Housekeeping

I've decided that it's time to a bit of housekeeping. Usually when a piece of historic electric equipment enters preservation, it's relatively easy to find out about because people want to publicize it (though that doesn't always mean I've got everything I need to add a car to the PNAERC list). But when something goes from "preserved" to "gone" it can often be difficult to figure out. Museums are understandably reticent about broadcasting that they've disposed of a car, even in cases where equipment was acquired solely for parts. It's especially difficult to find information in cases where the owning organization went out of business or the private owner died or dropped off the face of the earth.

So there are a few cars that I've decided to remove from the list even though I'm not 100% certain they're actually gone. These are "missing and presumed lost" - and who knows, maybe they'll resurface and I can re-add them. If you have solid information one way or another about any of these cars, please let me know.

Kansas City Clay County & St. Joseph 54 is/was an all-steel freight motor built by Cincinnati in 1913 for that line. It was built to a fairly lightweight design, matching the line's passenger cars, and was retired in 1933. The body was acquired around 1991 by a KCCC&StJ historian who styled himself the Missouri Short Line and it was stored in Dearborn, MO along the old interurban route. I recall seeing this car in person around 2004, give or take, and boy was it rough. Anyway, I believe the owner died some years back now, and aerial photos suggest that it's no longer located where I remember it sitting. It may have been moved but it's more likely that it's gone. UPDATE: Click here for the rest of the story!

El Paso City Lines 90 is/was a turtleback-roof steel-sided streetcar of typical Stone & Webster design that was built by St. Louis in 1913 for service in El Paso. It was owned by the late Ron Dawson, historian and aficionado of all things El Paso streetcar, but I saw a photo of (what I believe was) this car once and it was really a skeleton - not much beyond the steel frame remained. It may still be sitting in a field in west Texas somewhere but it's not at all unlikely that it's been scrapped.

This is kind of an interesting one: San Antonio Public Service 205 was around at least as late as 2012, and at the time was privately owned and stored inside a building in Boerne, Texas (see here for more on this). It is/was a pretty typical 1905 American Car Company-built streetcar, rebuilt by SAPS with steel sides, but was a body and was not in very good shape. Some years back the owner apparently died so it's as likely as not that the car has since been bulldozed or otherwise disposed of.

South Carolina Power Company 302 is actually two cars, but I never figured out the fleet number of the second one so this was always the only car listed on the PNAERC roster. Back in 2006 a real estate developer found these two identical streetcars in a house that was being torn down and decided to save them for potential preservation. They are/were very unusual cars: built by Cincinnati in 1918, small, low-floor, center-entrance trailers, though they may have been motorized at one point. Anyway, shortly after they were saved the real estate market collapsed and plans for the two cars were shelved. For a while they were stored in a former industrial area on the north side of Charleston (they're visible on a 2011 Google Street View image) but by 2016 the entire area had been cleared. My assumption is that the two cars were cut up.

Lackawanna MU car 4633 is/was just like every other Lackawanna motor car built by Pullman in 1930. To say this one is NOT very historically significant is a bit of an understatement. Anyway, it is/was one of two Lackawanna MU cars that were owned by the same person behind Buckeye Lake Trolley, but this pair was presumably too unwieldy to truck to the BLT property. I recall seeing the pair spotted next to a grain elevator on the east side of Columbus about 20 years ago. The other car ended up at the Mad River & NKP Railroad Museum, where it still sits, but for whatever reason 4633 made its way to Toledo where it spent the late 2000s sitting at the end of a track in Sumner Yard in increasingly deplorable condition (it's easily visible on a 2011 Google Street view image). By 2014 the car had disappeared. I'm guessing, though I cannot confirm, that it was scrapped.

I don't know much about the story of Tampa streetcar preservation in the 1990s and 2000s. One Tampa Birney, car 163, was preserved, restored from a body, and operated for a time on the heritage trolley line there. I believe that this effort started out with an historical group that also owned a Tampa double-truck Birney that has since disappeared (UPDATE: the Birney has been found) and a St. Petersburg Municipal Railway work car. It's this work car body, which never had a fleet number, that I'm removing from my list. For a number of years, until sometime around 2010, it sat alongside the heritage trolley line at 5th Ave and 13th Street (it's visible on a 2008 image from Google Street View). But then it disappeared and the property has more recently been redeveloped. Given its obviously mediocre-to-poor condition, limited usefulness, and generally low appeal, coupled with the apparent dissolution of the collection of original Tampa-area streetcars, my best guess is that this car is no more.

As alluded to before, the removal of these cars is based on the assumption that they are more likely gone than still extant. I would love to be proven wrong on at least some of these, and if you have any information on any of this equipment, please drop me a line.