a surprise: Matthew Juergens emailed me to let me know that Third Avenue Railway System 637, shown below in an undated photo, was scrapped sometime around last September.

The car was owned by the Tramway Museum Graz, which is located at the end of the streetcar line in Mariatrost, on the outskirts of Graz, Austria. Car 637 was built in 1939 by TARS but only ran in New York for nine years before it, along with a bunch of its fellow 600-series cars, was conveyed to the Vienna street railway system as part of the post-World War II Marshall Plan. Renumbered into the 4200-series in Vienna (car 637 became Wiener Stadtwerke Verkehrsbetriebe 4202), these cars remained in service into the 1960s. Eight (now seven) were preserved, including three that were repatriated to the United States (at Branford, Seashore, and National Capital) and five that remained in Europe.

The five that stayed in Europe have followed divergent paths, from a couple of fully restored showpieces to one or two victims of benign neglect. But the condition of the car in Mariatrost was far from the worst of the lot, and from outward appearances car 637 was complete and solid. I'm not sure of the reason for scrapping it, just that the museum supposedly tried and failed to find a new home for it. As previously mentioned, this is not a remarkable historical loss, as there are seven other examples of this type still extant, but it's still a dismaying development. Many thanks to Matthew for sending this information along. The list now stands at 2,087 cars in all.

SEPTA PCC Scrapped

Thanks to Bill Wall, who passes along word that SEPTA 2104, the last Philadelphia PCC remaining at the Middletown & Hummelstown, was shipped to the scrapyard yesterday.

Car 2104 was a standard Philly postwar car built in 1948, overhauled in the 1980s GOH program, and sold to the M&H in 1994. Its loss is unfortunate, but not particularly significant; by my count, there are roughly 70 Philadelphia PCC cars in existence, in an astonishing variety of states, and that's not even counting cars purchased secondhand by the city.

The M&H is down to 12 cars on PNAERC. Eight of those are Lackawanna MU cars, which I assume are sticking around. Of the other four, three - KCPS steeplecab 2, BRT convertible 4550 and SBK box motor 9425 - are likely available to a good home. That leaves only Red Arrow 77, and the single-truck Rio open car that isn't on the PNAERC list, that the M&H intends to retain for the long term. The PNAERC list currently stands at 2,088 cars in all.

A New Home for Ottawa 696

Thanks to Sean Bowen and Jordan Helzer, who sent me this link to a Facebook post from the Railway Museum of Eastern Ontario in May. Ottawa 696, the oldest double-truck car from that city in preservation, has been moved to a new location. It has moved from its longtime home in an OC Transpo bus garage to the Railway Museum of Eastern Ontario in Smiths Falls, which is an organization new to PNAERC. RMEO has a small collection of steam-road equipment clustered around the town's rather impressive railway station, but car 696 is their first streetcar.

I don't have any insider information on car 696 or this transfer, but the photos posted of the move (including the one shown here) make it clear that the car's condition is similar to the photos on PNAERC taken back in 2018, suggesting that the major rebuilding project that was underway may have largely ground to a halt sometime back. As for the car's new home, RMEO does have a single-track barn, so my hope - especially given that the car doesn't have windows - is that car 696 is going in there and not remaining outside. The museum posted that there are no current plans for an operational restoration, but they do plan to complete restoration work on the car's body and possibly tow it around with a diesel.

Another question, since OC Transpo has divested itself of car 696, is what might happen to Ottawa 905, the other car owned by the city transit agency. While 1917-vintage car 696 is the oldest double-truck Ottawa car in preservation, 1933-vintage car 905 is the newest extant streetcar from the city. It was rescued out of a house in 2004 and has been stored in the same bus garage as 696 for some time, but it's a car body without any interior or running gear.

EDIT: Thanks to Bill Wall for sending along some additional background information. It seems that cars 696 and 905 were both moved to outdoor (tarped) storage at a city works yard in Cumberland, east of Ottawa, last year. That nixed any hope of restoration work on 696 continuing - until its move to Smiths Falls. I'm still not certain of what the plans for car 905 might be, or whether there are any.