Lafayette Birney preserved

Today's update to the database is an addition: the Indiana Transportation Museum in Noblesville has added the body of a Birney from Lafayette, Indiana to its collection. Right now it's stored tarped on the museum's property. The car's number is unknown, unfortunately, but Lafayette only owned two groups of Birneys and both were built by Brill in 1922 - so at least this car's history can be narrowed down pretty closely.

One thing I'm not sure of is exactly when ITM acquired this car. It was apparently just in the last couple of years and may have been as recently as earlier this year. It's interesting that the museum acquired it at all; ITM hasn't operated any electric cars since the late 1990s and there hasn't been much restoration work done on electric equipment at the museum in some 15 years. But the acquisition of this car, which would obviously be a very expensive and involved restoration project, suggests that ITM management has not given up on the goal of preserving Indiana's traction history.

MU car at Carthage Knightstown & Shirley sold

Today's news comes from Robert Macdowell of the Southern Michigan Railroad, a diesel-hauled tourist line in rural southeast Michigan which already owns a pair of South Shore interurban cars. Penn Central car 1291 (former New York Central 4331, built by Standard Steel in 1929) has been acquired by the SMRR from the Carthage Knightstown & Shirley. The CK&S, which curtailed operations a couple of years ago I believe, is a small diesel-hauled tourist line in east-central Indiana.

Car 1291 is really pretty historic. The NYC had a sizable fleet of MU cars that ran north from Grand Central Terminal starting in the first decade of the 20th century. None of the first generation cars was preserved but three 1920s-era heavyweight cars were saved. However the other two, currently stored on the Toledo Lake Erie & Western in northeastern Ohio, had all of their electric equipment stripped off. Of the pre-lightweight-era NYC MU fleet, only car 1291 is complete and original. The Southern Michigan is aware of its historical value and, judging by the relatively intact state in which their South Shore cars have been kept, it's likely that car 1291 will remain an intact artifact.

Pullman order numbers

A website I'd never visited before was pointed out to me today: www.ericsrailroadcarhistory.com, which along with quite a bit of astonishingly detailed freight and passenger car history articles, includes - as of October - a Pullman passenger car order list starting in 1912. This is a fascinating document, as it includes all electric passenger cars built by Pullman during that period as well as mainline passenger cars. I've used it to go through and add order numbers, where they were missing, to the PNAERC list. I also discovered that I had mistakenly listed a number of Pullman-built Lackawanna MU cars as having been built in 1920 when in fact they were part of the 1917 batch of "high roof" cars.

So this increases the number of car builders for whom I've come across relatively complete order lists. A gold mine for this type of information is streetcars.telcen.com, Harold Cox's site, which features order lists for ACF, American, Brill, CCF, Cincinnati, Kuhlman, and Laconia among others. An order list for St. Louis Car Company has also been published. However there are still several prominent builders - including McGuire-Cummings, Ottawa, Stephenson, and Wason - for which I've never seen an order list. Anyone know of one in print for these companies?

East Side Railway 1455

Today's change for the roster was to add ownership history information for East Side Railway 1455, a standard McGuire-Cummings snow sweeper owned by the Oregon Electric Railway Historical Society. Previously there was no real ownership history for this car, but it turns out their website has some good info on its revenue service history. The only unknown date left is when it was acquired by OERHS from the City of Portland.

East Troy updates

I was able to visit the East Troy Electric Railroad this past weekend for the first time in some years (see the Hicks Car Works blog for a full report) and this visit resulted in some updates and corrections to the PNAERC roster. First, I was able to update the status of several cars, including South Shore cars like car 33 - acquired from the National Park Service in 2010 - which have been put into service. Additionally, I confirmed that South Shore car 21, which had been largely stripped for parts and was in use as a storeroom and office when I was last at East Troy some 15 years ago, was parted out and scrapped. The car was in poor condition when acquired by East Troy in the 1990s and its roof had further deteriorated, so it made sense given the presence of another ten South Shore cars also on the property (some 20% of the railroad's entire passenger fleet!).

And finally, I had the chance to inspect Twin Cities Rapid Transit car 1583 and update some of its mechanical info. Acquired back in the 1970s by the Wisconsin Trolley Museum (ancestor to ETER) as a body, the car is now confirmed to be fitted with Boston Blue Line trucks and motors. Its controllers are a mystery; though "Type 25LB" is cast into their tops, along with some wording in French that betrays their Belgian origin, I have no idea what company may have manufactured them. Help? The car also has an air compressor that resembles a GE CP-something-or-other but was actually manufactured by SEM, another Belgian company. So that pump is currently listed as simply an "SEM" though if I can figure out what CP-type pump it resembles that may change.

El Paso PCC update

Today's update involves six of the surviving PCC cars listed under the Paso del Norte Streetcar Preservation Society. According to the Trolleyville Times at George Huckaby's trolleyville.com website, the list of cars being remanufactured at Brookville (a list I've been trying to hunt down for some months) is 1504, 1506, 1511, 1512, 1514, and 1515. All six have been on the PNAERC list for years, included among the cars stored derelict at the El Paso airport. I'm not certain what the timeline for completion of these cars is, but for the moment their location has been updated to Pennsylvania.

However that's not the end of the story, and at the moment I'm afraid I don't have the end of the story. I'd be very interested in more information on two fronts. First, are these cars still considered part of the PdNSPS collection? Since they're going to be part of a transit agency-run heritage line, I wonder. Second, I've read that they're going to be rebuilt with newer-style control (and possibly motors and brakes) in place of their original XD323 controllers and air-electric brakes. Any information on what exactly they're being rebuilt with would be very helpful.