Well that's embarrassing

Back in March, I got an email from Joe Sharretts that pointed out a mistake on the PNAERC roster. It took me a little while to get to the bottom of it (many thanks to Joel Salomon and Charles High for providing more information) but over the weekend they confirmed that my listings for Red Arrow cars at the Middletown & Hummelstown have been incorrect for years. And it's not a minor thing either: the M&H has two "80-series" Red Arrow cars, but my roster has long listed three of them there. One of these three cars on the list hasn't actually existed since it was scrapped in 1982.

So what in the world happened? Until now the three 80-series cars on my list were car 77, car 83, and car 86. There's no question around car 77; it was apparently sold to the M&H in 1982 and in recent years has had one end on jack stands with a truck pulled out (photo here). The issue comes with cars 83 and 86. Apparently, when the M&H decided to buy Red Arrow cars, they purchased 77 and 86. However at the last minute someone - whether at the M&H or at SEPTA - decided that car 86 had some damage and that car 83, which I guess hadn't been sold, would be a better car to get. So the numbers were swapped. Car 83 was hastily painted up as car 86, while car 86 briefly acquired the number 83 before it was scrapped. At least, from what I'm told that's what's going on... hopefully I'm not getting this backwards!

So car 83 is the second 80-series car at the M&H; it's pictured at the top of this post in a Connor Frasier photo from here and if you look closely you can see that its fleet number appears to have been altered at some point. In retrospect that's part of what caused the confusion: depending on which side or end of the car you were looking at, its number either looked more like "83" or more like "86" so I thought that I was just seeing photos of different cars. Oops. Well, at least the mistake is corrected now. We regret the error.