"Almond Joy" Car Arrives in Kingston

The Trolley Museum of New York announced today on their Facebook page that SEPTA 618, one of two preserved "Almond Joy" cars from the Market-Frankford Elevated in Philadelphia, has arrived at the TMNY site in Kingston. The car has been listed under TMNY ownership since May 2025, which is when it departed its former home at the Seashore Trolley Museum in Maine, but it had been kept at an intermediate storage facility for the last 10 months before it landed at its new home. Car 618 is a single-unit (as opposed to part of married pair) car built by Budd in 1960.

I'm a little hazy on the end of its career, but I believe it was one of a handful of these cars kept around for work service after the remainder of the Budd fleet was retired in 1999. Regardless, in 2002 the car went to Seashore, where it was joined by a pair of standard-gauge ex-PATH "K car" trucks that had been placed under a different "Almond Joy" car that had seen use on the standard-gauge Norristown high-speed line from 1989 to 1992. Those trucks had been set aside upon retirement for exactly this purpose, i.e., making an "Almond Joy" car usable at a standard-gauge trolley museum. Car 618 was never placed on those trucks, though, and spent its time at Seashore on a truck trailer. It was conveyed to TMNY in January 2024. Sometime soon, it will be put on standard-gauge trucks for the first time at TMNY.

EDIT: Many thanks to Mark Wolodarsky of TMNY, who sent along this account of car 618's history: The car was retired in early 1999, and was prepped for preservation by the shops at Bridge Street. It was moved to 69th Street Yard in March 1999 where it was loaded onto the dolly that it remains on. It was then moved to the SEPTA Midvale Bus garage for storage, where it remained until being moved to Seashore in 2002. We hope to put it onto its trucks this year. We are raising funds for the cost of a crane rental.

Open car removed from list

I found out this past weekend from a Liberty Historic Railway volunteer that Five Mile Beach Electric 20, a double-truck open car body that had been stored for many years in a warehouse in Wildwood, New Jersey, is no more. I knew the car had been acquired in 2019 by LHR and had been shipped to Gomaco in Iowa for evaluation, but hadn't heard anything more. As it turns out, the car's condition was bad enough that it partially collapsed en route, and the remains were dismantled. The car has been removed from the PNAERC list, leaving just a single car owned by LHR and a total of 2,085 cars on the list overall.

Meet Me in Perris

Someone I know recently visited the Southern California Railway Museum in Perris, and I persuaded them to take photos of some of the bodies stored at the museum there. There are a few cars on the PNAERC list with no photos, including several at SCRM, and I'm hoping that our readers can help me identify some of the cars that are kept there in storage. I'm grateful for any information on the below cars!

To the left is Fresno Traction 51, which is pretty hard to mistake for anything else, but in the middle here is an unidentified Birney that we'll call "Birney #1." My guess is that it's one of two Los Angeles Railway Birneys preserved at the museum, 1003 and 9007, but does anyone know which?

Here's a wider shot that shows the aforementioned Birney #1 on the left. On the right is a body that I'm reasonably certain is Los Angeles Railway 2501, the experimental low-floor car built in 1925. But what's the car in the middle? It looks like a deck-roof car with a Huntington end, but there are several cars that it could be.

This one is a complete mystery.

That's certainly Los Angeles Railway 3084 on the right, a deaccessioned PCC body, but what's the car on the left? It looks like a LARy Huntington standard, probably a Class B, but it could be 807, 836, or a different car.

I'm pretty sure this is Los Angeles Railway 744 - I already have a photo of this car on the list, and that's the car it's assigned to - but confirmation would be appreciated.

Let's call this Birney #2 - as mentioned earlier, I figure this is either Los Angeles Railway 1003 or 9007, but I don't know which.

This photo, and the below one taken looking from the other direction, appear to show a Pacific Electric car. My best guess is that it's PE 511, but can anyone confirm that?

I really don't mean to bash SCRM with this post; every large trolley museum has cars in poor condition, and overall SCRM has done very well in moving the majority of their historic collection into indoor storage. But I'd like to get photos assigned to as many of the cars on the PNAERC list as possible, and this is the best way I can think of to do it for several cars in Perris that have no obvious photographic record. As I mentioned earlier, information is greatly appreciated.

PCC Updates from the Fox River

There are a couple of PCC-related updates from the Fox River Trolley Museum in Illinois. The first is that San Francisco Municipal Railway 1030, the 1951 PCC shown in the above photo taken on Saturday, has been scrapped along with a diesel. This car has been stored out of service for decades and was offered to other organizations more than a year ago. Given its condition, there were no takers. This car was far from unique; eight other cars from this series are preserved intact, and both the first and last members of the class have been beautifully restored by their respective owners. FRTM now has 18 cars included on the PNAERC roster.

But wait, there's more PCC news from FRTM. The above PCC 'L' car, Chicago Transit Authority 45, was repainted late last year in its 1970s-era "mint green and alpine white" livery. It has worn these colors for roughly 20 years, since its days at the East Troy Electric Railroad, and in recent years the paint had faded. When ETER conducted a major culling of its own collection in 2009-2010, the only one of its three CTA "singles" to be sold rather than scrapped was this one. It's been in regular use at FRTM ever since. (The above photo is from the FRTM Facebook page; thanks to Anderson Pries for emailing me about car 45's repainting and for sending me photos which I regrettably managed to lose.)

Mexico City LRV Added to List

Many thanks to Jacob Wiczkowski, who emailed me to point out that a new car was added last year to the collection of the Museo de Transportes Electricos, or Museum of Electric Transportation, in Mexico City.

SDTE car 018 is a light rail vehicle, the first to be preserved in Mexico as far as I know. It was built for the Xochimilco light rail line, which was built in the mid-1980s as an upgrade of the city's last streetcar line. When the streetcar line was closed for upgrading in 1984, the plan was to rebuild PCC cars for use on the new line, but virtually all the PCCs were destroyed when the shop collapsed in the 1985 earthquake. SDTE had new LRVs built using the old PCC trucks and equipment, but they proved unreliable, so a dozen all-new LRVs were built in 1990-1991 by Mexican car builder Concarril (today part of Bombardier). Car 018 is part of this series, and not only is it the first car on the PNAERC list built by Concarril, but I believe it's the first car on the list built by an actual Mexican car builder. The only other cars on the list built in Mexico were homebuilt by street railway companies.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any mechanical or electrical information at all about the SDTE Concarril cars - even basics like their wheel arrangement (which I assume, but don't know, to be B-2-B) are uncertain. Any specifications on these cars would be greatly appreciated! SDTE 018 is the 15th LRV on the PNAERC list, the sixth unique type of LRV on the list, and the 2,087th car on the list as it stands now.

A Plus and a Minus

Today, I've got a new car on the list and another piece of equipment taken off. First, the good news: Northeast Rail Heritage Inc., the enigmatic owner of an Amtrak AEM7 as described here, now has a second piece of equipment on the list. SEPTA 238, pictured above, is the last Silverliner III MU car built in 1967 for the Pennsylvania Railroad. This car was retired in 2012 but remained on SEPTA property until 2023, when it was shipped off to a scrapper in Morrisville, PA, along the Delaware River. It never quite made it, though, and it's been sitting on a siding in Morrisville a short distance from its destination for a couple of years. A few months ago, NERHI went after it and they were successful in obtaining the car from the scrapyard. They haven't moved it - and I'm not sure where they even want to move it to, since they don't appear to have a physical site of their own, either owned or rented - but they do claim to own it, so I've added it to the PNAERC list. The group wants to someday restore it to "Yellowbird" livery it wore in the late 1980s, when it was assigned to Philadelphia Airport service.

And in less fortunate, but certainly not unexpected, news, Ferrocarril General Urquiza steeplecab 951 (shown above) has been removed from the list. This locomotive was built by Baldwin-Westinghouse in 1920 for Central Limones, but never went to that operation; stored by B-W for a few years, it ended up being sold to the Pacific Electric in 1923 as their number 1591. It went to Argentina in 1951 and ran on FGU for a number of years, acquiring trucks and electric equipment off ex-PE "Elevens" along the way. It ended up as part of the Ferroclub Argentino museum collection in Buenos Aires, but sometime around 2022 it found itself on an isolated siding and illegal scrappers cut up its trucks. The museum stopped the scrapping, but the locomotive's body remained dumped on that site, as shown above. The remains were cut up at an uncertain later date. This leaves four pieces of equipment on the list belonging to Ferroclub, of which three are ex-PE locomotives.

Four New Cars for Danbury

Ending 2025 on a positive note, the Danbury Railway Museum last week received a quartet of new cars for its growing collection of mainline electric equipment. Metro-North M3A-type cars 8002, 8003, 8106, and 8107 were brought onto the museum grounds in a late-night move. Thanks to Jordan Helzer for alerting me to this Facebook post, and to DRM and Marc Glucksman/River Rail Photo for the above picture from that post.

The four identical M3A cars were built in 1984-1985 by Budd and ran for their careers on the old New York Central electric division to Croton-on Hudson and White Plains. They're similar to the two M2 cars already at Danbury, which ran on the old New Haven, but unlike those cars they're "pure" 600V DC cars and do not have equipment for high-voltage AC operation. They also don't have pantographs. Most of the M3A class is still in regular service, but these were early retirees and were donated to DRM by Metro-North for preservation. The DRM traction collection has now grown to 15 pieces, quite an impressive collection and one that is exclusively mainline electric in nature, while the overall PNAERC roster is 2,086 cars.