Atlanta Subway Car Preserved

In a slightly surprising piece of news, the Southeastern Railway Museum outside of Atlanta - which has a small collection of electric cars but is mostly focused on steam road equipment - has acquired a car from the initial order for Atlanta subway cars. MARTA 509 arrived at the museum on Wednesday and will be placed on public display there, according to this press release.

This is actually a relatively significant acquisition, historically speaking. First, of course, it has local importance. Car 509 is the first and only MARTA car in preservation, and given the paucity of trolley museums in the southeast and the difficulty in putting large subway cars like this to practical use in a museum setting, may very well be the only MARTA car in preservation for quite a long time. Amazingly, I think it's also only the second electric railway car from Atlanta ever to be preserved intact after retirement (you may have to think hard to guess the first), at least if you only count cars still around today.

Furthermore, this car has some national significance too. During the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, several cities built all-new heavy-rail subway systems, including not just Atlanta but also San Francisco, Washington DC, and Los Angeles. Other than a pair of WMATA cars that have supposedly been squirreled away for safekeeping, but to my knowledge have not yet appeared publicly as historic artifacts, this MARTA car is the first car from any of these modern subway systems to be preserved in the US. (I say "in the US" because this preserved car from the Montreal Metro is also from a modern subway system, albeit a very unusual system built for rubber-tire cars.)

EDIT: Thanks to Richard Schauer for sending a link to this video about the history of car 509 and its donation to SERM. I was quite impressed; the video has a good mixture of technical/design history of the car and general background information on MARTA.

Another Seashore deaccession

The Seashore Trolley Museum is underway with its "fourth round of re-homing" and in addition to the South Shore car and Long Island Rail Road car mentioned here back in July, there's a third car that's available: MBTA 3283, a line car built in 1949. Car 3283 is pretty unremarkable; it's the only car on the list built by Henry Dow, but Dow wasn't a car builder, it was a local company that (if I recall correctly) mostly built houses. The most interesting thing about the car is probably the story, on Seashore's deaccession listing, about its involvement in a major head-on collision with another work car in 1969 that killed a man and injured 16 more, in part the result of the crews of both cars having been drinking. Ah, the good? old days...

Regardless, the car arrived at Seashore in 2007 and ran briefly before it was sidelined with electrical issues. If you're interested in 3283, there's a catch: Seashore is keeping the trucks, motors, and electrical equipment. Only the body is available. With the market for line car bodies pretty slim, this car will mostly likely end up scrapped, but only time will tell for sure.

Northeastern Updates

There are a few updates to the PNAERC data out of museums (and non-museums) in the northeast. First, NYCTA 9075, an R-33ML subway car from New York, was moved over the weekend from its home of 17 years on a plinth in front of Queens Borough Hall. Many thanks to Bill Wall for the striking photo above. Unfortunately, I'm not sure where the car has gone, though online rumors suggest somewhere in New Jersey (which doesn't narrow it down much!). At the time the car was sold, it was said to have been purchased by an art dealer, so make of that what you will. Any updates are appreciated!

Second, there's another update to the ongoing saga of the deaccessed Warehouse Point cars. Halton County Radial Railway has come to an agreement to acquire Canadian National 6714, a boxcab locomotive from the Montreal suburban electrification. The locomotive was built in Toronto (it was news to me that this series of six locomotives were built in three different locations!) so has some local significance in addition to its technological significance. That means that, of the six cars deaccessed by CTM, three have been scrapped and two sold with just one still available: LIRR 4153. Any takers?

And finally, Branford's restoration shop has posted on its Facebook page that the wheel sets and motors have been pulled from underneath their diminutive four-wheel GE locomotive "Amy." Surely one of the more obscure pieces of equipment at the museum, this 1902 industrial boxcab gains a bit of prominence on the PNAERC list because the top line in the alphabetical "Now or Formerly Owned By" search box on the homepage is always Abendroth Foundry, the locomotive's owner. It's been out of service for years but that looks like it will be changing in the near future. The locomotive's condition has been changed to "undergoing restoration."

Boston PCC Overhaul Progress

Since we've had a "PCC overhaul program progress report" from Philadelphia, why not one from Boston, too?

Indeed, the T is also going through their PCC fleet and rebuilding it a handful of cars at a time, though there are some differences. First, these cars weren't modernized to quite the extend the Philadelphia cars were - they still retain their original running gear, including air-electric brakes. They did receive air-conditioning and sealed windows, though. Anyway, the overhaul program started with cars 3265 and 3234 in 2019. It was suspended for a time, but 3265 returned to service in April of this year, and car 3234 has now joined it back home in Mattapan.

The next two cars to get rebuilt are, apparently, 3238 and 3260. The former is just one of the members of the Mattapan fleet (it's on the left in the photo above, by Cam Moore via Facebook), but the latter car is a bit of a special case. Car 3260 was involved in a fairly serious collision back in December 2017, when it was rear-ended by 3262. Both cars have been out of service since. And while it's good that 3260 is being rebuilt, it appears that car 3262 - which had its front end badly stove in - has now had its rear end cut off aft of the bolster. This section will be grafted onto car 3260. I'm not certain whether the T has already cut up the rest of 3262, or whether the incomplete shell will hang around as a parts source, but in either case I don't think it qualifies for the PNAERC list anymore. So it's been removed. The Mattapan PCC fleet, formerly at 10 cars, now numbers nine.

Philadelphia PCC-II Overhaul Program

A recent post on a PCC group on Facebook, made by a SEPTA employee, brought readers up to date on the overhaul program currently underway at SEPTA. That agency has a fleet of 18 "PCC-II" streetcars - Philadelphia PCC cars that were torn down to their frames and rebuilt by Brookville around 2004-2005, complete with new (though "PCC-inspired") control and motors as well as sealed windows and A/C. After about 15 years the cars were all pulled from service and they're now going through an in-house overhaul. This job, unlike the last one, is generally sympathetic, and they're emerging more-or-less indistinguishable from how they went in.

Of the cars in the fleet (list here - note that this is not an all-inclusive list of cars on PNAERC owned by SEPTA), four have already been overhauled and outshopped: 2332 (outshopped June 2021), 2328 (outshopped August 2021), 2337 (outshopped June 2022), and 2322 (outshopped within the last few weeks). Four more are currently in the shop being overhauled: 2324, 2326, 2327, and 2333. The remaining 10 cars are still waiting their turn. Cars undergoing overhaul have been noted as "undergoing restoration;" cars that haven't yet gone into the shop are "stored operable;" and cars that have been overhauled are described as "operated often." This may be a bit aspirational for the moment, but sooner or later it's bound to come true.

Savannah Birneys surface

Thanks to my father for forwarding this article about two Savannah, Georgia, Birney bodies that have surfaced. The cars were built into a house in Isle of Hope, just south of Savannah, and were discovered when the house was being torn down.

The Savannah system was almost entirely Birneys in later years, I believe. They had 30 Birneys built by St. Louis in 1922 and another eight built by American the following year. A number of the cars were resold as bodies upon retirement in 1946. These two cars look pretty rough, probably in worse shape than the two American-built cars preserved at the Savannah Roundhouse Museum. There's also a Savannah Birney buried in a seaside cabin on Tybee Island and possibly at least one other body preserved elsewhere.

The Isle of Hope Historical Association is currently fundraising to preserve these cars, though how exactly isn't entirely clear, nor is it clear when they stand to be removed from the site of the house (or whether they've already been removed). With so much unknown about these cars, and with preservation far from certain, I haven't added them to the PNAERC list - yet. I did add them on my "non-preserved list" (one of the links on the right side of this page if you're viewing in desktop mode). We'll try and stay tuned and see what happens.

North Texas Historic Transportation confirmed to be defunct

Many thanks to Andy Nold for confirming that the North Texas Historic Transportation group, which I believe had been functionally inoperative for some time, is officially defunct.

Until now, six cars had been listed as owned by NTHT, though the organization does not seem to have owned any of its own property, meaning the six cars were all scattered around the greater Fort Worth area on various other people's properties. Two of the six cars, Tandy Subway 1 and 4, have been scrapped. These two squared-off body rebuilt PCC cars had been stored in a parking lot in Fort Worth and had been offered for sale (see here), but found no takers and have now been cut up. Intriguingly, there may only be one "Winnebago" Tandy car left, the car McKinney Avenue owns and now has stored out of service. Two others, numbers 3 and 6, are on the PNAERC roster as being stored in Brookville, PA, but these may have been scrapped for parts already - I haven't been able to get confirmation one way or another.

The other four cars that were owned by NTHT are all ex-Northern Texas Traction car bodies which, evidently, still exist, and have presumably not been moved from their respective storage locations. There are two streetcars in Azle, Texas, northwest of Fort Worth; a freight motor in Benbrook, Texas, southwest of Fort Worth; and a double-truck Birney on private property within the city of Fort Worth. The PNAERC list has been updated to remove the two scrapped Tandy cars and to list the ex-NTT cars as being under private ownership in their respective locations. Any further information on the condition of these cars, or plans for their future, is always appreciated.