Kansas City Birney Made Available

One of the varied trove of extant Birney bodies has gone up for sale, according to this post on the Ahead of the Torch Facebook group. The car, shown above, is Kansas City Public Service 1545, and it has an unusual and slightly sordid history. It's a standard single-truck Birney built by American in 1919, notable in part because it remained in service long after most Birneys had gone to scrap. Car 1545 was the last Birney to run for KCPS, on May 1, 1949, and it was one of two KCPS Birneys preserved (sister car 1533 is at the National Museum of Transportation and is in the midst of a major restoration project). This car was purchased in 1950 by Jay Maeder, who at the time was the president of Speedrail, operator of the rump of the once-great Milwaukee Electric interurban system. Car 1545 was moved to Milwaukee and stored with out-of-service equipment from the Wisconsin lines. After the disastrous Speedrail wreck of September 1950, which happened in large part due to decisions made by Maeder, the remaining suburban lines out of Milwaukee were abandoned. The disgraced Maeder moved to Ohio, and in December 1952 he donated car 1545 to the Ohio Railway Museum of Worthington. ORM moved the Birney to their site in June 1953.

At ORM, the Birney was restored to operation and painted in pre-WWII KCPS colors (the same paint it wears today). I recall a story that during the 1963 Association of Railway Museums convention, held at ORM before they had completed their bridge over Route 161, car 1545 held down an unusual operation. The museum put down some isolated track on the far side of the highway, strung wire, and hauled their Birney over to this piece of track. Convention attendees willing to hike south across Route 161 could go for a ride on the 1545 on its little piece of track courtesy of traction author and trolley museum boomer Jim Blower, who served as motorman for at least part of the time (photo here).

Unfortunately, car 1545's condition deteriorated steadily. I'm not sure whether it was still running at the time of the museum's infamous schism in 1975, but by 1980, it was already in bad shape, with the roof canvas deteriorated and the windows smashed by vandals. In late 1982, the car was sold by ORM to the Fort Smith Trolley Museum, which stripped it for parts to restore the body of hometown car 224.

But FSTM never scrapped the body of 1545; since 1982 or 1983, it's been sitting safely inside their barn. They've now offered the hulk for sale or trade. Car 1545 isn't the only car in preservation to have been stripped for parts after a period of intact preservation, but I believe it's the only Birney with this dubious distinction. Whether it will find a taker will be interesting to see. Given that an identical, but complete, car is preserved elsewhere, it's not the most historic of the extant Birneys, but it would still be nice if it ends up somewhere that preserves it intact.

Magna Motor for Sale

If you're interested in an enormous electric locomotive with an industrial appearance, two different oddball operating voltages, and a truly hideous loading gauge, you're in luck! Kennecott Copper 402, currently on display out in the desert at the Oquirrh Mountain Mining Museum in Tooele, Utah, has been put up for sale.

KCC 402 is one of eight steeplecabs from that operator still in existence, but it's one of only two that are distinctive dual-voltage "Magna motors" built by GE in 1947 for service on the line to Magna, among other things. The other surviving example, KCC 407, is preserved at Rio Vista and has been the subject of recent evaluation work to determine suitability for restoration to operation. These locomotives are behemoths, weighing in at more than a quarter million pounds. But their outstanding feature is their height: listed at 18'8" over the rail, they're the tallest things on the entire PNAERC roster by more than a foot, and they're nearly two feet taller than the tallest non-KCC piece on the list, BC Rail 6001.

Thanks to David Wilkins, who sent me the link earlier today to the public auction listing. Unfortunately, the auction ended earlier this evening and the link no longer works, so I'm not sure how it ended up. Online posts suggest there's a group in the area that is interested in saving KCC 402. But they've got their work cut out for them, what with its isolated location and imposing size. The 2024 photo above is by Josh Lyman.

Not Quite Preserved

As you may already be aware, there's an adjunct to the PNAERC list that I've been maintaining for a few years, the "not-quite-preserved" list. If you view this blog on desktop, the link is at the bottom of the right column; if you're viewing the mobile version, there's a link at the bottom to view the desktop version. Anyway, this "non-preserved" list includes cars that don't qualify as "preserved" by PNAERC standards: they're electric cars that are currently in use as houses, sheds, buildings, or just sitting derelict somewhere. I've only been maintaining this list for a few years, and the owners of these cars typically don't particularly want them publicized, so the list is just a drop in the bucket of what's actually out there. But it's mildly interesting nonetheless.

So my thanks go out to a couple of folks who've written just in the last few days and contributed four new cars to the not-quite-preserved list. First up are two cars in Goffstown, New Hampshire, submitted by Ellie Flint. The first, above, is evidently Manchester & Nashua 8, if the number on the end is to be believed (and why not?). There are some nice interior photos at a real estate listing online that suggest this very likely is M&N 8, a car built by Laconia in 1907 to the same basic plan as Manchester 38 at Seashore - the main difference being that cars 7-12 were one window longer. And then right next door, the house immediately adjacent also has an electric car sticking out the end. To my eye, this looks a lot like another Manchester Street Railway car, but MSR had a lot of these square-window, railroad-roof cars, so I haven't a clue which one this might be.

EDIT: Ellie wrote back to report that there's a third car on this same road in Goffstown, almost certainly another one of the Manchester "rapid" cars like Seashore's car 38. I can't tell whether it's one of the 1906 five-window cars or one of the 1907 six-window cars, but the real estate listing here has quite a few photos, including the one above. Ellie has followed up to say that this is likely one of the five-window cars, which narrows it down to five possibilities, since there were six in the series and one is at Seashore!

And then thanks to Jacob Wiczkowski, who sent along a Street View link that shows a pair of Georgia Power Company streetcars attached to a building in Hampton, Georgia. I guess I can't be 100% certain these are Atlanta cars, but I'm 99% certain - they look a whole lot like 900-series Georgia Power cars, identical to car 948 preserved in operating condition at Branford. All four cars, both Manchester cars and both Atlanta cars, have been added to the "non-preserved" list. And if you know of an electric car body that's missing from the list, drop me a line!

Finally, let's return to the land of the living - and by living, I mean preserved and on the PNAERC list. Bill Wall sends along this link which shows an entertaining time-lapse video of Public Service 4584, Branford's New Jersey center-entrance streetcar trailer, getting washed down. I've changed 4584's status from "stored" to "undergoing restoration" thanks to an update Bill sent:

Work is still being done on the interior.  A complete Tomlinson coupler assembly was gotten for it, with coupler and has since been reinstalled.  The interior is nearly 100% done, including all the missing manual door controls, conductor’s position and so on. All the seating and frames were made new.  The IRM archives came in handy as we were able to get a complete set of prints for the car (it’s an Osgood Bradley).  The trucks on it were salvaged from... Queensboro Bridge car 601, which are somewhat close to what it had.  The material was gotten for below the floor for the brake system.

Center-entrance streetcar trailers were a brief fad and were really only built for about 10 years, from the mid-teens to the mid-1920s. Ten still exist, of which two are little better than frames and three more are stripped bodies. Thanks to the restoration work done on PSCT 4854, I'd say it has vaulted ahead of CSL 9020 and Denver Tramways 610 to qualify as the third most complete of the survivors. The only one of the group that's still 100% complete - for the moment, at least - is SLPS 426, which not coincidentally is the only one that was preserved more-or-less immediately upon retirement from passenger service. (You can read more about streetcar trailers here.)

EDIT #2: Bill has followed up with some photos of car 4584 taken within the past couple of weeks. They show the tremendous amount of work that has gone into rebuilding the car's interior, which was essentially "tunneled" during its years as a car body, including all-new bench seating and a recreated conductor's station. There's also a shot of the front end of the car - remember, this is a single-ended trailer with a door on one side only - showing the recently mounted Tomlinson coupler.