Thursday, September 6, 2018
The streetcar at Knoebel's Grove
Joel Salomon of the Rockhill Trolley Museum has been kind enough to send along some photos of Shamokin & Mount Carmel 33, a 1905 Brill semiconvertible whose body has resided at the Knoebel's Amusement Park (aka Knoebel's Grove) in Elysburg, Pennsylvania for possibly as long as eighty years - perhaps since it was retired from railway service in 1938. The S&MC was one of many small rural trolley lines in the northeast, mid-Atlantic, and Midwestern states and, like many of those lines, it went out before World War II. This car is a pretty rare survivor of a small, rural street railway. It's also a rare example of a true off-the-shelf Brill semiconvertible, a type of streetcar which was as ubiquitous as any other early in the early 1900s but is difficult to find among museums since so many examples were retired and scrapped early. It's under roof, apparently in okay condition, and presumably in no danger of going anywhere - though hopefully if it does go anywhere it's to a museum.
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How much knowledge is there regarding historic carbodies, similar to this example, that still exist to this day, yet are not part of a museum or similar organization, and therefore do not necessarily qualify as "preserved?" I'd like to think that there are some rare finds out there, waiting to be preserved and included on the list.
ReplyDeleteSomewhere there is a list, compiled by Ben Minnich back in the 1980s or 1990s, which describes a lot of car bodies located all over the country. A version of this list was online back a decade or so ago but I don't think it still is; the online list was interesting but pretty fragmentary and there were a lot of duplicates and inaccuracies in locations.
ReplyDeleteAs time goes on, though, many trolley museums seem to be losing interest in acquiring car bodies, especially ones that have been heavily modified or have suffered significant deterioration. Seashore hasn't acquired a body since 2002, IRM since 2003, Branford since 2004, Orange Empire since 2007.
I found the list, titled "American Chicken Coop Project":
Deletehttp://www.erha.org/coop_files/coopindex.htm
It has not been updated for 18 years. There's some interesting things, although some of them are probably gone now.