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.

Linear Induction Motor Cars Preserved

A post on the Transit Toronto Facebook page here has revealed that two cars from Toronto's Scarborough RT rapid transit line, which closed in 2023, have found their way to the Halton County Radial Railway. The cars are TTC 3026 and TTC 3027, a married-pair set of "people mover"-type automated cars built in 1986 by UTDC. Not only were these cars built for automated, or driverless, operation, but they were built to use linear induction motors. As such, they don't have normal traction motors geared to the axles, but they still have electric motors that move them along the track. There's one other car of this general type (actually, a nearly identical car built by UTDC in 1982 for Vancouver) on the PNAERC list, described here when I added it to the list a year or so ago.

As for cars 3026 and 3027, they're standard gauge, which means they can't roll on Halton County's track. For the moment, they're stored on panel track in the maintenance building. Supposedly, one will be preserved and the other will be disposed of, though I'm not sure which. With these two cars added, Halton County's up to 56 cars listed on PNAERC, while the entire list stands at 2,089 cars.

I was able to find more information about these cars (albeit from Wikipedia) than I was on the Vancouver car that's on the list, but I could still use more information. Technical details are always appreciated.

Modern MUs at Exporail

Many thanks to Jacob Wiczkowski, who pointed out that I had missed a pair of electric cars that entered preservation this past October: Exo 400 and Exo 485. They have now been added to the list.

The cars are shown above, in a photo from this page, being delivered to the Canadian Railway Museum (aka Exporail) in Delson-Ste. Constant, PQ, this fall. The cars are MR-90 type mainline commuter cars set up in good old motor-trailer fashion, with car 400 representing the fleet of four-motor cars while 485 is a control trailer. These MR-90 cars were built by Bombardier in 1994-1995 and replaced the old GE boxcabs and 1950s MU cars, many of which are now in preservation. But Montreal is completely rebuilding the Deux-Montagnes line, so this fleet was retired en masse in late 2020.

The entire fleet of 58 of these cars was scrapped except for these two, so they're unique and moderately significant in that respect. I'd also point out that their most recent operator, Exo, probably represents the shortest railway name on the PNAERC list. I have almost no mechanical information on these cars - they ran on 25kV AC and apparently used Siemens AC traction motors, but that's all I've got. If anyone can contribute control, motor, truck, brake, or air compressor information, I'd be very much obliged.

Data enhancement

Many thanks to Bill Wulfert of the Illinois Railway Museum who passed along to me a roster book produced around 1981 by the late Jim Johnson and H. George Friedman. This 40-page book made it to the proofing stage (this is one of an unknown number of proof copies, a fact noted at the bottom of the front cover) but was never published. It's an interesting document from the pre-Internet age when information was significantly tougher to gather from disparate sources.

The book features rosters from 29 different organizations, though the title is a bit of a misnomer as a few museums that never ran electric cars (such as the Snoqualmie group, "Colorado Railway Museum," and Kentucky Railway Museum) are featured as are a few groups that wouldn't commence electric operation until years later like Northern Ohio and Edmonton. A few groups no longer around (TWERHS, listed simply as East Troy Trolley Museum; Trolleyville, listed as Columbia Park & Southwestern; and of course IMOTAC) and some have changed names ("Relic Trolley Museum" is now Fox River Trolley Museum, California Railway Museum is now Western Railway Museum, Railways to Yesterday is now Rockhill, and "Arden Trolley Museum" is now Pennsylvania Trolley Museum). For groups included, not only electrics are listed but also steam railroad equipment.

As luck would have it, combing through these rosters has produced quite a few pieces of information I formerly didn't have in the PNAERC roster. The height and width of the Fresno hobbleskirt car; dimensional information on the Yakima Master Units; motors for Montreal Tramways 1; and air compressor type for Ohio Public Service 21 are just a few of the myriad tidbits of data I was able to mine from this document. Many of the rosters were incomplete, some more so than others (Arden's in particular only listed 14 cars, far fewer than they owned at the time - perhaps they only submitted their core historic collection?), but the information that was there was quite interesting. It was also a reminder of the sizable influx of equipment into many trolley museums during the 1980s and 1990s. There were surprisingly few car bodies owned by trolley museums back in 1981.

Anyway, I'm always grateful for bits of information that fill in gaps in the PNAERC roster. There's still a lot of mechanical and electrical information that is missing from the list and even more missing dimensional information. If you come across an old roster that can help fill in the gaps, I hope you'll send along any information that I'm missing or that I've got wrong. Thank you!

Los Angeles light rail car preserved

From Chris Baldwin of the Orange Empire Railway Museum comes news that Los Angeles P865 type light rail car 144 has been acquired by the museum. The car arrived in Perris earlier this week where it joins two Duewag-built U2 light rail cars. Per Chris, the preservation of this light rail car was spearheaded by Gary Starre and AJ Chier; the photo above is from a GoFundMe page set up to raise money.

Car 144 is the newest preserved car on the PNAERC list, its 1989 construction date beating out a pair of TTC work motors at Halton County by a year. It's the first car on the list built by Nippon Sharyo, a company which debuted in the U.S. traction market with interurban cars built in the mid-1980s for the South Shore line and are still in service. It's a P865, a type of light rail car built only for Los Angeles, and only the third distinct type of light rail car - after Boeing LRVs and Duewag U2s - in preservation. It's also a significant addition to the Orange Empire collection, as it was part of the original fleet of cars built for the first Los Angeles light rail line to Long Beach that opened in 1990.

I still need motor, truck, and brake information for the P865 - help?

Montreal Tramways cars updated

Thanks to Gord McOuat of the Halton County Radial Railway for providing technical information on two cars on the PNAERC list that are preserved at the Canadian Railway Museum in Delson-Ste. Constant, Montreal Tramways 1953 and 1959. These are both lightweight cars built in 1928 and comprise two of three surviving examples of their type (Bill Wall points out that 1972 is preserved at Branford). Until now I was lacking any mechanical information at all - trucks, motors, control, brakes, etc. Thanks Gord!

I'm still in need of this information for some of the other cars at Delson. If you're able to provide any information, it's always apprecaited!

Bristol Traction corrections

I'm always trying to go through the PNAERC list to check information, especially historical (ownership) information, and correct listings. This week it was time to take a look at the surviving cars from Bristol Traction, the street railway in Bristol, Connecticut. BT was a small system, with only about two dozen cars at any one time, but there are three survivors (sort of): car 28, a 1907 single-trucker; car 34, an unusual 1917 convertible; and car 43, a 1927 double-trucker bought secondhand which is also the only surviving car from the Fitchburg & Leominster in Massachusetts. All are located at the Connecticut Trolley Museum. All three are car bodies in various stages of disrepair, though car 28 at least is on a truck which looks from photos to be roughly correct. Car 34 is probably the most distinctive of the group: not only is it a two-axle, arch-roof convertible - a rare type to be built as late as 1917 - but it is also one of only two extant cars that was built with a Brill Radiax truck with "steerable" axles.

Anyway, some research into the history of Bristol Traction (not to be confused with the Bristol Traction located in Tennessee) revealed that none of the above cars was built for BT. Rather, BT was only created in 1927 and before that was known as the Bristol & Plainville. The two older cars were built for the B&P while car 43 was purchased from the F&L, possibly around 1932 when the F&L quit or maybe earlier. (Anyone know for sure?) I also discovered that car 34, which had formerly been listed as built by Brill, was actually built by Wason - something it has in common with the other two BT cars. I'm still in need of a lot of mechanical information on these Bristol cars but at least their histories seem to have been cleared up somewhat.

First PCC returns to El Paso

An online article published yesterday states that the first of the prewar PCC cars remanufactured for the El Paso Streetcar project by Brookville is now en route back to its home in Texas. Car 1506 is the first car to return, attired in mint green and white livery. It has been heavily rebuilt so all of the mechanical components of the car have been blanked out in the PNAERC database until correct information can be found; the car's original equipment has been noted in the remarks section. Question: anyone know what the equipment being fitted to these cars is called?

UPDATE: Thanks to Peter Ehrlich, who has pointed out that the cars retain their original Clark B2 trucks - albeit rebuilt for all-electric braking. It's still not certain what motors or control the rebuilt cars have.

The car's ownership has also been changed to Sun Metro, the transit provider in El Paso, with this change backdated to 2015. That's when the car really left Paso del Norte Streetcar Preservation Society's site and went to Brookville for rebuilding. As the other five PCC cars return to El Paso they will also be switched over to Sun Metro ownership. I've set the car's status to "operated occasionally" which is admittedly getting a little ahead of myself, but should be true soon enough.

First rebuilt El Paso PCC outshopped

More news shows up on Facebook: the El Paso Streetcar page there posted a few photos late yesterday showing the first of the El Paso PCC cars to be outshopped by Brookville. It's not clear whether car 1506 is completed or whether it's in some nearly-complete stage of rebuilding, but it looks complete - and certainly looks very different. As shown above the car now has an enormous fairing stretching almost the entire length of the roof which presumably contains air-conditioning equipment and may also contain propulsion or control electronics, I don't know. It also sports a rear-mounted pantograph as well as a variety of new warning lights on the front and rear. That said, the car has kept its original number and is painted in one of El Paso's several PCC liveries, the same mint green with red trim livery worn by the El Paso tribute car in San Francisco.

At the moment I've changed car 1506's description from "prewar PCC" to "modified PCC" but it's still listed as being under restoration, since it's still at Brookville and it's not in operation yet. At the moment it still has its original electrical equipment shown in the listing though I'm pretty sure that's not accurate. I need to get information on what electrical and mechanical equipment is being fitted to these cars by Brookville. Car 1506 is also still noted as owned by Paso del Norte Streetcar Preservation Society, which for decades was the caretaker for the collection of El Paso PCC cars in storage in that city, but I'm not sure that's still accurate. Anyone know who technically owns these El Paso rebuilds and/or will be operating them?

New Jersey historic cars

Piscataway Township in New Jersey, of all things, has posted on Facebook some photos of a selection of historic New Jersey electric cars. The post shows photos of two cars owned by the United Railroad Historical Society and one car owned by the North Jersey Electric Railway Historical Society, which is closely affiliated with URHS. NJ Transit 5221 and NJ Transit 5223 are rather aged work cars that until only a decade ago served on the Newark subway system. Both of these are cars whose histories are somewhat uncertain; car 5223 in particular is a bit of a mystery, as it was obviously rebuilt from a standard passenger car but which one is unknown to me. The third car is PSCT 2651, a Public Service standard car built in 1917 and subject of a slow long-term restoration effort by NJERHS. (Until now this car has been listed on the roster under the railway name "New Jersey Consolidated Transport" but that has been corrected to PSCT.) All three cars are apparently stored at the site of a Kinkisharyo plant in Piscataway where subway cars from Atlanta will soon be undergoing rebuild. What the long-term plans are for these cars, which have knocked around various locations in the northeast including the National Capital Trolley Museum and Lyons Industries in Pennsylvania, is uncertain.

And now for the appeal for help: does anyone have any mechanical information on these cars?

Southwest Missouri 60 photo

Dave Hamley from the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum forwarded me the above photo, from an unknown online source, taken (apparently recently) of Southwest Missouri 60 in operation in Webb City, MO. It's an intriguing photo, particularly since the last I had heard, this car was operating using an on-board gas engine out of an old Corvair to power it. However it now appears that it has this interesting little thing coupled to it.

Anyone know what the arrangement is here? It looks kind of like that might be some sort of remote-control locomotive that is pushing/pulling the electric car. Alternately it could be a more standard tow-along generator powering electric motors under the car. But I simply don't know.

New car added to list - ex-Windsor ON, ex-Staten Island NY

It's not every day that I add a new car to the PNAERC roster, particularly these days, and this one is fairly interesting in that it's old and historically significant. The new addition is Sandwich Windsor & Amherstberg 351 - thanks to Sloan Auchinloss, who sent me this newspaper article about the car's preservation and plans for its possible cosmetic restoration and display in Windsor, Ontario.

Car 351 was built in 1919 by Cincinnati Car Company for the Richmond Light & Railroad Company. You can be excused for thinking that RL&R was in Virginia - I know I hadn't heard of it - but the line was actually on Staten Island in New York City. This makes car 351 (originally RL&R 332) one of only two streetcars from Staten Island still in existence and, arguably, the more complete of the two. Car 332/351 was part of a series of 20 double-truck cars whose design appears to have mimicked pretty closely the standard Public Service of New Jersey car design, right down to the high curve-topped side windows and unusual low deck roof. Around 1927 all 20 cars were sold to the SW&A where they ran until the end of streetcar service around 1939. Car 351 was sold for use as a house but was acquired a couple of years ago by a private owner and moved to the old streetcar barn on University Avenue, which he owns and where the car sits now. The city is trying to come up with a plan to work with the owner on getting the car cosmetically restored and put on display so hopefully those plans come to fruition.

So here's a question: does anyone have any mechanical information on this series of car? Trucks, motors, control, etc?

EDIT: Jeff Hakner has provided some additional information on the history of these cars. According to notes from the Branford files, the 20 cars in this series were built by Cincinnati in 1918 for the Emergency Fleet Corporation, which was organized by the government to assist with war efforts. Supposedly the cars were assembled at the Plank Road Shops of Public Service of New Jersey, which may explain their very PSNJ-esque appearance. The cars were leased to RL&R from 1918 to 1920 at which time they were sold to the RL&R. Pretty interesting stuff!

El Paso PCC update

Today's update involves six of the surviving PCC cars listed under the Paso del Norte Streetcar Preservation Society. According to the Trolleyville Times at George Huckaby's trolleyville.com website, the list of cars being remanufactured at Brookville (a list I've been trying to hunt down for some months) is 1504, 1506, 1511, 1512, 1514, and 1515. All six have been on the PNAERC list for years, included among the cars stored derelict at the El Paso airport. I'm not certain what the timeline for completion of these cars is, but for the moment their location has been updated to Pennsylvania.

However that's not the end of the story, and at the moment I'm afraid I don't have the end of the story. I'd be very interested in more information on two fronts. First, are these cars still considered part of the PdNSPS collection? Since they're going to be part of a transit agency-run heritage line, I wonder. Second, I've read that they're going to be rebuilt with newer-style control (and possibly motors and brakes) in place of their original XD323 controllers and air-electric brakes. Any information on what exactly they're being rebuilt with would be very helpful.

First blog post

As I write this post, the new and improved PNAERC site is in beta test mode. The site's webmaster, Jeff Hakner, has completely redesigned the backend of the site and from now on we will be able to make changes to any listing at any time. I am going through and correcting any data that got mangled during the data transfer, after which I will be going back through the blog again to update and correct photo and video links.

I'm also making changes and updates, which going forward will be the raison d'etre for this blog. Today I added two recently-preserved cars to the list, both Duewag U2 LRV's from San Diego. Car 1017 was acquired earlier this year by the Western Railway Museum while car 1008 was acquired by Orange Empire. Both have been added to the PNAERC list, joining cars 1018 and 1019 which were already there.

Help needed: I am still looking for mechanical information on these San Diego U2 cars to fill in the gaps, so any assistance with this is appreciated!