Philly Six epilogue

So admittedly this doesn't affect the PNAERC list directly, but it was kind of interesting (and a little bizarre) so here it goes. The "Philly Six" were a half dozen ex-SEPTA PCC cars that were stored in increasingly derelict condition in North Philadelphia for many years. Then about a year ago, the cars were sliced up in various strange and interesting ways and scrapped, as outlined here and here. But now one of them has popped back up!

Well, not really. The above photo, posted on Facebook by E. Marquise Sanders, shows the front end of car 2141 mounted to a wall at a bar called Kensington Pub located in North Philadelphia. The owners were considerate enough to put the car's original number back on it and even painted the thing in what appear to be largely correct colors (not strictly appropriate to its post-GOH condition, but certainly directionally correct). Now this car is definitely not going back onto the PNAERC list - there are a handful of "pieces of cars" like this around the country, and unless it's a complete car that's just been shortened a bit and put back together (like this one, for instance), I exclude them from being considered "preserved." But it's still kind of interesting. Now you know where to stop for refreshments the next time you're in North Philly.

StLIM&S MU car on the chopping block

A post here on the Ahead of the Torch Facebook page (no log-in required) relates that Erie-Lackawanna 3565, a typical Lackawanna MU motor car, is set to be cut up for scrap sometime soon. It's owned by the St. Louis Iron Mountain & Southern, a tourist railroad near Cape Girardeau, MO whose regular operating consist includes a pair of Illinois Central MU trailers, one of which - car 1345 - is the last surviving IC MU car with air-operated doors that was likely pulled by steam for a brief period. Anyway, car 3565 is one of a large (though steadily decreasing) number of Lack MU motor cars in existence - not including 3565, there are 33 cars of this series on the PNAERC list. And for quite some time this car has been essentially derelict, so its impending loss is neither surprising nor particularly lamentable. I'm not certain of its precise history, but it came to the StLIM&S from the late Indiana Museum of Transportation & Communication, probably in the 1980s or early 1990s, and may never have been used at all in Missouri. Above photo by Shawn Friedrich.

Pittsburgh PCC off list

Well, apparently it's Pittsburgh PCC Week. The latest update following the updated information on Pittsburgh 4006 is that a different PCC car from that city, car 1705, has been scrapped. This was another one of the 1700-series cars built by St. Louis in 1949. It was sold in 1996 to Power Superconductor Applications in New Castle, PA, where it joined several other Pittsburgh PCC cars. In 2013, as PSA was getting rid of its last PCCs, this car was acquired by the Midwest Electric Railway Museum in Mt. Pleasant, IA. The photo above is a screen grab from this video of the car shortly after acquisition. MERM had hoped to add an all-electric, and therefore all-weather, car to their fleet, but the car's attractive appearance belied its true condition and it turned out to have been extensively stripped of parts. A proposed sale to an ill-fated start-up railway museum in California in 2018 fell through and car 1705 was sold to a scrapyard in 2019. It has been removed from the list.

The Pittsburgh 1700s, while still not exactly uncommon in preservation, are certainly seeing their ranks thinned. Not counting cars rebuilt as 4000s, and excluding six cars in deplorable condition at VESCO, there are now only six 1700s left.

Pittsburgh 4000 goes missing

Thanks to Nicholas Katz for pointing out that Port Authority Transit 4006, which has been sitting for around 15 years in a parking lot at the west end of the truncated Superior Viaduct in Cleveland, has gone missing. The car - shown above in a 2019 photo from here - is one of the PCC cars heavily remanufactured by PAT in the 1980s and renumbered into the 4000-series. This car was rebuilt in 1987 using 1949-vintage PCC car 1767 as a core and was retired in 1998. For a few years it was stored in Columbus behind a semi-derelict industrial facility on West Nationwide Boulevard (I recall seeing it there in 2002) but then that facility got renovated and sometime in the mid-2000s it showed up in the parking lot at 2401 West Superior Viaduct in Cleveland.

UPDATE: Many thanks to Wesley Paulson and Dave Hamley for getting to the bottom of this one. Car 4006 was indeed moved back to Buckeye Lake, Ohio, where its owner is based, in August 2021. There it joins fellow 4000-series cars 4011 and 4012 along with a collection of other miscellaneous cars.

BCER streetcar placed on display

Within the last few weeks a new history museum has opened in North Vancouver, BC, and one of its headline exhibits is a restored streetcar body. British Columbia Electric Railway 153, a double-truck semi-convertible built by Stephenson in 1908 (and, incidentally, the newest Stephenson product in existence), is on prominent display at the new Museum of North Vancouver. MONOVA, as it has dubbed itself, is described in this article that's also the source of the above photo.

The streetcar, which was retired in 1946, was a cottage at Ryder Lake for four decades before being acquired by the City of North Vancouver in 1986. From 1991 until 2021 it was stored at Fen Burdett Stadium and was the subject of a lengthy restoration project that wrapped up fairly recently. It's nice to see the car placed on display in such a visible location. Its ownership has been updated from the city to MONOVA and its status changed to "displayed inoperable."

Plans for the new year

News has surfaced thanks to this article that plans are afoot to move the stranded New York Central locomotives in Glenmont to a new home at the Danbury Railroad Museum. The two electrics in Glenmont (there are also two diesels and several passenger cars) are certainly historic. NYC 100, shown above, was the very first S-motor built and was outshopped in 1904 as NYC&HR 6000. It was retired in 1964 and given to the stillborn American Museum of Electricity in Niskayuna, but in the 1970s that plan collapsed and the locomotive was acquired by the Mohawk & Hudson Chapter NRHS. The other electric is NYC 278, the last surviving T-motor, built in 1926 and retired (I think) in 1980. As of the 1980s, these two locomotives were in very good cosmetic condition, but when the M&H chapter got evicted from the Colonie D&H shops they made the ill-fated decision to move their collection to a stretch of track through the woods on the grounds of the Glenmont power station.

Over the years this piece of track was isolated by the removal of bridges and track so the equipment was trapped. Now everything needs to be gone, and pronto, for construction of a planned factory. It remains to be seen whether the two NYC electrics end up at Danbury or in a scrap dumpster, but hopefully this story has a happy ending.

Nearly at the other end of the country, more plans are being formulated by the Phoenix Trolley Museum (aka the Arizona Street Railway Museum). Following eviction from their former home on leased land in a city park, they've purchased a plot of land nearby on Grand Avenue near Pierce. With this vital step complete, they now have a plan (rendering shown above) for the site that seems, to me at least, to be eminently sensible. Their showpiece streetcar, Phoenix Street Railway 116, won't be in operation but will acquire its own shelter and exhibit area at the back of the property. An identical car which I believe is intended to be PSR 509 will apparently be kept as a body to interpret post-railway use of streetcars. (The Fort Smith Trolley Museum and a couple of other groups also have exhibits like this.) The museum's Phelps-Dodge locomotive (shown in the rendering, amusingly, as a steam engine) will also be displayed, and there will evidently be room for events.

The museum owns - or at least did own - one additional Phoenix streetcar, PSR 504, memorable largely because for a time it served as the monkey house at a zoo. Unfortunately I'm not sure where it went after the museum was evicted from the park. Any information would be appreciated.

Lackawanna MU cars move to new owner

Thanks to River Rail Photo, from where the above picture by Marc Glucksman comes, for posting the news that the two Lackawanna MU cars formerly stored on a siding in Croton-on-Hudson, NY, have been purchased by SMS Rail Lines and removed to the SMS yard in Bridgeport, NJ. The cars are both motor cars built in 1930, 3557 and 4624, and they've been sitting on that siding near the Croton-Harmon Yard since September 1986. Until recently, at least, they were rare examples of Lackawanna MU cars that had retained their pantographs (and perhaps the rest of their electric equipment?) but other than that they're bog-standard MU motor cars from that railroad. It seemed they were being somewhat maintained, insofar as there aren't any broken windows or obvious roof failures evident, but their real condition is unknown. Also uncertain is the plan for them; SMS runs some historic diesels in short line and switching service, and has a steam engine they're working on restoring, but I don't think they've run passenger trains before. That said, I'm not very familiar with SMS and this is the company's first appearance on the PNAERC roster.