South Shore 73 update

Many thanks to Bob Harris, who has forwarded a series of photos detailing recent progress on the roof of Chicago Lake Shore & South Bend 73. This is the last surviving South Shore Line wood car and it is the subject of a tremendous restoration project from chicken-coop condition. Recently the focus has been on the roof of the car, which was sheathed - unusually for an electric car - in copper. Well-known wood car restoration expert Glenn Guerra has been heading up this work.

The first five photos from a week or two ago detail various stages of installation of the copper sheets on the front end of the car's roof:

And the last two photos, taken more recently, show the front end of the car's roof following completion of the copper sheeting installation with all of the joints sealed up. Very impressive work!

Car 73 is a big car and there's a lot of work left to do, but the compound curves on the ends of the roof are obviously the most intricate and complicated parts of the roof work. This is a fairly unique accomplishment; I can't think of any other cars in traction preservation that have had this kind of copper sheathing totally replicated from scratch.

M2 Cosmopolitans added to the list

Thanks to Greg Kepka, who alerted me to the fact that the Danbury Railway Museum added a pair of 1970s-era class M2 "Cosmopolitan" MU cars to their collection. These cars were built for service between New York and New Haven and were jointly operated by the New York MTA and the Connecticut Department of Transportation. As such they were dual-voltage, designed to work on both the high-voltage AC of the New Haven and the 600 volt DC approaches into Grand Central Terminal. They were dubbed "Cosmopolitans" to set them apart from the similar type M1 "Metropolitan" cars built slightly earlier for the Long Island Rail Road. Cars 8706 and 8707 were in the last train of operating M2 cars on December 28, 2018 and in April of this year they were moved to DRM and put on display there. I haven't been able to find any decent photos of these cars in their new home but I'm sure photos will show up at some point.

I'm still missing some information on these two (notably, exactly when they were built - the M2 series was constructed over a period of several years) but their new PNAERC listings are relatively complete. For its part, Danbury is quickly gaining a significant collection of mainline electric equipment. Besides their new 1970s cars they also have all three surviving New Haven "washboard" MU cars and a pair of ex-New York Central MU cars from the 1960s. To top it off they've got the electric wrecker from Grand Central Terminal. Their collection already arguably rivals that of IRM or MOT; now all they need is an electric locomotive or two.