MU cars confirmed scrapped

Thanks to Mike Dodge, who wrote to me to confirm that Lackawanna MU cars 4351 and 4359 (discussed here) have indeed been scrapped. I'm not sure exactly when they were cut up but it was likely a few years ago. Regardless, while they had been stored at the Reading Company Technical & Historical Society site in Hamburg, PA the cars were apparently actually owned by the Reading & Northern. The R&N owns a sizable fleet of these cars used in locomotive-hauled excursion service so this pair was presumably judged to be too far gone and stripped for parts. Needless to say, this is no great historic loss as a lot of these "high roof trailers" are still around. These two examples have now been removed from the PNAERC list and the RCT&HS is back to an all-Reading collection.

Birney body added to list

I recently stumbled upon this photo on Flickr which shows a Birney on display in the dining room of the Old Spaghetti Factory in Fresno, California. Most, if not all, OSF locations feature a streetcar as a dining room centerpiece but they're a mix of (mostly poorly-done) replicas and heavily rebuilt actual cars. I've generally included examples in the latter category on the PNAERC list, as they're on display primarily as streetcars and not employed primarily as buildings themselves. The trouble has always been figuring out the histories of these cars.

Anyway, one OSF tendency I appreciate is that when they rebuild an actual car they often reapply its original fleet number. As such, for the Fresno car, it's plausible to assume that its actual in-service number was 1033. For a California location especially this brings to mind Los Angeles Railway. That's not enough by itself, but a couple of spotting features support the suggestion that this is an LARy car: it has an unusual two-channel anticlimber which most Los Angeles cars had, and it lacks the marker lights over the center windows that were typical of most Birneys. The car is lettered Fresno Traction but that's doubtful given how distinctive the Birneys built for Fresno were. So I've elected to add this car to the PNAERC list as Los Angeles Railway 1033, the fourth LA Birney and the 72nd single-truck Birney on the list. (Speaking of Birneys, the cars seem to have been very popular to use as sheds or cabins, presumably because they were easy to move. Of the 72 examples on the list only 16 were originally preserved complete and intact - five of those from the Fort Collins system. The other 56 were initially, at least, preserved as car bodies.)

And one other housekeeping item: the URL for Weakly Reporting, Bruce Wells' blog following happenings at the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum and other items of note in Western Pennsylvania, has changed. Bruce has moved his blog over to Blogger due to changes with his former site host. Not too many trolley museums have a steady blog presence and Bruce's efforts are always appreciated!

Miscellaneous updates

A few updates to the PNAERC list have come across my desk recently, so here's a general housekeeping update. First, Bob Harris has sent in a couple of photos showing recent progress on Chicago Lake Shore & South Bend 73:

These are brand new clerestory window frames to go with the nice copper roof that was recently documented. The amount and quality of craftsmanship going into this car is extremely impressive.

Second, a huge thank you to Bill West, who sent me an extensively-researched roster of every Pennsylvania Railroad MP-54 ever built. The sheer amount of data in the roster is staggering; many cars were renumbered one, two, three, or even four times during their lives and in most cases these renumberings are listed along with the year and month. This invaluable resource has allowed me to fill out the ownership history of all nine of the PRR MP-54 type cars included on the PNAERC list. I'm still not sure exactly when most of the cars were sold by SEPTA to their respective preservation-industry owners, but I finally have a full and accurate picture of their service lives. Thanks, Bill!

And finally, circling back around to car 73, I received news from Bill Wulfert that South Shore interurban car 205 has been scrapped. The 205 was the second-to-last surviving trailer from the South Shore - and the very last one is in peril. Car 205 was stored in steadily deteriorating condition at the Indiana Transportation Museum from its retirement in 1984 until 2018, when the eviction of the ITM collection from the park in Noblesville led to the car's sale to a private party and removal (shown above) to an off-site storage location. Car 205's generally poor condition did not make it a good candidate for restoration but it was thoroughly stripped for parts which will aid in the restoration of car 73 and possibly other preserved South Shore cars from the steel era.

Windsor streetcar restoration completed

Thanks to Laddie Vitek, who forwarded me this link that documents the completion of restoration work on Sandwich Windsor & Amherstburg 351. This historic car, whose history is outlined here in a post I made almost exactly a year ago, has been the subject of one of the most extensive and exacting restoration efforts ever performed on a streetcar. It seems the work is now complete and the car will, at some point, be moved to its new display location on the Windsor waterfront near the Ambassador Bridge. For the time being, and until it is actually on display, the car's condition has been updated from "under restoration" to "stored inoperable." The notation that it's a "body only" has also been removed, which is always a nice milestone to achieve.

ITM equipment moved

Appearances to the contrary, the Indiana Transportation Museum isn't dead yet. The photo above is from a recent post on the Schlatter Boys Transport Facebook page and shows one of ITM's three remaining electric cars, all of them Lackawanna high-roof MU trailers in awful condition, en route to its new home. These three cars were among a motley assortment of equipment stored north of Noblesville near Cicero, Indiana on two sidings owned by an aggregate company of some sort. As such the equipment was not seized by the City of Noblesville but, rather, was evicted earlier this year by the owner of the sidings. Conventional wisdom suggested the equipment would all be cut up where it sat but it seems ITM has mustered the resources to move at least some of the cars to a concrete pad in Logansport, where they will now await further developments. The PNAERC list has been updated to reflect the fact that the core of the ITM collection, such as it is, now sits in Logansport rather than in Cicero.

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.