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.