Good news and bad from San Francisco

Market Street Railway's excellent blog at streetcar.org is an ongoing resource for updates on the Muni fleet of preserved cars. It recently featured a couple of pieces of news on the PCC fleet, one bit of bad news followed by a bit of good. The bad news came on New Years Day when car 1063, the most recently-rebuilt car to arrive back from Brookville, got into a serious accident with a box truck that stove in its front end. For the moment it's out of service.

Then there was the good news, which came shortly thereafter. Muni car 1050 is on its way back from rebuilding (it's probably in San Francisco now) and, like 1063, it is returning in a different livery from what it had before. Unlike 1063 it's also representing a different city: while it left in Muni green and cream it's returning in St. Louis Public Service red and cream, complete right down to the Civil Defense logo behind the front doors. Previously Muni had represented St. Louis with "actual" ex-SLPS car 1704, but it's been out of service for many years and there don't appear to be plans to rebuild it so car 1050 is now "flying the flag" for that street railway system. A photo of the car in transit, from the MSR blog, is above.