Fifth CLRV preserved

The Seashore Trolley Museum has announced that it has acquired a CLRV from Toronto. TTC 4068 is a standard production car and the fifth CLRV preserved thus far. It is pictured above in a photo by Tom Twigge from the Seashore Facebook page.

The car is not in Kennebunkport, however. It has been moved to the Halton County Radial Railway - where three of the other four preserved CLRVs are located - for interim storage. The timeline is not set, but Seashore plans to regauge their car to standard in similar fashion to the Illinois Railway Museum with its CLRV. For the time being, in keeping with PNAERC practice and to make it easier to track, car 4068 is listed with Halton County's collection with a notation that it is owned by Seashore. The CLRV is the first piece of electric equipment acquired by Seashore since CTA 1 in 2016.

Gretna locomotive gone

My thanks go out to Les Beckman, who forwarded along this link to a photo whose caption suggests that one of my mysteries has been solved. New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board 50, shown above in a photo from Wikipedia (though a different locomotive than the one in the RRPictureArchives link), has apparently been scrapped by the City of Gretna - and probably about a decade ago at this point. The diminutive four-wheel locomotive was built by Baldwin-Westinghouse in 1907 and was used by NOS&WB until about 1959. In recent decades it had been plinthed in Mel Ott Park in the city of Gretna, but as can be seen its condition had deteriorated badly. Around 2010 it disappeared from the park, as shown by Google Street View images, and it now appears that it was cut up. This was one of the pieces of equipment for which I'd been seeking information, so this is one mystery solved at least.

NOS&WB 50 was the last of these little four-wheel industrial electric boxcabs that I know of that was built by Baldwin-Westinghouse, but a few pretty similar locomotives built by GE still survive. The most original are probably Abendroth Foundry "Amy" at Branford and Singer 1, currently in private ownership.

Update From Kirkwood

I had a chance to visit the ersatz Museum of Transportation in Kirkwood, Missouri last week and came away with a couple of updates. First of all, I say "ersatz" because it's no longer known as the Museum of Transportation. Back under private management after a three-decade period under the authority of St. Louis County, the museum is now known as the National Museum of Transportation. Their website and logo actually list this as TNMOT, so apparently they've got either an Ohio State alum or a fan of Wisconsin interurban lines in their management, but regardless the name of the organization has been updated on the PNAERC list (albeit sans leading T). I also got to view progress on Kansas City Public Service 1533, a Birney which is undergoing a major rebuilding effort including a lot of steel replacement.

The big news, though, was that a new acquisition was en route and has since arrived. San Francisco Municipal Railway 1140, a PCC built in 1946 as St. Louis Public Service 1711, was offered for sale by Muni recently along with a collection of other PCC cars that had been in dead storage for years. This particular car ran in St. Louis until 1957, when it went to San Francisco and operated (I think) until about 1981. Muni stored it until 1994 when it was sold to an individual in Lodi, California. In 2003 it was bought back by Muni and has been in storage since. It still wears its old Muni "wings" livery but doesn't seem to have suffered the vandalism and deterioration that some of the cars in storage did. NMOT didn't acquire the car for permanent preservation, but as a parts source for their identical car 1743. However plans for car 1140 are not final and the museum may hold onto it, at least for a while.

As for the other PCC cars put up for sale by Muni, I haven't seen anything about disposition. The folks in St. Louis said that 1140 was the only car in the bunch that wasn't being scrapped but I don't know whether this is confirmed.