PCC collision in Boston

Well this isn't good. Two of the air-electric PCC cars on the Mattapan-Ashmont line in Boston were damaged in a rear-end collision; photos appear to show that 3260 was the front car (the one run into) while 3262 was definitely the rear car and had its entire front end stove in. Thankfully nobody was killed however there were a number of injuries. I'm hoping that everyone affected recovers quickly. Both cars involved have been marked on the PNAERC roster as out of service. The photo above, of 3262 in happier days, was taken during a visit of mine in March 2016.

What's the voltage?

I'm always looking to fill in more missing data and a question posted on RyPN yesterday about the voltage used by Reading MU cars made me check the database - and I realized that I didn't have any voltage listed for any of them. Oops. The rule I use is that voltage is assumed to be 600vDC unless otherwise stated, but the Reading used 11,000vAC. So the existing Reading MU cars - all 29 of them - now have the correct voltage noted.

Here's a piece of trivia for you: the highest voltage for any equipment on the list is 50,000 volts. What's odd is that there are two locomotives on the list designed for this voltage and, while they're in different countries and built for very different railroads, they're both numbered 6001 - the only two pieces of equipment on the list with that number. Black Mesa & Lake Powell 6001 is preserved in Arizona while BC Rail 6001 is preserved a thousand miles north in British Columbia. Odd.

Update on the Angeleno Heights Birney

I started working up a "mystery car" post but, as sometimes happened, with enough Googling I was able to answer at least some of my own questions and locate some fairly current information.

The car in question is Los Angeles Railway 1030, a standard off-the-shelf Birney built by St. Louis in 1920 and retired in 1946. It's listed on the PNAERC roster under the ownership of the Angeleno Heights Trolley Line and the last solid information I had on it dated back to about 2005. But I stumbled across a GoFundMe page on the car, still under the name of Angeleno Heights Trolley, working to raise money to store and restore the car. A few photos showing the car's current condition - definitely deteriorated but more complete than you'd think and lacking obvious major body rust or damage - are included. The page also has an update saying the car is safely stored with LA Metro, though I'm not sure where exactly that would place it. But I'm guessing that car 1030, shown below in transit, is safe for the time being.

I had been under the impression that car 1030 was used in filming the movie "The Changeling," which was set in the 1920s and came out back in 2008, along with a second Birney. However it appears fairly obvious that this is not the case, given the long-term deterioration evident on car 1030. It appears that only one Birney was used for the filming: the Union College Birney from Lincoln, Nebraska, listed on the roster as Omaha Lincoln & Beatrice 4. I should note that this car's identity is somewhat in doubt; though claimed by the college as ex-OL&B 4, a statement some years back from Ira Schreiber suggested that this is actually an ex-Virginia Electric Power Birney and not the ex-Baltimore, ex-OL&B car its current owners claims. How (and why) a Virginia Birney would have gotten out to Nebraska, I'm not sure. Unfortunately current information on the Lincoln car is difficult to come by and it seems to spend its time stored out of the public eye.

And here's a photo of the Lincoln car back in 2008 during its moment in the spotlight.

Roanoke survivor

The streetcar under the tarp at this link is the Roanoke Railway & Electric car owned by the Commonwealth Coach & Trolley Museum, which suffered a devastating fire about two months ago now. Initially there was some speculation about whether the car had been destroyed but written accounts stated that it had survived, and indeed here it is, wrapped in old billboard coverings and - according to the caption - awaiting transportation to a new site. The CC&TM website indicates that the organization is being merged into the Virginia Museum of Transportation across town, which is separately listed on the PNAERC list as it owns two mainline electric locomotives and a Washington DC streetcar, but for the moment CC&TM appears to be doing its own fundraising as a distinct entity. 

The streetcar is in rough shape, as it was acquired after service as a house that included removal of part or all of one entire side of the car, but it's the only Roanoke streetcar preserved in the state. Unfortunately the museum lost most of its restored buses in the fire; this photo, taken from the concrete pad that used to be the museum's storage garage, shows what's left of the museum.

Phoenix Trolley Museum closes

As shown above, the Phoenix Trolley Museum (listed on the PNAERC list under its other name, the Arizona Street Railway Museum) has closed. It's not out of business but it has lost its lease at Deck Park on the north side of downtown Phoenix because the city is renovating that space. The museum has been planning to move its collection to a storage site about a mile away but it's unclear what the long-term plans are. The museum owns three electric cars: two 1920s American-built lightweight cars from Phoenix, one restored and one not, and a 250-volt industrial switcher from the Phelps-Dodge operation in Douglas. All three are now noted as "stored" rather than on display.

Mystery car: the Dayton spaghetti streetcar

The latest "mystery streetcar" is the one shown above, which is ensconced in a Spaghetti Warehouse in Columbus, Ohio. A lot of these spaghetti restaurant streetcars are ex-Dallas 700-series cars, which were (and maybe still are) somewhat plentiful as bodies in the Lone Star State, but this example is definitely of a different design. It looks to be a double-truck Birney, which unfortunately means it could be from just about anywhere. Anyone have any ideas?

Kansas City PCC to Become Ice Cream Shop

Trolling the Internet for news on preserved electric cars, as I sometimes do, I came across this article from September about Kansas City Public Service 551, which from November 2006 until March 2016 was on display under its own pavilion next to Kansas City Union Station. Ironically enough, though, redevelopment of the Union Station area prompted by the new light rail line necessitated the car's removal and for a year and a half it was put into storage by the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority.

That seems to have come to an end and the car has been plinthed at the corner of 5th & Delaware in the River Market section of Kansas City, along the light rail line (as can be seen from the above photo) near the other end of the route from its former KCUS home. It sounds like the car is destined to become an ice cream shop, which is unfortunate. It had previously been restored to more-or-less in-service appearance inside and out, as I understood, though it may still suffer the significant frame and body rot that led the Western Railway Museum to deaccess it back in 2006. (This is the last of the Kansas City PCCs sold to Toronto; one other car that went from K.C. to Toronto to San Francisco, as did this one, was acquired around 1982 by the Illinois Railway Museum but scrapped soon afterwards because it was so badly rusted out from its years in Toronto that the step wells were falling off.) PCC cars turned into ice cream shops have also not fared well traditionally, with a couple in Canada and New York having been scrapped in recent years upon failure of the ice cream business, though to every rule there are exceptions.

Anyway, according to the article the ice cream stand is to be called "Trolley Tom" so that's what I'm listing as the car's new owner. That name will be updated as necessary if and when the business opens.

Sand Springs car running again

A post on our sister blog contains the information that Sand Springs 68, the only surviving piece of traction equipment from that line, is now once again operational after being out of service for several years to have wheels replaced. Car 68 is quite historic, as its series of cars is regarded by some as being the first true lightweight interurban cars ever built (the car weighs in at only 26,000 lbs or so). It was acquired by IRM in the late 1960s from a junkyard, mostly complete but sans motors and controllers, and was rebuilt extensively by the museum over the course of several decades. The car's record has been updated to reflect its operational status.

Asheville 117

The latest "mystery car" about which I'm looking for information is Asheville 117, a 1927 Brill Birney body that last I knew was owned by Charlotte Trolley. Charlotte Trolley started as a small volunteer-run heritage trolley line that morphed into a government-funded heritage trolley line, and eventually that morphed into a full-blown light rail system with a few of the government-funded heritage cars running over a portion of the route. The original volunteer-run fleet of historic cars was left out. The "mother car," Charlotte 85, is now at the railroad museum in Spencer, a Birney from Virginia went to Colorado and a Red Arrow car was recently sold to Branford. A Connecticut Company car body was placed on display in the new "Powerhouse Center" in Charlotte. But whatever happened to the Asheville Birney body? It's the car in the right foreground of the above photo and I vaguely recall seeing it in person around 15 years ago. The old car barn seems to have been converted into a coffee shop of some sort so I don't think it's there. Is it still in existence? If so, anyone know where it is? (I should also note that an identical car, Asheville 119, is preserved elsewhere in North Carolina.)

SOLVED: See the comments for the skinny on car 117, which apparently is indeed still in storage somewhere in Charlotte. It sounds like its future is somewhat in limbo at the moment but there are parties interested in preserving it in the area.

Middletown photos

Joel Salomon has been kind enough to send along some photos taken recently in the (relatively) new barn at the Middletown & Hummelstown. Most of these photos are of Lewistown & Reedsville 23, the center-door car that was moved to the M&H within the past couple of years.

The car appears to be in good shape, as car bodies go. The last photo shows Wendell Dillinger, owner of the M&H, standing next to the car with its L&R number clearly visible.

 Also in the barn are a steam engine, a pair of Rio open cars (the one on the right in the above photo is the single-trucker, which is capable of operation using the towed generator shown), and a Red Arrow 80-series car which has had its trucks regauged to standard gauge. The M&H owns three 80-series cars and I'm afraid I actually don't know which one this is.

Also stored in the barn is Brooklyn semiconvertible 4550, built by Laconia in 1906. This car had a strange post-preservation history that supposedly took it to somewhere called Tomorrowland before it later spent time at the Edaville Railroad in Massachusetts. By 1980 it was at Station Square in Pittsburgh, which fixed it up for display, and then when that collection was liquidated in 2000 the car went to the M&H.

Lewistown & Reedsville car moved

A recent visit to central Pennsylvania allowed me to confirm something that I had suspected, namely that the last surviving Lewistown & Reedsville car has indeed been retrieved from its former location in McVeystown, Pennsylvania and relocated at the Middletown & Hummelstown (thanks to Joel Salomon for the information). The car has been owned by the M&H for a number of years but it wasn't until recently that it was moved there. I'm not sure precisely when it was moved, unfortunately.

This is a fairly historic car; it ran briefly in New Jersey, a state from which there are very few interurban/suburban cars preserved. For most of its service life it operated on the L&R so it's a similarly rare example of a survivor from a small-town Pennsylvania street railway. Even its design is unusual. Its record has been updated to reflect that it's no longer stored off-site by the M&H.

UPDATE: Joel Salomon writes to confirm that this car's number is definitely L&R 23. He has also sent a Brill Magazine article about these cars which is extremely fascinating. It includes truck type (Brill 27MCB2) and dimensional and weight information on these cars. Unfortunately there's no control/motor information but that may turn up. The information in the article has been added to car 23's listing on the PNAERC site.

Miscellaneous updates

A couple of updates have been made to cars on the PNAERC list. First, courtesy of an HRA end-of-year roundup comes news that South Shore 106 in Boone, Iowa has been returned to operation for the first time in some two decades. The car had formerly been listed as "displayed inoperable" but this has been suitably updated. This brings to three the number of museums with operational South Shore cars; of the other two, IRM (like Boone) runs its using the original pantographs while East Troy runs its cars much more frequently using retrofitted trolley poles for ease of operation.

And via e-mail Walt Stafa points out that West Penn 832's listing has been perpetrating a falsehood, namely that the car's trucks are Brill 76E2's, which they are not. Oops!! They're actually a Cincinnati design, probably unique to this order, for which I cannot find an official designation. So lacking better information I'm calling them Cincinnati Arch Bars.

Hydro Electric Power Commission

I'm always on the lookout for more information, more data, to fill in the gaps. One of the hundreds of organizations listed among the "past or present owners" is the Hydro Electric Power Commission of Ontario, which at one time owned three steeplecab locomotives that eventually made it into preservation. Two were built for HEPC by Westinghouse/National Steel Car and are now preserved in Ontario while the third was bought secondhand from a western New York interurban line and eventually made its way to Warehouse Point. Anyway, I managed to find this website with some information on what HEPC was and why it owned these locomotives for such a short time. Imagine buying a fleet of steeplecabs bigger than most interurbans ever owned just for a construction project.

CTA acquires more 6000s

The head of the Chicago Transit Authority's heritage fleet program, Graham Garfield, has posted on Facebook at this link (should work regardless of whether you have an account) the news that CTA 6711-6712 have been acquired from the Museum of Transportation in St. Louis. Car 6712 arrived in Chicago on Tuesday the 28th with car 6711 soon to follow. This brings the CTA's historic collection up to a total of fourteen cars, which includes two 4000s, four 6000s, and eight 2400s.

The collection includes both the newest and oldest sets of 6000s preserved. This set of 6700s, built in 1959 at the tail end of 6000-series car production, was retired in 1992 and acquired by MOT in 1993 but never ran in St. Louis. The cars were stored in the MOT barn until this month but in the last two or three years the museum had been slowly stripping them for parts to use on CTA 44, which is regular use on the museum's electric line. It's thought that most essential components remain on the 6711-6712 though and the CTA should be able to restore them to service to operate with their other set, acquired recently from Fox River.