Thursday, November 16, 2017

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.

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