Phoenix 44 lives!

What once was thought lost now is found. Thanks to the Old Pueblo Trolley e-newsletter - and Richard Schauer, who forwarded me a copy - I have learned that Phoenix Street Railway 44 is still in existence. Car 44 is the eldest of the three surviving PSR cars and the only one of the three that was not part of the 1928 order for American-built lightweight cars that closed out streetcar service in the city in 1948. Rather, car 44 - which is only a body, and a pretty decrepit one at that - was a 1913-built California car (though it may have been rebuilt as a closed car - see here). A lot about it I don't know, including when it was acquired by the Arizona Street Railway Museum in Phoenix, but for years it was stored in their small barn next to the pride of their fleet, PSR 116.

However when I visited ASRM in late 2016 I found that car 44 had disappeared at some point in the preceding few years, its spot assumed by PSR 504, a sister to car 116 that has the unusual distinction of being (I believe) the only streetcar preserved in the country that once served as a monkey house at the zoo. Anyhow, given car 44's poor condition I assumed it had been scrapped. But I was wrong and it has turned up in the collection of Old Pueblo Trolley in Tucson. It was recently moved to their new building in South Tucson where it is stored safely indoors. OPT has a larger collection of cars than ASRM, a collection that includes a smattering of foreign equipment, but car 44 is their only native Arizona streetcar. If anyone knows exactly when it was moved to Tucson I'd be interested to know.

As for ASRM, they are in the process of being evicted from their longtime home at Deck Park on the north side of downtown Phoenix. This was always a claustrophobic location and permitted the museum only a two-track barn and a "main line" about 400' long. So given the impetus to move to more expansive digs, they have chosen... not to! The museum is apparently moving to an even smaller lot about a mile away in a light industrial area. I hope that their decision to eschew the potential of a larger property further away from the city center in preference for a more confined, but central, location turns out better than it has for some others.

NYC locomotive compressors

A recent discussion revealed some interesting information about New York Central electric locomotives and, more specifically, their air compressors. Talk about a niche interest! There are four NYC electric locomotives preserved: three of the iconic S-motors and one T-motor. Until recently I only had air compressor information for 115 (PC 4715) at the Illinois Railway Museum, which was fitted with a more modern Gardner-Denver pump later in its life (this pump is actually current in use on South Shore 803 but that's a different story. But Bill Wulfert provided some information on pumps used on various NYC locomotives from 1951 spec sheets:

S-3 - 1 x CP-26A
T-1, T-2 - 1 x CP-26A
T-3, Q - 1 x CP-26C2
P-1A - 2 x CP-35B1
P-2A - 2 x CP-35A
R-2 - 2 x CP-26C7

It's too bad none of the P-motors or R-2s was saved; the P-motors were real classics and the R-motors, while certainly more homely, did lead interesting lives that lasted into the 1970s on the South Shore. Anyway, the record for the one surviving T-motor has been updated to show a CP-26C2 though I'm admittedly not certain that it still has this type. A video taken of S-motor 100 seems to show a more modern type, likely also a Gardner-Denver, so that locomotive has had that added to its listing. That leaves S-motor 113 at St. Louis, which may have a Gardner-Denver or may still have its original CP-26A. Anyone know for sure?

As a trivia tidbit, none of the four NYC electrics is operational. But it hasn't always been that way in preservation; 115/4715 did operate a handful of times in the late 1980s at the Illinois Railway Museum courtesy of a South Shore pantograph grafted onto its roof. Unfortunately it was only running on two motors, one having been blown up prior to retirement, and after a few years another failed, so it hasn't run since. Photos of this spectacle are pretty rare but I do vaguely recall seeing it for myself at the time.

Reading MU car confirmed scrapped

So back in 2000 my father and I did a driving tour of several trolley museums in the northeast. We hit Halton County, Warehouse Point, Seashore, Branford, Electric City (at that time the tracks ended just past the tunnel - they've come a long way since!), and Brookins. On the way home we decided to exit I-80 in Danville, PA to gas up and about halfway down the off-ramp we spotted a Reading MU car, of all things, sitting alongside the expressway. Of course we investigated; the car (shown above in a photo by yours truly) had been brought in from a failed hotel in Wilkes-Barre and was being incorporated into a planned historic village. A few laborers were working on fixing the thing up for use as hotel rooms. We peeked inside, where the old Wilkes-Barre hotel furnishings were still evident. It was pretty lurid, with red carpet and mirrors on the ceilings as I recall. The car had been "lettered" with room numbers but under the green paint you could still see its original Reading car number: 805.

Anyway, sometime between 2008 and 2011 the car disappeared from Google Street View so I had moved it from the preserved list to my list of "mystery cars." A recent post on RyPN, however, confirms that the car - along with an adjacent freight car or two - was indeed scrapped back in 2011. It wasn't anything terribly historic, as there are plenty other Reading MU cars around, but it's good to know for certain.

Work begun on PTC Peter Witt

Word comes from Bruce Wells of the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum that restoration work is starting on PTC 8042, a Peter Witt acquired by the museum in 2005 from the Electric City Trolley Museum in Scranton. Of the four surviving Philadelphia Peter Witts, this 1923 car is the second eldest, slightly older than car 8530 (privately owned) and car 8534 (still owned by ECTM in Scranton) but newer than car 6618 at Seashore, which was rebuilt from a 1916 "Nearside" car. Keith Bray, who has done impressive work in recent years on cars at Scranton, National Capital, and Baltimore among others, is working on roof repairs to car 8042. The car is said to be largely sound, and is entirely complete, but does need some repair work in localized areas. I believe the plan is indeed to make the car fully operational so that it can join PTM's other regular PTC standard car, double-ender 5326, in service.

Electric City updates

I've received some updates on equipment at the Electric City Trolley Museum courtesy of an RyPN user who goes by the handle "6-18003." The most photogenic of these changes is shown above: Delaware Electric Power 120, which I believe is the only preserved car from the Wilmington, Delaware city system, is now once again operational. This attractive little single-trucker used to run at the old Penn's Landing Trolley operation but it's been a while since it saw use. For a while it was stored in Buckingham but was moved to Scranton about five years ago.

Other updates include progress on Scranton "Electromobile" 505, which has had the "frame only" notation removed. Steel work on the car is substantially done and work is beginning on rebuilding the wooden components of the body. The car is also being readied for its original trucks and WH 510A motors. I'm still looking for control and brake valve information on the car though.

And finally, a slight correction was made to Third Avenue Railway System 651, the open car at Scranton that saw later use on the Five Mile Beach Electric. Its motors were WH 56's once but they're long gone so it will be fitted with GE 80A motors out of a scrapped snow sweeper. (And it will only have two of them as it's got Maximum Traction trucks!) This change has been noted.

Updates to Cleveland center-door cars

It may not be that fascinating in the grand scheme of things, but a discussion over the weekend concerning the brakes on Shaker Heights Rapid Transit car 18 (shown above in a photo from around 2009) revealed that I was missing brake information on several of the eight preserved Cleveland center-door cars. However it appears that these cars all had SME brakes with M18A brake valves, so I've updated the various cars on the list with that information. (The exceptions are 024, rebuilt as a line car by GCRTA, and 031, modernized with a Peter Witt door configuration by SHRT and later rebuilt as a wire greaser - anyone know for sur eon those two?) I'm always looking to fill in blanks like this. Anyone know what an M18A brake valve is? Other than the Shaker cars the only examples on the PNAERC list seem to be a few cars in California and one "trailer puller" in St. Louis.

Terrible news from Roanoke

It appears that the Commonwealth Coach & Trolley Museum in Roanoke was devastated by an overnight fire this past evening, as reported here. The museum is primarily a bus museum but owns one Roanoke streetcar body (or maybe two*). The brick building that was used as the museum's primary storage garage appears to have been completely destroyed by the fire, with only the exterior brick walls left standing and the roof collapsed in on the buses stored inside. It's not obvious from Google Street View and overhead photos whether the streetcar was stored outside; it looks like it was stored outside under a tarp but it's tough to tell for sure. If it was stored outside it may have survived; if it was indoors then it almost certainly didn't.

It's impossible not to think of the parallels with the National Capital fire that took place back in 2003 and destroyed a significant part of that museum's historic collection, including several unique and fully-restored pieces of equipment. I'm not familiar with the CC&TM's bus collection, nor would I be able to readily identify the significance of whatever pieces were lost, but it's undoubtedly a bad day for preservation. From the perspective of the PNAERC list I hope to find out at some point what exactly happened to the museum's streetcar body. UPDATE: an article here says that the museum's streetcar body did, in fact, survive the fire. It's not clear but the car may have been moved to a different location, possibly to the Virginia Museum of Transportation across town.

*There were until recently two Roanoke streetcars listed on the PNAERC list as owned by CC&TM, both unidentified as to fleet number, one built in 1917 and one in 1927. However the 1927 car has not been listed on the museum's website for some years and is thought to have been scrapped. Anyone know for sure?