Tuesday, March 5, 2024

A Steeplecab Stumper

Many thanks to Paul Schneble, who sent me a series of corrections and additional tidbits of information (like the builder number for this thing). One thing he pointed out involves the steeplecab shown above, Missoula Street Railway .03, preserved at the Oregon Electric Railway Museum. But after looking into it a bit, I'm just more confused.

Let's start with what we think we know. This thing was supposedly built by General Electric in 1903 (we'll come back to this), was Missoula Street Railway (MSR) .03 (there's photographic evidence of this), and after MSR quit it became Anaconda Copper 351 or L351, depending on which source you use. In 1973 it was pulled off the scrap line along with another pair of early electric locomotives and preserved as part of the OERHS collection. One of these is Anaconda Copper 254, an odd-looking GE built in 1916, and the other is Anaconda Copper 401, a very early "standard" Baldwin-Westinghouse dating to 1912 and described in Joe Strapac's book on B-W locomotives as the very first "Class B" steeplecab built.

What Paul pointed out is that Strapac's B-W book also includes Anaconda Copper (ACC) 351, the locomotive pictured at the top of this post that was supposedly built by GE in 1903, in its B-W order list. But there are discrepancies. Strapac says that ACC 351 was built in 1911 as a Class B, builder #36840, as Western Lumber Company 1. It later became ACC 351. That makes sense, I guess, since WLC was bought by ACC in 1928 - but it doesn't say anything about the locomotive belonging to MSR. And the locomotive itself doesn't look anything like a B-W Class B. For one thing, it's got Taylor trucks!

Strapac's book also says that ACC 351 is preserved at OERHS but it suggests that ACC 401, builder #38616, was scrapped, which doesn't seem right given that the locomotive appears very much preserved.

Anyone have further insight into this? I'd love to know what motors and control (if any) are in these locomotives, but I've never found an OERHS roster with that level of technical detail and I don't know anybody with that organization. If MSR .03 has GE motors, that strongly implies it is indeed a GE. But the mystery wouldn't quite be over even then, because MSR didn't exist until about 1910 and the locomotive's number suggests (though doesn't prove) that it may not have been bought by MSR until as late as the mid-1920s. So, who owned it when it was new? And is it possible that ACC renumbering records got mixed up at some point? If so, is locomotive 401 actually builder #36840 or #38616? Curiouser and curiouser!

Monday, March 4, 2024

Tandy Car Surfaces

I've been removing a lot of cars from the PNAERC list recently, but today I got to add one back. I finally found a fleet number for the car shown above: Tandy Subway 4. This photo popped up at the end of 2023 and shows a car whose existence had been rumored, but I'd never been able to find any solid information. But it's now clear that car 4 has, indeed, been in indoor storage since the Tandy cars were sold off around 2003, and it seems to be in excellent condition. It was being moved last year because the facility where it was stored was being torn down, but it's supposedly been relocated to a Trinity Metro facility elsewhere in Fort Worth.

This car was built in 1945 as Capital Transit 1506, one of that city's typical postwar PCC cars. It was among the small fleet sold in 1963 for continued use on the Tandy Subway in Fort Worth. It was heavily rebuilt in "Winnebago" style around 1975-1977. When the Tandy line quit, several of its cars were preserved, but in the last 10 years most of those have been scrapped, including two or three that were stored locally and a couple that were moved to Pennsylvania. In fact, this is the last car preserved in end-of-service condition. Only two other cars that ran on the Tandy line still exist, beautifully restored car 1, which was never rebuilt with this boxy body, and car 2, which was modified for street railway service on the McKinney Avenue line but has been stored out-of-service for several years now.

As a side note, this car is considered privately owned in Fort Worth until I find information to the contrary, but it turns out I already have an entry for "Private owner - Fort Worth" in PNAERC. Oops! So, lacking any better ideas, Tandy Subway 4 is listed under as "Ft Worth" rather than "Fort Worth."

Monday, February 26, 2024

Lackawanna Trailer Removed

Thanks again to Wesley Paulson, who was able to contact Travis Stevenson with the Boone & Scenic Valley to ask about 1925-vintage Lackawanna "low roof" MU trailer 3208. This was one of the cars on my "status unknown" list, but Travis confirmed that the car was scrapped quite some time ago - possibly around 20 years ago. It may not have lasted much past the photo I took above when I visited in 2003.

Boone is now down to 18 pieces of equipment on the PNAERC list, while the list overall is currently at 2,085 pieces of equipment.

Tuesday, February 20, 2024

Updates from Warehouse Point

Thanks to Wesley Paulson for reaching out to Bill Wall, and thanks especially to Bill for writing with a series of updates from the Connecticut Trolley Museum, aka Warehouse Point. Bill even sent along a series of photos taken just a couple of weeks ago at CTM. All photos below are taken by Bill Wall except where noted.
First, the good news: as shown above, Connecticut Company box motor 2023 has not been scrapped, as we had previously thought. I got it mixed up with ConnCo 2022, a different box motor which was, in fact, scrapped by CTM a few years back. While 2023 is not in terrific shape, it is very much intact. It's been added back onto the list following a brief absence.
Another mystery solved is York Utilities 72, a 1919 Birney built for the Laconia Street Railway and later sold to York Utilities in Sanford, Maine. This is a body that has been at CTM since 1984, and as seen above, it's still there - it's stored on the ground under a tarp, off in the woods. Its condition has been updated from "unknown" to "stored inoperable."
From there, the news gets less sunny. First, Bill confirms that Connecticut Company 1550 was scrapped by CTM some time back. It's pictured above in a photo that I took back in 2007. This was a typical double-truck suburban car of the type so common on ConnCo. It was built by Osgood-Bradley in 1911 and, unlike nearly all the surviving ConnCo cars, went to Connecticut Railway & Lighting when the system split up in 1936. It was retired the next year and its body came to CTM in 1977.
This 2007 photo shows Bristol Traction 43, a double-truck lightweight safety car built by Wason in 1927 for the Fitchburg & Leominster Street Railway. I don't have any recent views of this car, but I don't think it's a stretch to assume that its condition did not improve over the 15 years after this photo was taken. Bill confirms that this car was dismantled about two years ago. It was the last F&L car in a museum, though there's an F&L body surviving as a house in central Massachusetts. In terms of design, there's a pretty similar Wason lightweight preserved intact at Seashore in the form of York Utilities 88.
Next up is Manchester Street Railway 94, shown above in a photo taken in 2007. Another body, this single-truck, railroad-roof streetcar was built by Wason in 1905.The body showed up at CTM in 1987.
And here it is today, or what little is left of it. Car 94 has completely collapsed, and probably did so closer to 2007 than to today. It's been taken off the list, of course.
And then finally we have Bristol Traction 34, shown above. This is a single-truck arch-roof convertible of pretty unusual design; by the time Wason built it for the Bristol & Plainville in 1917, not too many companies were ordering full convertibles like this. It was also built with an unusual Brill Radiax E1 truck, making it one of just two cars on the PNAERC list that once had that type (bet you can't guess the other one). Finally, according to my notes it arrived at CTM way back in 1948, astonishingly, which certainly makes it one of the very earliest car bodies acquired by a trolley museum anywhere - most trolley museums hadn't even been founded in 1948. But in recent decades it just sat outside next to the CTM shop, slowly becoming more derelict. It's hard to decide when this frog is fully boiled, so to speak, but given the photo above, I think it's safe to consider car 34 to be effectively gone as an intact car. So, I've taken it off the list.

With these changes, the CTM roster is down from three Bristol cars to just one, and down from 47 cars to 43 cars total in the collection. When you add in the two interurban cars, two Chicago 'L' cars, and the locomotive that the museum has also deaccessed within the last five years, CTM has culled its collection by more than 20%.

On an unrelated note, Wesley was able to track down one more car from the "mystery cars" list that, fortunately, is still around. Los Angeles Railway 1030, a Birney body built in 1920 by St. Louis, had disappeared about 10 years ago. It has now turned up, stored under a tarp in a bus lot in Downey, California. I'm not exactly certain who owns it, but it may still be the "Angeleno Heights Trolley Line" group that owned the car a decade ago. The car's status has been updated from "unknown" to "stored inoperable."

Saturday, February 17, 2024

Open Car Off the List

Thanks to Murphy Jenkins of the Fort Smith Trolley Museum for confirming that Veracruz single-truck open car 6, which had been listed as being in a state of disassembly, has been permanently disassembled and can be considered to be gone. Components from the car are going into identical car 9, which is expected to be made operational (I believe converted to double-end operation) at FSTM. I would guess that parts will also make it into other restoration projects at FSTM, which is a bit unusual in that nearly all of their (now nine-car) collection is single-truckers.

Car 6 was built in 1908 by Brill and retired in the mid-1960s, after which it spent a few decades under the ownership of the Texas Transportation Museum, where I believe its condition declined significantly before it went to FSTM in the mid-1990s. There are now three Veracruz single-truck open cars remaining: besides car 9, an ex-Trolleyville car acquired by FSTM in 2009, there's "car 001" (formerly car 8) on display under a very nice pavilion in its home city and car 19, another ex-Trolleyville resident which is in regular operation at the Illinois Railway Museum. Both of the other two cars were backdated by re-adding original-style deck roofs, so car 9 is the only one of the trio preserved in its later arch-roof guise.

Thursday, February 15, 2024

...And One More

Thanks to Wesley Paulson for tracking down yet another removal from the PNAERC list. This time it's Toronto PCC 4427, shown above in 2016, which was confirmed to have recently been scrapped. This car was plinthed in Morriston, Ontario, for years, but was removed sometime in mid-2022. Rumors had it transported back home to Toronto, but it sounds like it has indeed been cut up.

Monday, February 12, 2024

Three More Off the List

Many thanks to Wesley Paulson, who continues to track down cars on the "status unknown" list and send me updated information. Of the latest batch, one car, Lackawanna 4322, is intact and undergoing restoration work in the Catskill Mountain Railroad's yard in Phoenicia, New York. But his other two updates are removals.
Lackawanna 3565, a standard 1930 Pullman-built motor car shown above in a 2015 photo, had been stored derelict on the St. Louis Iron Mountain & Southern for years and was formally deaccessed by the tourist railroad back in 2022. At some point later that year or in 2023 the car was indeed cut up. It's been removed from the list.

The second car to be removed is Worcester Consolidated Railway 038, a cab-on-flat locomotive homebuilt by the Worcester system in 1912. This car has always been on the Seashore Trolley Museum's roster - it was acquired by that museum way back in 1946 - but was listed as "disassembled," so I don't have any photos of it. I had increasingly suspected that Seashore may have written it off, and correspondence from their Executive Director, Katie Orlando, confirms that this is the case. This was the last Worcester Consolidated Railway car preserved in the US, though there are two arch-roof cars from the system known to still exist in Brazil. I've taken 038 off the list, which reduces the number of Seashore cars on the PNAERC list to 190.
The third car to be removed, shown above, is ConnCo box motor 2023. Our own webmaster, Jeff Hakner, confirms that this car was demolished by the Connecticut Trolley Museum at some point within the past few years. Car 2023 was homebuilt by ConnCo in 1910 and at the ends of its career was fitted with a diesel generator so that it could operate as a switcher after the wires came down. I recall seeing it in 2007 and taking the above photo, but the car may have been disposed of not long after that - I can't find any images more recent. With this, the CTM roster on PNAERC is now at 46 cars and the total number of cars on the list is 2,091.

As an aside, speaking of Worcester 038, "disassembled" cars on the PNAERC list are an odd little subset. I have a policy that any electric car that's at a museum goes on the list, even if the museum doesn't consider it accessioned, because of how common it is for something that's deaccessioned to hang around for a long time, and sometimes become "re-accessioned." And as for whether a car is "at" a museum, I generally rely on the museum itself to make that call. This means that there's a handful of cars on the list that you'll be hard pressed to recognize, or in some cases track down at all. With the loss of 038, I think the only car on the list that's "completely" disassembled may be Staten Island Midland 157, owned by Branford but stored off-site in an indeterminate number of pieces. There's also Veracruz 6 in Fort Smith; I'm honestly not sure how intact this car is, only that it's in some state of disassembly. There are a few cars that have been mostly reduced to a flat car, including Los Angeles Railway 59 at Travel Town, Rochester 0243 at the New York Museum of Transportation, and St. Louis Public Service 850 at the National Museum of Transportation, which is notable in that its disassembly occurred quite rapidly and unexpectedly due to a tunnel lining collapse at the museum decades ago. Finally, there are a couple of cars like Chicago Surface Lines 1467 at IRM and Des Moines 512 at Boone that have been reduced to a skeletal framework, but are at least generally recognizable as electric cars. How many of these cars will be reassembled again? Your guess is as good as mine.