El Paso heritage operation opens

From our friend Bruce Wells, of the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum, comes a write-up and photos showing opening day for the El Paso heritage streetcar line operated by Sun Metro. There were at least three or four PCC cars in operation on opening day and they're the same cars, albeit heavily rebuilt, that ran the (previous) last streetcar operation in the city back in 1974. A total of six ex-El Paso (originally San Diego) prewar PCC cars are being rebuilt by Brookville and to my knowledge only one car has yet to return home from Pennsylvania. An additional three cars are stored at a Sun Metro facility adjacent to the El Paso airport, where all nine cars spent years stored derelict near the end of a runway.

Previously I'd been switching ownership for these cars from Paso del Norte Streetcar Preservation Society - to which they'd been loaned by the city of El Paso since the 1980s - over to Sun Metro as each car returned from rebuild, but it seems clear that PNSPS is pretty much out of the PCC game so I've switched ownership for all nine cars to Sun Metro. That leaves one car owned by PNSPS: El Paso 90, a 1913 Stone & Webster car that at last report was largely a shell. That was a few years back and its current condition and whereabouts are unknown.