Many thanks to Bill Wulfert, who forwarded me some photos showing the move of San Diego Electric Railway 502 to the Western Railway Museum. I don't have permission to post those photos publicly, so the above shot of the car taken within the last few years is from Railfan & Railroad. This is the culmination of a fundraising effort, largely online I believe, held by WRM over the past year or two to purchase and move this car.
SDER 502 was part of San Diego's first order for PCC cars and was among the earliest orders for PCC cars; of production PCC cars in preservation (say that eight times fast!), only Brooklyn 1001 and Chicago 4021 are from earlier orders, though El Paso 1517 started life as SDER 501 and would have been built alongside 502. A total of 13 cars from this order were preserved, actually, due to many of San Diego's cars finding a second life in El Paso that kept them around for decades after most air-electric PCC cars had gone to scrap.
Car 502 became El Paso 1500 in 1950 and ran in that city into the 1970s, being stored after the system there shut down. In 1986 the car returned home and to the ownership of the San Diego Electric Railway Association. Unfortunately during its time in San Diego it was damaged by fire, and in 1996 the car was sold to Tahoe Valley Lines and moved to northern California. It was owned by TVL until this year. It is the only air-electric PCC cars in the WRM collection, though it does join slightly newer "patent evasion" streamliner Muni 1003 which has many similarities to early PCC cars.
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