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.