ConnCo 855 returns home

 Many thanks to Bill Wall for passing along news, and the photos shown here, of Connecticut Company 855's return home to Branford.

Above the car is shown passing East Haven Town Hall; below it's passing the East Haven Green, while below that it's seen being unloaded at the foot of River Street and shown through the windows of Sprague.

Car 855 was built by Wason in 1905 as Consolidated Railway 512. It was retired and went to Branford in 1947, but as a duplicate in the collection (identical car 865, which is fully restored, is also preserved at the museum) it was soon stripped of parts and its body was placed on the ground. Over the years car 855 saw a few different uses but in 1984 it was cosmetically restored on the outside and placed on display nearby in East Haven outside of the Trolley Square shopping mall. In 1993 it moved again, this time to a spot in front of the Holiday Inn where it served as the East Haven Visitors Center until recently. It has now returned to Branford for the first time in more than 35 years.

Correction and additional information: Bill has written to point out that car 855 has been plinthed on the piece of track shown above, not in River Street (where Branford's line terminates) but alongside it. The car will serve as a welcome sign and landmark for visitors, not to mention an impressive photo op. Its years in various uses have given it a lot of modifications (including, among other things, a metal roof and vinyl windows and siding!) so while Branford is definitely keeping it around, it is not being preserved as an historic artifact.

Finally, as an unrelated aside, the recently-discovered Phoenix streetcar body mentioned here has indeed been moved to the Arizona Street Railway Museum's (aka Phoenix Trolley Museum's) storage site as shown here. The car had already been added to the PNAERC list.