PCC cars for sale

The Seashore Trolley Museum has announced on their website that they are putting a total of nine PCC cars up for sale (along with some buses). The cars are divided into two categories: single-ended cars built for Boston, of which there are three, and double-ended cars built for Dallas and later sold to Boston, of which there are six.

The single-ended cars are MBTA 3037, MBTA 3069, and MBTA 3174. All three were already listed on the PNAERC roster as "not accessioned" thus it is no shock that they're now being formally offered for sale. Cars 3037 and 3069 (the latter shown above in a photo from hopetunnel.org) were both built by Pullman-Standard in 1944 and are duplicates of car 3127, which is part of Seashore's historic collection. Car 3037 has been tarped in recent years while car 3069 has been displayed atop the "highway monster," Seashore's streetcar-hauling tractor-trailer rig, as an exhibit piece. Car 3174 was built by Pullman-Standard in 1945 and is duplicated by car 3221 in the Seashore collection It too has been tarped in recent years if I'm not mistaken. Cars 3069 and 3174 have been at Seashore for 35 years now while 3037 arrived later and has been in Kennebunkport since 1994.

And then there are six Dallas double-ended PCC cars, all of them built by Pullman-Standard in 1945. Four of them - cars 3328, 3331, 3338, and 3344 - were already listed on the roster as being for sale. These are cars that were acquired by Seashore in 1985 (except for 3338, which was acquired in 1994 from a short-lived preservation group) for the purpose of resale. They've been shopped around to various transit operators and heritage lines on and off for a few decades now but with no takers yet.

The other two cars are 3327 and 3343, both of which were converted into work cars and arrived at Seashore in 1999. These two cars have not been listed as deaccessioned, so the decision to sell them is new information. Both had large equipment doors cut into the middle of the car body, not to mention interior modification, so they'd need backdating work to turn them back into passenger cars.

As with the single-ended cars, Seashore has examples of Dallas double-enders that they are keeping in their historic collection, both in passenger (Dallas 608 - later MBTA 3342 - in original colors and car 3340 in Boston livery) and in work car (line car 3332) configuration. Thus, this proposed thinning of the collection won't remove anything particularly unique from the Seashore fleet.