Edison Car Under Restoration

From this post on the Rochester & Genesee Valley Railroad Museum's Facebook page comes some good news: Lackawanna MU car 2628, shown above, is at the Morristown & Erie's shop complex in New Jersey and is currently being restored. Car 2628 is one of the Lackawanna's 1930 "Edison cars," so called because Thomas Edison ran the ceremonial first train. Many of these motor cars are still around, in various states of preservation, but not a single one has been truly restored to in-service condition. It appears that may be about to change, though understandably enough this won't be an operational restoration. The car's status on the PNAERC list has been changed to reflect the work being done on it.

Three of a Kind

Thanks to Jacob Wiczkowski for alerting me to this post from the Western Railway Museum a few days ago. Their third BART cars has arrived! Following the arrival of an "A2" car in August and a "B2" car in September, they've now acquired "C1" car number 329. This car has led a less eventful existence than the other two, never having been renumbered or rebuilt, and is the only one of the trio to retain its as-built DC motors. It was built by Alstom in 1987 as a flat-end motor car, a way for BART to adopt a fleet more adaptable to changing needs for train lengths when compared with the original fleet, which consisted entirely of blind motors and "end cars" that couldn't easily be run mid-train.

This likely completes BART's presence on the PNAERC roster, at least for a while. I don't believe the system has retained any of its own first-generation cars for historic purposes, and certainly none of the giant 5'6"-gauge cars have gone to any other museums. With this arrival, WRM has a total of 69 cars on the PNAERC list, with 2,088 cars on the list in all.

A Streetcar from the Magnolia State

Thanks to Bill Wall for alerting me to this article from late August that describes an exciting development. The last (known) surviving Vicksburg, Mississippi, streetcar, which was discovered four years ago as reported right here, has now officially been preserved at a museum. The car body has been restored, as shown above, and moved to The Old Depot Museum, which is the local history museum and happens to be located in the old railroad depot.

Kudos to the folks in Vicksburg who turned this from just another "streetcar body found in a house and then shoved into storage somewhere" into a rather attractive display piece. Unfortunately, I still don't know anything about the car! I haven't managed to dig up any Vicksburg rosters. They apparently numbered their cars by tens, so builder records suggest that cars 75, 105, 115, 125, and 135 were all built by St. Louis Car Company between 1913 and 1916. Cars 145, 155, 165, and 175 were Birneys bought secondhand, and this car definitely isn't a Birney, so my guess is that it's in the 75-135 series. But I don't know what happened to numbers 85 and 95, so I can't even say with confidence that this is a SLCC product.

Nevertheless, even with as little information as I have, the car is certainly preserved and displayed, so I should add it to the PNAERC list. It's been added and is now the only car on the list to hail from the Magnolia State (though this car is preserved in Mississippi, it's from over the border in Memphis). If anyone happens upon a photo, roster, or any other information that might shed some light on the single-truck pre-Birney cars used in Vicksburg, please drop me a line.

And with that, I think I'm down to just four states that aren't represented by cars preserved on the list: Alaska, Hawaii, New Mexico, and South Dakota. Don't confuse that with states where cars are preserved; I mean that I don't think there are any cars on the list that ran in those states in regular service. I'd say 46 out of 50 ain't bad. As for states where cars are currently preserved, I think we're at 47/50, missing only Hawaii, New Mexico, and Vermont.

The Auto-Railer - UPDATED

It's rare for me to even mention anything with an internal combustion engine in relationship with PNAERC, but on occasion, something pops up that's cool enough that even I can't manage to find it uninteresting. And so, courtesy of some timely photos and information from our friend Bill Wall, I present the Evans Auto-Railer.

Back in the 1930s, there was a small market for rail buses, with many of the examples built going to traction lines to either replace or feed into electric railway operations (see the Grafton rail bus and the slightly later Houston-North Shore rail bus, both preserved at the National Museum of Transportation). Around 1935, a company called Evans started building modern, streamlined rail buses patterned after the city buses of the day. These weren't normal rail buses, though, because they had both rubber tires and railroad wheels - think Hy-Railer - and could operate both on and off the tracks. Evans called them Auto-Railers, and only one has survived to the present day.

Pictured here, it has just been acquired by the National Capital Trolley Museum. That's a good home for it because it came from the Arlington & Fairfax in Virginia, an electric line that had just taken down its wires. It was built in 1936 and only ran on the A&F until 1939, which is when that line was abandoned. This example was sold to the Arcade & Attica in western New York, where it resided until it went to Clark's Trading Post in New Hampshire in the late 1950s. It has been there ever since. Other examples went to interurban lines including the Washington & Old Dominion and the Chicago South Shore & South Bend.*

So, congratulations to NCTM on saving this quite distinctive piece of history. The Auto-Railer wasn't very successful; I think the A&F, with its 13 examples, was by far the largest operator. These can't have been terribly popular with riders accustomed to large, heavy streetcars. Incredibly, the seating capacity appears to have been 27 people, which sounds horrifying given that the thing doesn't appear that much larger than a Chevy Suburban.

*Intriguingly, although historic records claim that A&F 109 went to the South Shore, that number is clearly evident on the example shown here that's going to NCTM. So, which Auto-Railer went to the South Shore?

UPDATE: Bill Wall kindly provided an additional photo of the front of the Auto-Railer that clearly shows the number, even though most of the paint has worn away: 109. The number is located over the front headlight in the same location and typeface used by the Arlington & Fairfax, so I would presume that this was, indeed, A&F 109. 

This was definitely not the Auto-Railer that ended up on the South Shore. Bill reports that the example now at NCTM has a complete interior and ceiling, plus it clearly lacks add-ons the CSS&SB one acquired such as square headlight surrounds and some rooftop accoutrements. Ideally, it would be nice to find South Shore Line records showing the previous fleet number of the Auto-Railer they received and rebuilt as an overhead line truck; barring that, it may be difficult to figure out what that thing's A&F number had been, since it's now known that it wasn't A&F 109.

UPDATE #2: More information from Bill Wall comes in the form of this 1962 photo of Auto-Railer 109, purportedly taken at the White Mountain Central (Clark's Trading Post, I presume) and labeled "Grasse River." The photo is from this page.

This thing was clearly in rough shape even 60 years ago! The Grasse River Railroad was an unusual short line railroad in upstate New York which was also home to the distinctive wooden doodlebug now preserved in operational condition at the Strasburg Railroad. This thing appears to have gone from the A&F to the GRR, possibly via the Arcade & Attica. How much use it saw, if any, on the GRR is unknown. Note that when this photo was taken, the South Shore was still using their Auto-Railer as a line car!

Two Out of Three Ain't Bad

The Western Railway Museum is acquiring three Bay Area Rapid Transit cars from the system's just-retired "legacy" fleet, and the second of these three cars arrived yesterday. BART 1834 has a pretty interesting history. It's a "B2" class car, and the "B" indicates that it's a blind motor (aka, no cab) while the "2" indicates that it was rebuilt around 2000 with IGBT inverter control and AC motors. However, that was its second rebuilding - when it was new, it was "A" car 120 and was the same type as BART 1164 (then numbered 164), already preserved at WRM. It was rebuilt without its cab sometime around 1980, I think. The car's most unique claim to fame, though, is that in September 1972, it was ridden by President Richard Nixon. So, there you go.

The above photo of car 1834 leaving San Francisco comes from a post on WRM's Facebook page, and it appears that the car has now been placed on display indoors at the museum, coupled to car 1164. It's been added to the PNAERC list but I'm still looking for more information, primarily rebuild dates - both for when it went from an A car to a B car and for when it went from a B to a B2 car.

I believe car 1834 is only the second blind motor on the PNAERC list, after PATH 143, and the first to be preserved with a matching cab car. This acquisition brings the size of WRM's fleet on PNAERC to 68 cars (just six shy of SCRM!) and brings the overall PNARC list to 2,086 cars.

Saskatoon Sweeper Update

Many thanks to Cliff Humphrey of the Edmonton Radial Railway Society, who has sent along the following photo and update of restoration work on Saskatoon Municipal Railway 200:

This 1906 Ottawa Car Company sweeper is now operable and can be used to sweep snow. Hopefully, some 'testing' will be done this winter! The cable-lifted work platform and wing plow assemblies are still being worked on, so the car is not technically complete yet. Sask 200 has already been driven around Fort Edmonton in a few tests and display runs; it will officially debut alongside Regina 42 in 2025. The big item on this car is the brushes; the chain-driven mechanism was a difficult system to rebuild, especially using a cast steel chain of uncertain origin (we know it came from 200, but whether it's original from 1906 or a later component is unclear). The brush drive system took a lot of staged testing to ensure it was safe to operate, and a couple months of concerted effort to rebuild the original brush boards with new rattan. The brushes are incredibly loud while operating, and we aren't sure if we'll be able to operate it regularly on our Fort Edmonton track due to how close the buildings (and their windows!) are to our track. Although double-ended, Sask 200 can't run on our High Level Bridge line due to only having hand brakes. ERRS isn't sure how we'll make use of it, but even having a car like this in operable condition for static display will be great for us.

SMR 200 is one of just five Ottawa-built snow sweepers in preservation and is (now) the only one in operational condition. There are some intriguing "missing links" in this car's history, including that it was built in 1907 but didn't arrive in Saskatoon until 1913, with its whereabouts in the interim unknown. I'm also not sure about its history between the Saskatoon system quitting in 1951 and ERRS acquiring it in 1986.

News from Michigan

A couple of updates from Michigan regarding extant electric cars have popped up in the last couple of days. These don't involve updates to the PNAERC list per se, but they're still interesting.

The first is that Grand Rapids Grand Haven & Muskegon 8, the "Merlin," is in the process of getting a new home. It hasn't moved - rather, a substantial brick enclosure is being constructed around the car by the Coopersville Historical Museum. The car already had a fairly nice shelter over it, but of course this will obviously be an improvement and will keep the car entirely protected from the weather. The shelter is also built to mimic the style of the history museum itself, located just a few feet away in the old interurban substation. Very impressive! The photo above comes from the museum's Facebook page.

In less positive news, an abandoned building in Kalamazoo caught fire yesterday and was heavily damaged. This wouldn't be very newsworthy to us except that an ex-Michigan Railways double-truck snow sweeper has been attached to one side of this building for quite some time. It appears that the sweeper was largely unharmed, and that the fire damage was on the other side of the building, but if the building gets demolished, the sweeper will probably go too. This car isn't on the PNAERC roster, but rather on my "non-preserved electric cars" list. I'm not sure who built it or when, but there's reputed to be an excellent book coming out soon on Michigan Railways, so answers may be forthcoming. Anyone interested in a snow sweeper body?