South Shore 73 update

Many thanks to Bob Harris, who has forwarded a series of photos detailing recent progress on the roof of Chicago Lake Shore & South Bend 73. This is the last surviving South Shore Line wood car and it is the subject of a tremendous restoration project from chicken-coop condition. Recently the focus has been on the roof of the car, which was sheathed - unusually for an electric car - in copper. Well-known wood car restoration expert Glenn Guerra has been heading up this work.

The first five photos from a week or two ago detail various stages of installation of the copper sheets on the front end of the car's roof:

And the last two photos, taken more recently, show the front end of the car's roof following completion of the copper sheeting installation with all of the joints sealed up. Very impressive work!

Car 73 is a big car and there's a lot of work left to do, but the compound curves on the ends of the roof are obviously the most intricate and complicated parts of the roof work. This is a fairly unique accomplishment; I can't think of any other cars in traction preservation that have had this kind of copper sheathing totally replicated from scratch.

M2 Cosmopolitans added to the list

Thanks to Greg Kepka, who alerted me to the fact that the Danbury Railway Museum added a pair of 1970s-era class M2 "Cosmopolitan" MU cars to their collection. These cars were built for service between New York and New Haven and were jointly operated by the New York MTA and the Connecticut Department of Transportation. As such they were dual-voltage, designed to work on both the high-voltage AC of the New Haven and the 600 volt DC approaches into Grand Central Terminal. They were dubbed "Cosmopolitans" to set them apart from the similar type M1 "Metropolitan" cars built slightly earlier for the Long Island Rail Road. Cars 8706 and 8707 were in the last train of operating M2 cars on December 28, 2018 and in April of this year they were moved to DRM and put on display there. I haven't been able to find any decent photos of these cars in their new home but I'm sure photos will show up at some point.

I'm still missing some information on these two (notably, exactly when they were built - the M2 series was constructed over a period of several years) but their new PNAERC listings are relatively complete. For its part, Danbury is quickly gaining a significant collection of mainline electric equipment. Besides their new 1970s cars they also have all three surviving New Haven "washboard" MU cars and a pair of ex-New York Central MU cars from the 1960s. To top it off they've got the electric wrecker from Grand Central Terminal. Their collection already arguably rivals that of IRM or MOT; now all they need is an electric locomotive or two.

Another mystery

Once again I'm trying to clear up some of the unknowns on the PNAERC roster. Today's focus is on a pair of Lackawanna MU cars that, until five or six years ago at least, were in Hamburg, PA at the Reading Company Technical & Historical Society site. Cars 4351 and 4359 are (were?) standard high-roof trailers like so many others at other museums and tourist lines. As of 2013, though, it appears that both cars were taken off their trucks as shown in the above photo by Michael Huber. My guess is that they were stripped of parts and scrapped but I haven't been able to confirm this, so they've stayed on the PNAERC roster pending confirmation. Can anyone answer whether these two cars are indeed gone?
UPDATE: This mystery has been solved!

Branford rebuilding updates

The latest newsletter from Branford has arrived and, as usual, it has a trove of information on their massive years-long motor rebuilding project. This effort was begun not by choice but by necessity, following the flooding of the museum by two different hurricanes about a decade ago. The scope of work is remarkable: dozens of cars have had, or will have, their motors rebuilt and in many cases will also see significant mechanical and control system work. By the project's end, it will give Branford a collection of cars in better electrical and mechanical shape than any other trolley museum.

The latest car returned to operation with its motors rebuilt is Rhode Island Company 61, the attractive single-trucker shown above in a photo from Branford's website. Its record on the list has been suitably updated. The newsletter makes the point that car 61 is Branford's oldest electric streetcar that was built as an electric; Third Avenue Railway 220 is a year older but was built as a cable car.

Then there are the cars that are just entering the motor rebuild project. Lynchburg Railway 34, which was the first car ever acquired by Branford, has been jacked up and its motors removed for rebuilding. The same is true, though at the other end of the size spectrum, for Interborough Rapid Transit 3662. This is the only preserved deck-roof IRT car and one of only two preserved IRT Hi-V cars that were built with GE Type M control. It hasn't run in years so its return to operation should be pretty interesting.

The final category includes cars whose rebuilds are in progress. North Shore 709, the museum's representative Chicago area interurban car, has had its motors rebuilt and is awaiting their reinstallation. The same is true of Cincinnati & Lake Erie 116, which has been seeing quite a bit of interior restoration work. And control system overhaul on Brooklyn & Queens Transit 1001, the first production PCC car, has progressed enough to allow reassembly to begin. This car's motors have been rebuilt but its under-floor control equipment was also flooded and has needed significant work.

North Shore car removed from list

Thanks to Justin Birchfield, who posted the above photo (and a few others) online recently depicting the current sad status of Chicago North Shore & Milwaukee 154. This car is/was the oldest extant North Shore Line passenger car, part of the line's first order for steel cars placed in 1915 with Brill. It ran until the NSL was abandoned in 1963 and then spent about four years traveling around Indiana on railroad excursions organized by the Anderson Railroad Club. Around 1967 it went to the Ohio Railway Museum in Worthington, where it was made operational and for roughly a decade saw regular use.

But ORM's fortunes began declining quickly after a membership schism in 1975 and car 154 was one of the victims. Its condition had deteriorated badly by the early 2000s and it was put up for sale by ORM in 2004. There were a few on-again, off-again deals to sell it but it wasn't until the Grass Lake Historical Society in Grass Lake, Michigan stepped in during 2016 that the car actually left Worthington. That year it was moved to Grass Lake, stripped for parts for Michigan Electric 29, and the body dumped on private property outside of town. In 2017 the GLHS transferred car 29, and presumably car 154 as well, to the Lost Railway Museum.

While car 154 has remained on PNAERC, at this point - given the time that has passed since it was parted out and the obviously quite thorough job that was done of stripping the car - it doesn't seem like the car stands any better chance of ultimate preservation than any other car body abandoned on private land. As such, I've decided to remove it from the PNAERC list.

Toronto Suburban Railway 8

Another mystery is solved, at least to the degree it's likely to be solved. A while back I posted this piece asking for information on the car shown above, Interprovincial Railway 8, preserved at the Canadian Railway Museum. The other day I stumbled upon this photo which looked a whole lot like car 8 and it occurred to me that it might be worth sending an e-mail to Gord McOuat, general Canadian traction expert, asking about the car. Gord didn't disappoint and sent me the car's entire ownership history so far as is known.

The kicker is that it never ran on the Interprovincial Railway! Well that's embarrassing. It turns out that tidbit came from a book published back in the 1990s and was erroneous; instead the car is more properly known as Toronto Suburban Railway 8. It was indeed built in 1895 and ran for two successive street railway companies in Peterborough, Ontario before going to Toronto. When exactly that happened isn't clear; apparently open cars were banned in Toronto around 1915 so it would have been before that. It went to Gillies Brothers, a large lumber mill in Braeside, Ontario at some point around 1920 or so (the photo linked above shows it still on TSR in 1920 but obviously out-of-service) and remained there until donated to CRM for preservation in 1957 (though it was kept on the Montreal streetcar system for a few years). It most likely went to CRM along with the rest of MT's historic collection in 1963. Many thanks to Gord for this helpful information!

Kansas City Birney under restoration

Thanks to David Wilkins for forwarding along the above photo, taken by Bob O'Neil, showing Kansas City Public Service 1533. This single-truck Birney is preserved at the Museum of Transportation in St. Louis and as the photo shows it is now the focus of the museum's Trolley Volunteers restoration group. This is the group within the MOT organization that previously restored St. Louis 1743, a 1946 PCC car, and before that restored St. Louis Waterworks 10. Car 1533 is an historic car and should be well-suited to their short line. Built in 1919 at the height of the Birney fad, car 1533 ran in Kansas City for a full three decades, later than Birneys ran in most larger cities. When it was retired in 1949, it was acquired by the nascent National Museum of Transport (now MOT) and brought to St. Louis intact. Over the years it was maintained in pretty good condition, though in recent years it suffered a collapsed platform knee at one end which resulted in some damage to one platform (see below photo, taken in 2009).

But the MOT restoration crew is obviously rebuilding the framing of this platform and it looks like they will be rehabbing the rest of the car as well. Besides being the only Birney, and the only Kansas City car, at MOT, car 1533 is also in the best shape of the four pre-PCC cars from Kansas City that are in museums. It will be a great addition to the MOT operating fleet when it's done.