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.

Sheridan Streetcar Relocated

Sheridan Railway & Light 115, the only electric car from Wyoming to be preserved in its home state, has been relocated. According to this article on the Sheridan Media site, the car was moved in November from its recent location in a construction company yard along Higby Road to a new site southwest of Sheridan on the property of the Sheridan Community Land Trust's Big Goose Natural Area. There, the plan is to construct a shelter over the car and, presumably fix it up.

I'm really not sure how many electric railways ever operated in Wyoming, but I wouldn't be surprised if they could be numbered on one hand. I believe car 115 is one of only two Wyoming streetcars in existence, the other being an ex-Cheyenne Birney preserved at the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan. It was built by American in 1911 and it's pretty typical of single-truck deck-roof cars American built for a lot of cities. One unusual aspect is that it was built for single-end operation, with doors on only one side, however it was equipped with controllers at both ends and seems to have been operated in double-ended fashion as a necessity, at least initially.

And in unrelated news, thanks to Olin Anderson for passing along word that the Tacoma "turtleback" streetcar body that was located at the Ballard Terminal Railroad in Seattle has been demolished. I was never able to figure out this car's number, and between that and having virtually no solid information on it, it never made it onto the PNAERC list, though I did have on my "non-preserved cars" list. My best guess is that it was a 200-series cars identical to car 202, which is preserved in Arlington.

More Cars Deaccessioned by Seashore

(UPDATED - see bottom of post) It's been a little while since there have been any updates to Seashore's re-homing plans, but news has arrived of a few updates. Specifically, three more cars have been marked for disposition.

The first car, shown above in a 2020 photo, is MBTA 0997. This is a 1928 Wason-built rapid transit car built for the Main Line Elevated in Boston. It's been at Seashore since 1981. It's identical to car 01000, which is restored and operational, but 0997 hasn't run in a number of years and looks to be in rough - albeit complete - condition. It's been made available for re-homing. (Seashore actually has four cars from this series, but the other two, 0986 and 0996, are in semi-derelict condition back in the woods and have never been considered part of the historic collection.)

The next recent addition to the re-homing list is SEPTA 1018, a Philadelphia-Delaware Bridge car built by Brill in 1936. The above photo, taken way back in 2008, is the most recent image of this car I can find, making it unusually elusive. Identical car 1023 is also at the museum; a decade or so ago that car was painted in original blue and silver colors and was even made operational for a time, but car 1018 has remained in its end-of-service Broad Street Subway "dip" red livery and has never, to my knowledge, operated at Seashore. Cars 1018 and 1023 are two of six cars of this class still in existence, with the others including a pair on PATCO in Lindenwold (albeit modified for work service), a car stored at Fern Rock Yard in Philadelphia, and a car preserved at the Rockhill Trolley Museum

The last car added to the deaccession list is Atlantic City 299, shown here in 2016. Of the three cars, this one is the most historically significant but is also in the worst condition by far. It's a double-truck lightweight streetcar built by St. Louis in 1925 for Fort Wayne, Indiana, making it the last extant car from that city and (I believe) one of only six streetcars in existence from any city in the Hoosier State. It ran as Fort Wayne Street Railway 552 until it was sold to Atlantic City in 1946, where it was modernized a bit and renumbered 299. It was retired in 1955 and its body was sold to someone in Cross Keys, NJ, where it remained until Seashore got it in 1988 as part of their "last roundup" carbody collecting campaign. For a time, the car was stored in the Fairview barn, but recently it seems to have been moved outside and it has now been slated for scrapping due to the condition of the body.

UPDATE: Seashore has also confirmed that they've recently scrapped Ottawa Transportation Commission 825, a 1923 Ottawa-built car body described here that was in atrocious condition. There are two other Ottawa 800s preserved in Canada, albeit from the 1927 order, and between that and the truly skeletal nature of car 825, it's hard to say this is much of a loss (the above photo was taken back in 2016, before the car's roof caved in). I've removed car 825 from the PNAERC roster, leaving Seashore with 187 cars on the list and a grand total of 2,082 cars on the list in all.