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!

More From Canada

Today I was able to add a pair of Canadian cars to the PNAERC list, though admittedly I'm rather tardy on one of them. The less unique of the two, I'd say, is Toronto CLRV 4034, shown above at its new home at the Illinois Railway Museum. It is now the fourth CLRV preserved but the first one not at Halton County. IRM has built a short section of Toronto-gauge track, which is what the car is now sitting on, but the intention is to regauge a spare set of trucks acquired for the purpose and put the car into operation on the museum's streetcar line. This will presumably be the first time a CLRV has operated south of the border since this happened.

The second car to be added today, shown above in a photo from Flickr, is by far the more unusual one. It's Montreal Metro 81-502, which actually made its way to the Canadian Railway Museum (aka Exporail) more than a year ago in September 2018, and it qualifies for several "firsts" on the PNAERC list. The facts that it's the first Montreal Metro car and the first car built by Canadian Vickers are the least of it: it's the first rubber-tired subway car that I've added. It was one of the inaugural group of MR-63 class rubber-tired cars built in the 1960s for the Montreal Metro, using technology patterned after that used on some lines of the Paris Metro.

Fortunately the decision of whether or not to include it on my list wasn't too hard; besides its tires, which in service would support most of the car's weight, it also has standard railroad wheels that ride on standard-gauge track. So given that fact, I'd definitely say it qualifies for the list. I'm still looking for technical information on the thing: it has a pretty standard two-truck design with traction motors on each axle, and supposedly has some sort of cam control, but I haven't been able to find much in the way of specifics on its electrical gear.

CLRVs preserved

There have been some changes at Halton County! In the Tom Twigg photo above, from the Halton Facebook question, can be seen a lineup of cars from the post-PCC era that are now museum pieces. To the right is the ALRV set that arrived a couple of weeks ago, TTC 4204, while on the three tracks to the left are three single-unit CLRV cars that arrived between November 4th and today: cars 4003, 4010, and 4039. All three are new additions to the PNAERC list.

Car 4003 is the eldest, one of six prototypes built in 1977 by Swiss company SIG (Schweizerische Industrie Gesellschaft, but you knew that). The other two were part of the 190-car production order, with 4010 being the first production car in a series that included fleet numbers 4010-4199. They were constructed in Canada by Hawker-Siddeley in 1979. The CLRVs are truly streetcars - certainly streamlined and modern-looking, but undoubtedly streetcars. They even echo the PCC in their general layout and door arrangement. Other than their styling their most unusual feature may be their mono-motor trucks, which gives them a B-B wheel arrangement but only two motors per car (the later ALRVs returned to the more traditional one motor per axle design).

Halton County suddenly has quite the fleet, though it's fitting given that these cars represented the Toronto surface system for a few decades. Rumor has it that a couple more CLRVs are in line to be preserved by TTC itself and/or other museums, so stay tuned.

Cars for sale

It's come to my attention that a couple of the cars on the list have been put up for sale, their fates likely dependent on whether anyone steps forward to purchase and preserve them.

The more historic of the two, by a long shot, is South Shore 203. This car is an interurban trailer built for the South Shore Pullman in 1927, one of ten trailers built as part of the line's second order for steel cars. It was later lengthened by the railroad. What makes this car historic is that it is the last South Shore coach trailer (identical car 205 is still on the PNAERC list but it is in very poor condition and is to be stripped for parts and scrapped). It's also a rare example of an all-steel interurban trailer, and I suspect the newest survivor of that type. Car 203 was among the cars stored for a number of years by the National Park Service, first at Beech Grove and later in East Chicago, before the NPS divested itself of its interurban car collection and donated the lot to East Troy in 2010. Of the five cars moved to East Troy that year, car 203 is the rarest, but according to an RyPN post to which I was alerted by Olin Anderson it is now up for sale. If it ends up being scrapped, it will be a shame for this series of car to go extinct at such a late date. As recently as 2000 there were no fewer than six of these cars still around, but two were cut up in the early 2000s and another pair at the Indiana Railway Museum were scrapped in the mid-2010s. The last two are 205, a victim of long-term benign neglect at ITM, and 203.

And then there's Philadelphia 2134, a typical PCC built for that city in 1948 by St. Louis Car Company. Back in 2003 it was purchased from SEPTA, rehabbed by Brookville, and plinthed along the now-abandoned Germantown streetcar line in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Mt Airy for use as an ice cream stand. The business closed about a month ago, though, and the streetcar is now up for sale. While I don't usually include cars used as diners (or houses, or sheds) on the PNAERC list, I do make some exceptions in cases where the car's identity as a streetcar is obviously being preserved and emphasized. If this car is scrapped it will not be a significant historic loss.

Missing PCC located

Good news - I've found one of my "missing" cars. Pittsburgh Railways 1772, a standard (for that city) 1700-series PCC built in 1949 and noted as missing here, has popped up in an unlikely spot. It's been plinthed in Trinidad, Colorado at the entrance to a real estate development located at Commerical Street and the Purgatoire River. The above photo from Flickr shows that the car has been painted garishly as a billboard for "The Americana Experience" which is evidently a planned trolley (i.e. bus) line somehow associated with the real estate development.

This car went to the Ohio Railway Museum in Worthington, Ohio in 1990 and left ORM in 2015 for parts unknown. Supposedly it went to Texas, and there's some evidence that it was resold around 2017, but until I find more specific information I'm just noting its ownership as switching to the company in Trinidad, Downtown Trinidad Development Group, in 2015. I'm glad to take this car off of the "missing" list.

Switching at Branford

Branford has published on their shop's Facebook page (no log-in required) some photos taken during a recent switch move. As with many museums, switch moves like this afford a rare opportunity to get a good look - and good photos - of equipment that is normally ensconced deep inside storage barns. Thanks to Roger Addil, who took the photos, and to Dennis Pacelli, who has granted permission to re-post them, we can now get a look at some recent progress and rarely-seen cars.

The big news here is significant recent progress on restoration of the museum's two oldest double-truck Third Avenue Railway System cars. These cars are really emblematic of the equipment used for decades on that system and it's terrific to see them fixed up. The car above is TARS 884, a rare full convertible car built by Brill in 1909 that sports the three-panel front end that was so common on the system. This car has been completely repainted on the outside and really looks spectacular.

Close behind it is another Third Avenue car, TARS 830, which is a standard closed double-truck car built by Brill in 1908. Exterior restoration on this car was begun more recently and is ongoing, so it has been completely repainted but not yet lettered. Both cars look really stunning. It's hard to believe that they were retired all the way back in 1948!

After that we have a few pieces of equipment that aren't the subject of current restoration projects, but are rarely seen out in the sunlight. This is Brooklyn & Queens Transit 9832, a single-truck snow sweeper built by Brill in 1915. This is the only Brill-built single-truck snow sweeper currently surviving in the U.S., though there are a handful of them still around in Europe.

Cornwall 12 is a standard Baldwin-Westinghouse class B steeplecab built in 1917. It spent most of its service life in northern Utah, running first for the Ogden Logan & Idaho and then for the Utah-Idaho Central.

And finally we have Boston 3271, a typical Differential dump motor built in 1920 that came to Branford in 1976. It has a cab at one end, as was typical of many of these motors, but the cab was removed years ago during a restoration effort that was later suspended. The "house roof" was put over the dump body to protect it during a period when the car was stored outside.

Car builders' order lists

One of the many valuable resources I've turned to over the years has been the website created back around 2004 by the late Dr. Harold E. Cox, noted traction historian, at streetcars.telcen.com. The site included a scanned copy of The Birney Car, some other shorter historical publications, and - quite usefully for me - lists of orders placed with several electric car builders. Unfortunately, in early 2025, this site went offline. I saved the ACF, American, Brill, CCF, Cincinnati, Kuhlman, LaClede, and Perley Thomas, and these have been put back online for anyone to access and use. A huge thank you goes out to Mark Sims, who saved the Barber, Danville, Jackson & Sharp, and Laconia order lists. These have been made available here as well.

American Car & Foundry

American Car Company

Barber

Brill 1887-1899

Brill 1900-1909

Brill 1910-1941

Canadian Car & Foundry

Cincinnati Car Co.

Danville

Jackson & Sharp

Kuhlman

LaClede

Laconia (PDF)

Perley Thomas (PDF)

The Pullman electric car order list has been digitized and is available here:

Pullman (Google Sheets)

I'll also mention that there were two other rosters, a PDF of Pullman orders on the "Eric's Railroad Car History" site and a PDF of ACF orders on the old Barriger Library site, that have also gone offline. Both of these were massive lists in PDF format that included both traction and steam-road orders.

Pullman (PDF) This link now inactive

AC&F (PDF) This link now inactive

There's a list of St Louis Car Company orders included in Alan Lind's excellent book on that company, From Horsecars to Streamliners. There's also a "mostly complete" order list of Jewett Car Company orders in the book From Small Town to Downtown by Lawrence Brough and James Graebner.

That still leaves several major builders for which I have never seen an order list including McGuire-Cummings, Niles, Ottawa, and Stephenson, plus a number of smaller builders.