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!