MU cars confirmed scrapped

Thanks to Mike Dodge, who wrote to me to confirm that Lackawanna MU cars 4351 and 4359 (discussed here) have indeed been scrapped. I'm not sure exactly when they were cut up but it was likely a few years ago. Regardless, while they had been stored at the Reading Company Technical & Historical Society site in Hamburg, PA the cars were apparently actually owned by the Reading & Northern. The R&N owns a sizable fleet of these cars used in locomotive-hauled excursion service so this pair was presumably judged to be too far gone and stripped for parts. Needless to say, this is no great historic loss as a lot of these "high roof trailers" are still around. These two examples have now been removed from the PNAERC list and the RCT&HS is back to an all-Reading collection.

Birney body added to list

I recently stumbled upon this photo on Flickr which shows a Birney on display in the dining room of the Old Spaghetti Factory in Fresno, California. Most, if not all, OSF locations feature a streetcar as a dining room centerpiece but they're a mix of (mostly poorly-done) replicas and heavily rebuilt actual cars. I've generally included examples in the latter category on the PNAERC list, as they're on display primarily as streetcars and not employed primarily as buildings themselves. The trouble has always been figuring out the histories of these cars.

Anyway, one OSF tendency I appreciate is that when they rebuild an actual car they often reapply its original fleet number. As such, for the Fresno car, it's plausible to assume that its actual in-service number was 1033. For a California location especially this brings to mind Los Angeles Railway. That's not enough by itself, but a couple of spotting features support the suggestion that this is an LARy car: it has an unusual two-channel anticlimber which most Los Angeles cars had, and it lacks the marker lights over the center windows that were typical of most Birneys. The car is lettered Fresno Traction but that's doubtful given how distinctive the Birneys built for Fresno were. So I've elected to add this car to the PNAERC list as Los Angeles Railway 1033, the fourth LA Birney and the 72nd single-truck Birney on the list. (Speaking of Birneys, the cars seem to have been very popular to use as sheds or cabins, presumably because they were easy to move. Of the 72 examples on the list only 16 were originally preserved complete and intact - five of those from the Fort Collins system. The other 56 were initially, at least, preserved as car bodies.)

And one other housekeeping item: the URL for Weakly Reporting, Bruce Wells' blog following happenings at the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum and other items of note in Western Pennsylvania, has changed. Bruce has moved his blog over to Blogger due to changes with his former site host. Not too many trolley museums have a steady blog presence and Bruce's efforts are always appreciated!

Miscellaneous updates

A few updates to the PNAERC list have come across my desk recently, so here's a general housekeeping update. First, Bob Harris has sent in a couple of photos showing recent progress on Chicago Lake Shore & South Bend 73:

These are brand new clerestory window frames to go with the nice copper roof that was recently documented. The amount and quality of craftsmanship going into this car is extremely impressive.

Second, a huge thank you to Bill West, who sent me an extensively-researched roster of every Pennsylvania Railroad MP-54 ever built. The sheer amount of data in the roster is staggering; many cars were renumbered one, two, three, or even four times during their lives and in most cases these renumberings are listed along with the year and month. This invaluable resource has allowed me to fill out the ownership history of all nine of the PRR MP-54 type cars included on the PNAERC list. I'm still not sure exactly when most of the cars were sold by SEPTA to their respective preservation-industry owners, but I finally have a full and accurate picture of their service lives. Thanks, Bill!

And finally, circling back around to car 73, I received news from Bill Wulfert that South Shore interurban car 205 has been scrapped. The 205 was the second-to-last surviving trailer from the South Shore - and the very last one is in peril. Car 205 was stored in steadily deteriorating condition at the Indiana Transportation Museum from its retirement in 1984 until 2018, when the eviction of the ITM collection from the park in Noblesville led to the car's sale to a private party and removal (shown above) to an off-site storage location. Car 205's generally poor condition did not make it a good candidate for restoration but it was thoroughly stripped for parts which will aid in the restoration of car 73 and possibly other preserved South Shore cars from the steel era.

Windsor streetcar restoration completed

Thanks to Laddie Vitek, who forwarded me this link that documents the completion of restoration work on Sandwich Windsor & Amherstburg 351. This historic car, whose history is outlined here in a post I made almost exactly a year ago, has been the subject of one of the most extensive and exacting restoration efforts ever performed on a streetcar. It seems the work is now complete and the car will, at some point, be moved to its new display location on the Windsor waterfront near the Ambassador Bridge. For the time being, and until it is actually on display, the car's condition has been updated from "under restoration" to "stored inoperable." The notation that it's a "body only" has also been removed, which is always a nice milestone to achieve.

ITM equipment moved

Appearances to the contrary, the Indiana Transportation Museum isn't dead yet. The photo above is from a recent post on the Schlatter Boys Transport Facebook page and shows one of ITM's three remaining electric cars, all of them Lackawanna high-roof MU trailers in awful condition, en route to its new home. These three cars were among a motley assortment of equipment stored north of Noblesville near Cicero, Indiana on two sidings owned by an aggregate company of some sort. As such the equipment was not seized by the City of Noblesville but, rather, was evicted earlier this year by the owner of the sidings. Conventional wisdom suggested the equipment would all be cut up where it sat but it seems ITM has mustered the resources to move at least some of the cars to a concrete pad in Logansport, where they will now await further developments. The PNAERC list has been updated to reflect the fact that the core of the ITM collection, such as it is, now sits in Logansport rather than in Cicero.

Data enhancement

Many thanks to Bill Wulfert of the Illinois Railway Museum who passed along to me a roster book produced around 1981 by the late Jim Johnson and H. George Friedman. This 40-page book made it to the proofing stage (this is one of an unknown number of proof copies, a fact noted at the bottom of the front cover) but was never published. It's an interesting document from the pre-Internet age when information was significantly tougher to gather from disparate sources.

The book features rosters from 29 different organizations, though the title is a bit of a misnomer as a few museums that never ran electric cars (such as the Snoqualmie group, "Colorado Railway Museum," and Kentucky Railway Museum) are featured as are a few groups that wouldn't commence electric operation until years later like Northern Ohio and Edmonton. A few groups no longer around (TWERHS, listed simply as East Troy Trolley Museum; Trolleyville, listed as Columbia Park & Southwestern; and of course IMOTAC) and some have changed names ("Relic Trolley Museum" is now Fox River Trolley Museum, California Railway Museum is now Western Railway Museum, Railways to Yesterday is now Rockhill, and "Arden Trolley Museum" is now Pennsylvania Trolley Museum). For groups included, not only electrics are listed but also steam railroad equipment.

As luck would have it, combing through these rosters has produced quite a few pieces of information I formerly didn't have in the PNAERC roster. The height and width of the Fresno hobbleskirt car; dimensional information on the Yakima Master Units; motors for Montreal Tramways 1; and air compressor type for Ohio Public Service 21 are just a few of the myriad tidbits of data I was able to mine from this document. Many of the rosters were incomplete, some more so than others (Arden's in particular only listed 14 cars, far fewer than they owned at the time - perhaps they only submitted their core historic collection?), but the information that was there was quite interesting. It was also a reminder of the sizable influx of equipment into many trolley museums during the 1980s and 1990s. There were surprisingly few car bodies owned by trolley museums back in 1981.

Anyway, I'm always grateful for bits of information that fill in gaps in the PNAERC roster. There's still a lot of mechanical and electrical information that is missing from the list and even more missing dimensional information. If you come across an old roster that can help fill in the gaps, I hope you'll send along any information that I'm missing or that I've got wrong. Thank you!

More From Canada

Today I was able to add a pair of Canadian cars to the PNAERC list, though admittedly I'm rather tardy on one of them. The less unique of the two, I'd say, is Toronto CLRV 4034, shown above at its new home at the Illinois Railway Museum. It is now the fourth CLRV preserved but the first one not at Halton County. IRM has built a short section of Toronto-gauge track, which is what the car is now sitting on, but the intention is to regauge a spare set of trucks acquired for the purpose and put the car into operation on the museum's streetcar line. This will presumably be the first time a CLRV has operated south of the border since this happened.

The second car to be added today, shown above in a photo from Flickr, is by far the more unusual one. It's Montreal Metro 81-502, which actually made its way to the Canadian Railway Museum (aka Exporail) more than a year ago in September 2018, and it qualifies for several "firsts" on the PNAERC list. The facts that it's the first Montreal Metro car and the first car built by Canadian Vickers are the least of it: it's the first rubber-tired subway car that I've added. It was one of the inaugural group of MR-63 class rubber-tired cars built in the 1960s for the Montreal Metro, using technology patterned after that used on some lines of the Paris Metro.

Fortunately the decision of whether or not to include it on my list wasn't too hard; besides its tires, which in service would support most of the car's weight, it also has standard railroad wheels that ride on standard-gauge track. So given that fact, I'd definitely say it qualifies for the list. I'm still looking for technical information on the thing: it has a pretty standard two-truck design with traction motors on each axle, and supposedly has some sort of cam control, but I haven't been able to find much in the way of specifics on its electrical gear.

CLRVs preserved

There have been some changes at Halton County! In the Tom Twigg photo above, from the Halton Facebook question, can be seen a lineup of cars from the post-PCC era that are now museum pieces. To the right is the ALRV set that arrived a couple of weeks ago, TTC 4204, while on the three tracks to the left are three single-unit CLRV cars that arrived between November 4th and today: cars 4003, 4010, and 4039. All three are new additions to the PNAERC list.

Car 4003 is the eldest, one of six prototypes built in 1977 by Swiss company SIG (Schweizerische Industrie Gesellschaft, but you knew that). The other two were part of the 190-car production order, with 4010 being the first production car in a series that included fleet numbers 4010-4199. They were constructed in Canada by Hawker-Siddeley in 1979. The CLRVs are truly streetcars - certainly streamlined and modern-looking, but undoubtedly streetcars. They even echo the PCC in their general layout and door arrangement. Other than their styling their most unusual feature may be their mono-motor trucks, which gives them a B-B wheel arrangement but only two motors per car (the later ALRVs returned to the more traditional one motor per axle design).

Halton County suddenly has quite the fleet, though it's fitting given that these cars represented the Toronto surface system for a few decades. Rumor has it that a couple more CLRVs are in line to be preserved by TTC itself and/or other museums, so stay tuned.

Cars for sale

It's come to my attention that a couple of the cars on the list have been put up for sale, their fates likely dependent on whether anyone steps forward to purchase and preserve them.

The more historic of the two, by a long shot, is South Shore 203. This car is an interurban trailer built for the South Shore Pullman in 1927, one of ten trailers built as part of the line's second order for steel cars. It was later lengthened by the railroad. What makes this car historic is that it is the last South Shore coach trailer (identical car 205 is still on the PNAERC list but it is in very poor condition and is to be stripped for parts and scrapped). It's also a rare example of an all-steel interurban trailer, and I suspect the newest survivor of that type. Car 203 was among the cars stored for a number of years by the National Park Service, first at Beech Grove and later in East Chicago, before the NPS divested itself of its interurban car collection and donated the lot to East Troy in 2010. Of the five cars moved to East Troy that year, car 203 is the rarest, but according to an RyPN post to which I was alerted by Olin Anderson it is now up for sale. If it ends up being scrapped, it will be a shame for this series of car to go extinct at such a late date. As recently as 2000 there were no fewer than six of these cars still around, but two were cut up in the early 2000s and another pair at the Indiana Railway Museum were scrapped in the mid-2010s. The last two are 205, a victim of long-term benign neglect at ITM, and 203.

And then there's Philadelphia 2134, a typical PCC built for that city in 1948 by St. Louis Car Company. Back in 2003 it was purchased from SEPTA, rehabbed by Brookville, and plinthed along the now-abandoned Germantown streetcar line in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Mt Airy for use as an ice cream stand. The business closed about a month ago, though, and the streetcar is now up for sale. While I don't usually include cars used as diners (or houses, or sheds) on the PNAERC list, I do make some exceptions in cases where the car's identity as a streetcar is obviously being preserved and emphasized. If this car is scrapped it will not be a significant historic loss.

Missing PCC located

Good news - I've found one of my "missing" cars. Pittsburgh Railways 1772, a standard (for that city) 1700-series PCC built in 1949 and noted as missing here, has popped up in an unlikely spot. It's been plinthed in Trinidad, Colorado at the entrance to a real estate development located at Commerical Street and the Purgatoire River. The above photo from Flickr shows that the car has been painted garishly as a billboard for "The Americana Experience" which is evidently a planned trolley (i.e. bus) line somehow associated with the real estate development.

This car went to the Ohio Railway Museum in Worthington, Ohio in 1990 and left ORM in 2015 for parts unknown. Supposedly it went to Texas, and there's some evidence that it was resold around 2017, but until I find more specific information I'm just noting its ownership as switching to the company in Trinidad, Downtown Trinidad Development Group, in 2015. I'm glad to take this car off of the "missing" list.

Switching at Branford

Branford has published on their shop's Facebook page (no log-in required) some photos taken during a recent switch move. As with many museums, switch moves like this afford a rare opportunity to get a good look - and good photos - of equipment that is normally ensconced deep inside storage barns. Thanks to Roger Addil, who took the photos, and to Dennis Pacelli, who has granted permission to re-post them, we can now get a look at some recent progress and rarely-seen cars.

The big news here is significant recent progress on restoration of the museum's two oldest double-truck Third Avenue Railway System cars. These cars are really emblematic of the equipment used for decades on that system and it's terrific to see them fixed up. The car above is TARS 884, a rare full convertible car built by Brill in 1909 that sports the three-panel front end that was so common on the system. This car has been completely repainted on the outside and really looks spectacular.

Close behind it is another Third Avenue car, TARS 830, which is a standard closed double-truck car built by Brill in 1908. Exterior restoration on this car was begun more recently and is ongoing, so it has been completely repainted but not yet lettered. Both cars look really stunning. It's hard to believe that they were retired all the way back in 1948!

After that we have a few pieces of equipment that aren't the subject of current restoration projects, but are rarely seen out in the sunlight. This is Brooklyn & Queens Transit 9832, a single-truck snow sweeper built by Brill in 1915. This is the only Brill-built single-truck snow sweeper currently surviving in the U.S., though there are a handful of them still around in Europe.

Cornwall 12 is a standard Baldwin-Westinghouse class B steeplecab built in 1917. It spent most of its service life in northern Utah, running first for the Ogden Logan & Idaho and then for the Utah-Idaho Central.

And finally we have Boston 3271, a typical Differential dump motor built in 1920 that came to Branford in 1976. It has a cab at one end, as was typical of many of these motors, but the cab was removed years ago during a restoration effort that was later suspended. The "house roof" was put over the dump body to protect it during a period when the car was stored outside.

Car builders' order lists

One of the many valuable resources I've turned to over the years has been the website created some time back by the late Dr. Harold E. Cox, noted traction historian, at streetcars.telcen.com. The site includes a scanned copy of The Birney Car, some other shorter historical publications, and - quite usefully for me - lists of orders placed with several electric car builders. Unfortunately, a year or so ago the portion of the site devoted to builder order lists went down. But there's good news! I recently stumbled upon the fact that the lists themselves are still online - it's just the directory page on the website that's down. So in case you're looking for them, here are the links:

American Car & Foundry

American Car Company

Brill 1887-1899

Brill 1900-1909

Brill 1910-1941

Canadian Car & Foundry

Cincinnati

Danville

Jackson & Sharp (thanks to Charlie Lowe for tracking this one down)

Kuhlman

Laconia (PDF)

Perley Thomas (PDF)

The Pullman electric car order list has been digitized and is available here:

Pullman (Google Sheets)

There is still a monumental Pullman order list on the Eric's Railroad Car History site here:

Pullman (PDF)

There's also this enormous listing on the Barriger Library site of AC&F orders that is not limited to electric cars, though electrics are included:

AC&F (PDF)

There's a list of St Louis Car Company orders included in Alan Lind's excellent book on that company, From Horsecars to Streamliners. There's also a "mostly complete" order list of Jewett Car Company orders in the book From Small Town to Downtown by Lawrence Brough and James Graebner.

That still leaves several major builders for which I have never seen an order list including McGuire-Cummings, Niles, Ottawa, and Stephenson, plus a number of smaller builders.

National Capital anniversary

Congratulations to the National Capital Trolley Museum on their 50th anniversary. Thanks to regular contributor Wesley Paulson for making me aware of this milestone and for sending along a couple of photos taken during a commemorative event on the 19th. Above, the museum's three operating cars from the Capital Transit system: PCC 1101, single-trucker 522, and snow sweeper 09. These three have very different histories with NCTM. The PCC is a longtime member of the museum's operating fleet, while 522 has been at NCTM for decades but only recently underwent a significant restoration effort. The newest (though not youngest) member is 09, which only came to the museum in 2012.

And here's a photo that includes some of the museum's equipment from further afield. A Toronto PCC, Third Avenue Railway car from New York, and a single-trucker from Belgium round out the lineup. All are shown in front of the museum's beautiful car barns that were constructed around a decade ago.

Toronto ALRV preserved

As shown above in a photo from the Halton County Radial Railway Facebook page (no log-in required), the museum has acquired an ALRV - or Articulated Light Rail Vehicle - from Toronto. The car, TTC 4204, arrived yesterday at the museum and has supposedly already been powered up and operated at the museum. Of course, it's the latest addition to the PNAERC list.

This ALRV was built in 1988, which makes it the second-newest piece of equipment on the list, and is a two-car articulated car of a general design common to light rail vehicles. It is the first car on the list built by UTDC and the first - though surely not the last - Toronto surface car from the post-PCC era to be put on the list. The ALRVs were a development of the CLRV (Canadian Light Rail Vehicle) design dating to the late 1970s but their retirement has predated just slightly that of their elder, single-unit brethren. Rumor has it that an ALRV may also be preserved by TTC itself and it seems certain that Halton will acquire at least one CLRV once they're all out of service. I should mention that I was able to find some truck and motor information about these cars but I'm still in need of control, brake, and air compressor information.

One conundrum is how exactly I should classify this car. On the one hand, it seems clear to me that the CLRV - despite its name - is a streetcar. The ALRV articulated design is more typical of light rail vehicles, which heretofore I've classified as "rapid transit cars" rather than streetcars, but it's basically a two-car CLRV and it spent its service life amidst the traffic on Toronto's streets. I'd say it's closest to a Cleveland 5000, of which regrettably none were preserved. As such I've classified 4204 as a streetcar - the only articulated streetcar on the PNAERC list.

Spam cans to the Carolinas

The Friends of Philadelphia Trolleys Facebook page (no log-in required) reports that the last pair of ex-CTA "spam can" rapid transit cars, SEPTA 482 and 483, have at long last left Philadelphia and are on the road to a new home in North Carolina. The above photo is from the announcement.

The two cars in question are among the earliest CTA 6000-series 'L' cars built that are still around. They were constructed in late 1950 or early 1951 by St. Louis Car Company as CTA 6089-6090, like all 6000s a married pair. As part of the CTA's initial order for 6000s they were not built using components from scrapped PCC streetcars but were designed to utilize standard PCC components like windows and control equipment.

Most of the CTA's fleet of 6000s was retired during the mid-1980s when the 2600-series (today the eldest CTA cars in service) was delivered. By 1986 there were still some 6000s in service but most had been retired and in storage. In the meantime the SEPTA ex-Philadelphia & Western line between Norristown and 69th Street in Philadelphia was practically in a state of collapse. Several accidents and fires occurred in 1985-1986 that took cars - some 60 years old - out of service and the operations over the P&W were actually suspended for a few months in the fall of 1986 for lack of equipment. Desperate for rolling stock, SEPTA purchased ten pairs of retired 6000s in rough shape from the CTA and put seven of them into service in late 1986, cannibalizing the other three pairs for parts. These cars permitted the resumption of service on the P&W line and comprised the majority of the service fleet on the line until the new N-5 cars arrived in 1993-1994.

Amazingly, all seven pairs of 6000s sold to SEPTA are still around, although all have been victims of benign neglect over the past 25 years. Five sets, including at least one pair that was never repainted by SEPTA and retains its CTA Bicentennial color scheme, are in storage at VESCO in Windber, PA. Another pair is at the Middletown & Hummelstown. And that leaves 482-483, which have been sitting alongside 72nd Street Shop on the Norristown line for 25 years. I'm not sure why this pair stuck around so long however I think that they were retained for a couple of years after retirement from passenger service as "brine cars" for spraying ice melt on the third rail.

Where they're headed is the Craggy Mountain Line in Woodfin, North Carolina. Since its creation a decade ago, CML has amassed the largest - and by far the oddest - collection of traction equipment in the Carolinas. Joining two local Asheville single-truck streetcar bodies is the body (on trucks) of a New York IND subway car and, now, a pair of ex-Chicago Philadelphia rapid transit cars. What CML plans to do with the cars isn't entirely clear but they are, at least, the organization's first complete (or at least mostly complete) electric cars. For its part, SEPTA hasn't run out of semi-derelict rapid transit cars on its property yet.

Missing streetcar

A post on our sister Hicks Car Works blog here reveals that a streetcar in the East Troy Electric Railroad collection, Milwaukee Electric 200, has gone missing. The car is pictured above in 2011, by which time it had been moved off-site to private property, but between then and now ETER has undergone one of its periodic "regime changes" and the owner of the property died. At some point during the last few years the car seems to have vanished. Whether it was demolished or is sitting in someone's barn somewhere is a good question that the folks at East Troy are looking to answer.

UPDATE: This mystery has been solved!

So its condition on PNAERC has been changed to "situation unknown." There are a lot of cars on the list with this tag - 32 total at the moment. And I'm always looking to solve some of these mysteries, so please take a look at the list if you've got a minute. Some of the cars on the list (like QRL&P 105 and TTC TP10) are undeniably intact, I'm just not sure what condition they're in. There are some that were, until recently at least, bodies in a state of precarious storage on private land (KCC&StJ 54, El Paso 90, San Antonio 205, and SCP 302 fall into this category). These cars have very likely been scrapped, and at some point I'll probably have to assume the worst and take them off the list (update here), but I'd love to know for certain. There are a handful of cars that were owned by apparently established organizations but seem to have disappeared (besides car 200, NOS&WB 50*, Muni 1111, and the St Pete line car  (update) are in this category). There are a couple of PCC cars that were trucked to destinations unknown (NJT 24* and Pittsburgh 1772*). And then there are a few cars that I'm pretty sure - but not 100% certain - were scrapped, like Tandy 6*, TTC 2822, and Lackawanna 4351* and 4359*. (*=since solved!)

As always, the PNAERC list is only as complete or as accurate as the information that I'm able to gather. YOU can help!

Lake Shore 73 update

Thanks to Bob Harris for sending along another set of photos documenting progress on the last Chicago Lake Shore & South Bend interurban car, CLS&SB 73. Recent work by project workers Glenn and Gary has focused on installing new copper sheathing on the car's roof. While this is an unusual roof coating for interurban cars, it was used by the Lake Shore and (I believe) some other high-voltage lines early in the 20th century.

 Note the intricate bends needed to shape the copper around the clerestory window frames. I'm not certain how much of the clerestory will get copper sheathing.

The following photos were taken a few days after the previous ones and show significant progress being made as the copper steadily marches down the length of the car:

Here we see Gary working to seal the seams of the copper sheets:

The curves at the corner of the car's roof give you an idea of the craftsmanship needed to create something like this:

CRANDIC 55 off the list

Thanks to Bob Harris, who has related the news that Cedar Rapids & Iowa City (CRANDIC) 55, a steeplecab formerly preserved at the Indiana Transportation Museum in Noblesville, has been scrapped for parts. The first photo was taken on Thursday the 26th, the second late on Friday the 28th.

CRANDIC 55 was built in 1926 by Detroit United, which ran it until 1928 when it went from being DUR 2007 to Eastern Michigan Railway 2007. In 1935 when EMR quit, the locomotive was sold to CRANDIC which ran it until the wires came down in the 1950s. It sat at the CRANDIC shop until the late-1960s, when it was spotted by Indiana traction fans who bought it and moved it to the nascent Indiana Museum of Transportation and Communication in Noblesville, later to become ITM.

Though complete, the locomotive was deteriorated when it arrived in Noblesville and it never ran there. Its condition gradually worsened over four decades of benign neglect and by the time ITM was evicted from its site in 2018 the locomotive looked like this. Nobody stepped forward to attempt to save CRANDIC 55 but it's fortunate that it didn't simply become nails and razor blades (as did other equipment in comparable condition). Instead, a couple of different groups including Hoosier Heartland Trolley Company purchased the locomotive and moved it off-site to be stripped for parts. Components from the steeplecab will go to help make Union Traction 437 and other cars complete.

Cars on the move

There are two cars on the PNAERC list that have recently moved. The first is Chicago Aurora & Elgin 453, pictured above in a photo taken earlier today. As noted on our sister blog, this 1946 interurban car was recently sold to the Illinois Railway Museum by the Electric City Trolley Museum. ECTM acquired it back in 2009 from Trolleyville as part of the consortium effort to distribute the collection of that organization when it went defunct, but after the car was moved to Scranton in early 2010 it was simply held in storage. For various reasons it was preserved but was not the focus of restoration work, and recently ECTM began eyeing the car's indoor storage spot as potential home for another car owned by that organization but stored off-site. With its addition to the IRM collection, that museum now owns ten CA&E cars evenly split between wood and steel cars, more than half of all the CA&E cars in preservation. And as a matter of trivia, car 453 is the first car sold as part of the 2009 consortium effort to have changed owners in the time since.

The other car that has recently moved is Lackawanna MU club car 2454, owned by the Whippany Railway Museum in New Jersey. While its ownership hasn't changed, the car has for several years been located in Boonton where it has been undergoing a monumental restoration effort courtesy of contractor Star Trak. That restoration job - I would it's say by far the most extensive ever done to a Lackawanna MU car - concluded earlier this year and photos posted on Facebook show that the car has now been sent on to the WRM site. Unfortunately it still has some boarded-up windows owing to a nasty vandalism incident in Boonton back in April but hopefully that damage is fixed soon. The car looks to be a real showpiece.

Bullet car removed from list

I've received confirmation that ex-Philadelphia & Western "Bullet car" 204 was scrapped at the Museum of Transportation within the last couple of years. As with the rest of the series of ten Bullets, car 204 was built by Brill in 1931 and ran on the P&W - later Red Arrow, later SEPTA - for some 50 years. This car was retired in 1986 and for some reason its stripped shell went to the Delaware Car Company in Wilmington where it spent several years plinthed alongside the Northeast Corridor (photo here). In 1996 it was acquired by the Museum of Transportation in St. Louis and moved there. Not much was ever done with it and I believe that for the entirety of its time at MOT it was stored outside the "trolley building" at the bottom of the hill. The photo above was taken by yours truly in 2009 and the car's condition didn't improve in the years following this. After being offered to other museums with no takers, it was cut up.

While the Bullets are iconic cars, from an historical perspective this is really no loss. First, the car was only a shell, missing its interior, trucks, and all of its underbody equipment. More importantly, there are still six out of the original ten* P&W Bullet cars around (not to mention three out of the original five FJ&G Bullets) and those six are all complete, or substantially complete, cars. One of them is even in running condition.

*Yes, I know there were eleven because one was built shortly after the others to replace a car destroyed by fire. But there were only ten P&W Bullets at any one time.

Washington Metro cars

I've decided to bite the bullet and add a pair of Washington Metro cars to the PNAERC list. The first two cars built for the system back in 1974, Rohr-built cars 1000 and 1001, have - by multiple accounts - been set aside by WMATA for preservation. It sounds like they're currently stored at Greenbelt Yard in Maryland, possibly being refurbished. I've tried getting absolute confirmation of this fact, including contacting WMATA itself, without any luck. However there have been some rumored sightings of the cars in recent months and I found an official WMATA pronouncement here that these two cars were being preserved. So I'll make the leap and assume that these two cars are, indeed, squirreled away at Greenbelt Yard and being kept around for the foreseeable future.

I've had only moderate luck finding mechanical information about these cars, and most of what I've found has come from Wikipedia (ecch), so I'm interested in any information on the cars' mechanical equipment. They were rebuilt in the 1990s with AC traction motors, which I think makes these the first modern equipment on the PNAERC list with AC motors. They're also the first Rohr-built cars on the list.

WMATA has recently retired, or will soon retire, a few other series of cars and there have been rumors that at least one or possibly two more pairs of cars might be marked by them for preservation. As always, submissions of information are greatly appreciated!

Portland Railway Light & Power 1067

Today we've got an update on Portland Railway Light & Power 1067 courtesy of Nick Christiansen, who is working on that car. PRL&P 1067 is a wooden interurban coach built in the company shops in 1906. It's a very historic car because it's the only surviving PRL&P interurban passenger car - and PRL&P isn't just another interurban, it has its origins in one of the very first "true" interurban lines built anywhere in the U.S., the line to Oregon City constructed in 1893.

Car 1067, shown in the two c1910 photos above (all photos copyright Nick Christiansen), is a pretty standard full-sized interurban car of a design typical of the Portland system. It ran until 1945 (later photo here), I believe, at which point it was turned into a cabin in Cannon Beach, Oregon.

Above is a photo taken in 1980 of car 1067 and sister car 1065. The former was saved and moved to the Oregon Electric Railway Historical Society site while the latter, which had been sitting on the ground was in much worse condition, was disassembled for parts.

In recent years car 1067 has been sitting on trucks in the OERHS barn but its stripped condition precluded much serious restoration work. Nick reports that this, however, has changed. The parts retrieved from Portland Traction 1058 have been allocated to help restore PRL&P 1067. This includes correct-type Brill 27E trucks, GE Type M control equipment, AMM schedule brakes, and other parts. The photos above show the current state of car 1067, with its east side in primer and its west side currently stripped and awaiting new windows. The car's interior is pretty well stripped, as is typically the case with cars saved as bodies.

And here's some what what will be going back on to car 1067. At top, an entire set of new windows has been fabricated for the car; then there's a smattering of components salvaged from PTCo 1058; and at bottom is a C6K controller that will go to car 1067. The PRL&P car's record has been updated in the PNAERC database to reflect the equipment assigned to it and the fact that it is undergoing restoration work. Many thanks to Nick for this update, and I look forward to hearing more about this project as it moves forward.