Thursday, April 26, 2018

Rebuilt Los Angeles Railway car for sale

One of the more unusual streetcars on the preservation database is Los Angeles Railway 57, preserved - after a fashion - at the Poway-Midland Railroad in Poway, California, north of San Diego. The car is a single-truck California car that led a varied life, starting out c1890 as a streetcar trailer, later rebuilt rebuilt as a (motorized) open car, and ending its LARy service life as a rail grinder. There are a lot of questions about this car's history, not least of which is what it was doing between retirement in 1948 and acquisition by the P-MRR in 1993. Regardless, it is now "restored" as a California car and operates on proper 42" gauge track using what appears to be an appropriate streetcar truck. However the car has had a heavy steel frame and gasoline engine retrofitted so that it can operate as a doodlebug - definitely an odd duck.

Regardless, the car is now being offered for sale by Ozark Mountain Railcar. It will be interesting to see where something this specialized ends up.

UPDATE
Wesley Paulson made the astute observation that P-MRR has a history of car 57 on their website here - and it's rather different than the history on the PNAERC roster! How could such a thing happen? Well, I suppose it goes back to the fact that there are three superficially similar LARy single-truckers listed on the PNAERC roster and their histories are a bit confusing.

In more recent history - we're talking the 1920s and 1930s, that kind of "recent history" - these cars were 9306, a material car; 9311, a rail grinder (not to be confused with 9310); and 9411, a sand car. All three cars started out as early single-truck cars. According to Interurbans Special 43, car 9306 started out as open car 54 and ended up being sold to Lasky Studios in 1926; car 9311 started out as trailer 405, then became work car 57, and was scrapped in 1939; and car 9411 started out as car 59 and was sold to Lasky Studios in 1926.

It should be noted that at least some of the cars listed as "scrapped" really weren't; there's a photo of LARy work car 9307 in private ownership post-LARy even though company records indicate it was scrapped. And car 9307 is one of at least a dozen other single-truckers, again generally similar to car 57, that were in work service in LA.

And now we get to the three cars on my roster. My impression was that the three extant cars (the Poway car and two derelicts owned by Travel Town) had started out as 54, 57, and 59, later to become 9306, 9311, and 9411 respectively. The P-MRR history of their car 57 states that rather than ex-LARy 57 it's actually ex-54, which suggests that my history is wrong. Apparently P-MRR has traced the history of their car through a private owner and a couple of successive movie studios right back to its sale to Lasky Studios in 1926 as car 9306.

Then that begs the question: what are the two cars at Travel Town? Are they 57 and 59, or is at least one of those an entirely different car - maybe 9307, originally LARy 51, which is known to have survived at least briefly post-LARy? Anyone know for certain?

EDIT: Thanks to Wesley Paulson for tracking down information on the two cars at Travel Town. One, car 57, has been cosmetically restored and is on display; the other, car 59, is essentially a flat car with its superstructure stored in boxes as a "kit." It, too, is on display. The histories of both of these cars are somewhat murky, but this seems to be the best information available.

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