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.