Seashore Re-Homing List Update

The latest Seashore Trolley Museum "re-homing list" update has dropped, and it adds a handful of cars to the various pieces still hanging out on the list from previous editions of the list.

The most significant addition to the list is Harrisburg Railways 811, shown above in a 2016 photo. One of two Harrisburg streetcars in existence, this double-truck, arch-roof semi-convertible was built by Brill in 1918. It's of generally similar design to the other extant Harrisburg car, 1914-vintage car 710, but has steel sides. As can be seen, it also has some serious structural issues. It's the only car of its series in existence, so it's technically unique, but it's not remarkably historic.

Another addition to the re-homing list is Cleveland Transit System 113, a "Bluebird" PCC rapid transit car built in 1958 by St. Louis. This car hasn't been included in Seashore's published re-homing lists, but it was deaccessioned a couple of years ago and has been listed on PNAERC as "available for sale" since early 2024. This car is a Trolleyville alumnus, and came to Seashore in 2010 as part of that museum's dissolution. It's one of three single-unit "Bluebirds" in existence, with the other two - car 109, restored and operational, and car 112, which is probably in similar condition to 113 - both at Northern Ohio.

The other new car on the list is MBTA 0579, which isn't on the PNAERC roster. It's a flat car from the Boston 'L' system and is fitted with a small cab for use as a shove platform, but as far as I can tell, it's not electrified. The photo above is from the museum's re-homing document.

There are also quite a few cars on the latest re-homing document that have been carried over from previous editions. Boston Elevated Railway "Cambridge-Dorchester" subway cars 0709, 0749, 0753, and 0754; "main line elevated" cars 0986 and 0996; work motor 0575; and flat car 0503 (not on PNAERC), as well as New York subway car 175 were all added to the list in November 2023. Chicago Transit Authority 1 was added in October 2023, Laconia Street Railway 17 was added in March 2023, and Boston PCC 3037 has been on the list since all the way back in June 2020.

There are a lot of cars that were on previous editions of the re-homing list but are not on the current version, so it's unclear how many might still be available to other museums and how many are now slated for scrapping. Three cars added to the re-homing list in December 2025 are missing, namely MBTA 0997, SEPTA 1018, and Atlantic City 299, as is Staten Island Rapid Transit 366, added to the list in November 2023 alongside the Boston 0700s. Virginia Electric Power 194, Mobile 49, and Boston 3608 were added to the list in March 2023. South Shore 32 and Long Island Rail Road 4137, both added back in July 2022, as well as Boston PCC 3328, added to the re-homing list in 2020, have recently been stripped for parts and are known to be on the short list to be scrapped soon. Other assorted Boston PCCs listed as available back in 2020, including cars 3069, 3174, 3327, 3331, 3338, and 3344, are missing from the latest version of the list.

Finally, a couple of cars that were never included in published "re-homing" lists are slated to leave Kennebunkport. These include Roanoke "Master Unit" 51, transferred to the Roanoke NRHS chapter in 2024 but not yet moved, and SEPTA "Bullet" car 208, which is being stripped for parts prior to scrapping.

Atlanta Streetcar in Limbo

Thanks to Wesley Paulson for pointing me to a Facebook post that contained some unexpected news about Georgia Railway & Power 269: the car has left the Southeastern Railway Museum in Duluth, its home for some 24 years.

Car 269 was built by Cincinnati in 1921 and was used on the line to Duluth, making it the only one of the handful of surviving Atlanta streetcars able to make that claim. As the above photo shows, it's in rough shape and has an end missing, but it's been kept tarped at SERM. However, the car appears to have been sold to a developer called SoDo Atlanta LLC (SoDo = South Downtown). SoDo has removed nearly all the remaining wood from the car, sand-blasted the steel, and moved it into a building at 82 Peachtree Street in the city.

The video on their site says "We imagine the car will become a small restaurant, bar, or unique hospitality experience in the near future." That could go either way; the car could be cosmetically restored as a centerpiece display, like this car or like one of the spaghetti restaurant cars. Or it could end up like this. For the moment, I've updated the car's ownership, but it's still on the PNAERC list. SERM is down to two cars on the list, a MARTA rapid transit car they acquired in 2022 and a second Atlanta streetcar body, Georgia Power 636.

"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.