Spam cans to the Carolinas

The Friends of Philadelphia Trolleys Facebook page (no log-in required) reports that the last pair of ex-CTA "spam can" rapid transit cars, SEPTA 482 and 483, have at long last left Philadelphia and are on the road to a new home in North Carolina. The above photo is from the announcement.

The two cars in question are among the earliest CTA 6000-series 'L' cars built that are still around. They were constructed in late 1950 or early 1951 by St. Louis Car Company as CTA 6089-6090, like all 6000s a married pair. As part of the CTA's initial order for 6000s they were not built using components from scrapped PCC streetcars but were designed to utilize standard PCC components like windows and control equipment.

Most of the CTA's fleet of 6000s was retired during the mid-1980s when the 2600-series (today the eldest CTA cars in service) was delivered. By 1986 there were still some 6000s in service but most had been retired and in storage. In the meantime the SEPTA ex-Philadelphia & Western line between Norristown and 69th Street in Philadelphia was practically in a state of collapse. Several accidents and fires occurred in 1985-1986 that took cars - some 60 years old - out of service and the operations over the P&W were actually suspended for a few months in the fall of 1986 for lack of equipment. Desperate for rolling stock, SEPTA purchased ten pairs of retired 6000s in rough shape from the CTA and put seven of them into service in late 1986, cannibalizing the other three pairs for parts. These cars permitted the resumption of service on the P&W line and comprised the majority of the service fleet on the line until the new N-5 cars arrived in 1993-1994.

Amazingly, all seven pairs of 6000s sold to SEPTA are still around, although all have been victims of benign neglect over the past 25 years. Five sets, including at least one pair that was never repainted by SEPTA and retains its CTA Bicentennial color scheme, are in storage at VESCO in Windber, PA. Another pair is at the Middletown & Hummelstown. And that leaves 482-483, which have been sitting alongside 72nd Street Shop on the Norristown line for 25 years. I'm not sure why this pair stuck around so long however I think that they were retained for a couple of years after retirement from passenger service as "brine cars" for spraying ice melt on the third rail.

Where they're headed is the Craggy Mountain Line in Woodfin, North Carolina. Since its creation a decade ago, CML has amassed the largest - and by far the oddest - collection of traction equipment in the Carolinas. Joining two local Asheville single-truck streetcar bodies is the body (on trucks) of a New York IND subway car and, now, a pair of ex-Chicago Philadelphia rapid transit cars. What CML plans to do with the cars isn't entirely clear but they are, at least, the organization's first complete (or at least mostly complete) electric cars. For its part, SEPTA hasn't run out of semi-derelict rapid transit cars on its property yet.

Missing streetcar

A post on our sister Hicks Car Works blog here reveals that a streetcar in the East Troy Electric Railroad collection, Milwaukee Electric 200, has gone missing. The car is pictured above in 2011, by which time it had been moved off-site to private property, but between then and now ETER has undergone one of its periodic "regime changes" and the owner of the property died. At some point during the last few years the car seems to have vanished. Whether it was demolished or is sitting in someone's barn somewhere is a good question that the folks at East Troy are looking to answer.

UPDATE: This mystery has been solved!

So its condition on PNAERC has been changed to "situation unknown." There are a lot of cars on the list with this tag - 32 total at the moment. And I'm always looking to solve some of these mysteries, so please take a look at the list if you've got a minute. Some of the cars on the list (like QRL&P 105 and TTC TP10) are undeniably intact, I'm just not sure what condition they're in. There are some that were, until recently at least, bodies in a state of precarious storage on private land (KCC&StJ 54, El Paso 90, San Antonio 205, and SCP 302 fall into this category). These cars have very likely been scrapped, and at some point I'll probably have to assume the worst and take them off the list (update here), but I'd love to know for certain. There are a handful of cars that were owned by apparently established organizations but seem to have disappeared (besides car 200, NOS&WB 50*, Muni 1111, and the St Pete line car  (update) are in this category). There are a couple of PCC cars that were trucked to destinations unknown (NJT 24* and Pittsburgh 1772*). And then there are a few cars that I'm pretty sure - but not 100% certain - were scrapped, like Tandy 6*, TTC 2822, and Lackawanna 4351* and 4359*. (*=since solved!)

As always, the PNAERC list is only as complete or as accurate as the information that I'm able to gather. YOU can help!

Lake Shore 73 update

Thanks to Bob Harris for sending along another set of photos documenting progress on the last Chicago Lake Shore & South Bend interurban car, CLS&SB 73. Recent work by project workers Glenn and Gary has focused on installing new copper sheathing on the car's roof. While this is an unusual roof coating for interurban cars, it was used by the Lake Shore and (I believe) some other high-voltage lines early in the 20th century.

 Note the intricate bends needed to shape the copper around the clerestory window frames. I'm not certain how much of the clerestory will get copper sheathing.

The following photos were taken a few days after the previous ones and show significant progress being made as the copper steadily marches down the length of the car:

Here we see Gary working to seal the seams of the copper sheets:

The curves at the corner of the car's roof give you an idea of the craftsmanship needed to create something like this:

CRANDIC 55 off the list

Thanks to Bob Harris, who has related the news that Cedar Rapids & Iowa City (CRANDIC) 55, a steeplecab formerly preserved at the Indiana Transportation Museum in Noblesville, has been scrapped for parts. The first photo was taken on Thursday the 26th, the second late on Friday the 28th.

CRANDIC 55 was built in 1926 by Detroit United, which ran it until 1928 when it went from being DUR 2007 to Eastern Michigan Railway 2007. In 1935 when EMR quit, the locomotive was sold to CRANDIC which ran it until the wires came down in the 1950s. It sat at the CRANDIC shop until the late-1960s, when it was spotted by Indiana traction fans who bought it and moved it to the nascent Indiana Museum of Transportation and Communication in Noblesville, later to become ITM.

Though complete, the locomotive was deteriorated when it arrived in Noblesville and it never ran there. Its condition gradually worsened over four decades of benign neglect and by the time ITM was evicted from its site in 2018 the locomotive looked like this. Nobody stepped forward to attempt to save CRANDIC 55 but it's fortunate that it didn't simply become nails and razor blades (as did other equipment in comparable condition). Instead, a couple of different groups including Hoosier Heartland Trolley Company purchased the locomotive and moved it off-site to be stripped for parts. Components from the steeplecab will go to help make Union Traction 437 and other cars complete.

Cars on the move

There are two cars on the PNAERC list that have recently moved. The first is Chicago Aurora & Elgin 453, pictured above in a photo taken earlier today. As noted on our sister blog, this 1946 interurban car was recently sold to the Illinois Railway Museum by the Electric City Trolley Museum. ECTM acquired it back in 2009 from Trolleyville as part of the consortium effort to distribute the collection of that organization when it went defunct, but after the car was moved to Scranton in early 2010 it was simply held in storage. For various reasons it was preserved but was not the focus of restoration work, and recently ECTM began eyeing the car's indoor storage spot as potential home for another car owned by that organization but stored off-site. With its addition to the IRM collection, that museum now owns ten CA&E cars evenly split between wood and steel cars, more than half of all the CA&E cars in preservation. And as a matter of trivia, car 453 is the first car sold as part of the 2009 consortium effort to have changed owners in the time since.

The other car that has recently moved is Lackawanna MU club car 2454, owned by the Whippany Railway Museum in New Jersey. While its ownership hasn't changed, the car has for several years been located in Boonton where it has been undergoing a monumental restoration effort courtesy of contractor Star Trak. That restoration job - I would it's say by far the most extensive ever done to a Lackawanna MU car - concluded earlier this year and photos posted on Facebook show that the car has now been sent on to the WRM site. Unfortunately it still has some boarded-up windows owing to a nasty vandalism incident in Boonton back in April but hopefully that damage is fixed soon. The car looks to be a real showpiece.

Bullet car removed from list

I've received confirmation that ex-Philadelphia & Western "Bullet car" 204 was scrapped at the Museum of Transportation within the last couple of years. As with the rest of the series of ten Bullets, car 204 was built by Brill in 1931 and ran on the P&W - later Red Arrow, later SEPTA - for some 50 years. This car was retired in 1986 and for some reason its stripped shell went to the Delaware Car Company in Wilmington where it spent several years plinthed alongside the Northeast Corridor (photo here). In 1996 it was acquired by the Museum of Transportation in St. Louis and moved there. Not much was ever done with it and I believe that for the entirety of its time at MOT it was stored outside the "trolley building" at the bottom of the hill. The photo above was taken by yours truly in 2009 and the car's condition didn't improve in the years following this. After being offered to other museums with no takers, it was cut up.

While the Bullets are iconic cars, from an historical perspective this is really no loss. First, the car was only a shell, missing its interior, trucks, and all of its underbody equipment. More importantly, there are still six out of the original ten* P&W Bullet cars around (not to mention three out of the original five FJ&G Bullets) and those six are all complete, or substantially complete, cars. One of them is even in running condition.

*Yes, I know there were eleven because one was built shortly after the others to replace a car destroyed by fire. But there were only ten P&W Bullets at any one time.

Washington Metro cars

I've decided to bite the bullet and add a pair of Washington Metro cars to the PNAERC list. The first two cars built for the system back in 1974, Rohr-built cars 1000 and 1001, have - by multiple accounts - been set aside by WMATA for preservation. It sounds like they're currently stored at Greenbelt Yard in Maryland, possibly being refurbished. I've tried getting absolute confirmation of this fact, including contacting WMATA itself, without any luck. However there have been some rumored sightings of the cars in recent months and I found an official WMATA pronouncement here that these two cars were being preserved. So I'll make the leap and assume that these two cars are, indeed, squirreled away at Greenbelt Yard and being kept around for the foreseeable future.

I've had only moderate luck finding mechanical information about these cars, and most of what I've found has come from Wikipedia (ecch), so I'm interested in any information on the cars' mechanical equipment. They were rebuilt in the 1990s with AC traction motors, which I think makes these the first modern equipment on the PNAERC list with AC motors. They're also the first Rohr-built cars on the list.

WMATA has recently retired, or will soon retire, a few other series of cars and there have been rumors that at least one or possibly two more pairs of cars might be marked by them for preservation. As always, submissions of information are greatly appreciated!