Muni PCC cars removed from list

It took me long enough but finally I noticed the, er, notice at the bottom of Market Street Railway's roster page concerning the cars that Muni offered up for sale back in 2018 as described here. Sure enough, sometime in 2019 SFMR did end up scrapping ten of the cars listed on their disposal notice (there was one car, car 1140, that escaped and was donated to the Museum of Transportation in St. Louis instead, while identical car 1139 was either given a reprieve or erroneously missed on the website scrapping list). The ten cars have now been removed from the PNAERC roster, knocking the size of the Muni collection on my list from 70 cars down to 60.

The scrapped cars come from four different groups. Three are Muni "Baby Ten" cars numbered 1023, 1031, and 1038. These cars were built by St. Louis in 1951 as part of the last domestic order for PCC cars, were retired by Muni in the early 1980s, and have been in dead storage since then. There are numerous other examples of the type preserved, both on Muni rails and elsewhere. (Rather than keep repeating a version of that line, I'll just say now that none of the scrapped cars is anything like unique in preservation.)

The second group includes three 1100-series Muni PCC cars, 1106, 1108, and 1125. These three were all built by St. Louis in 1946 for St. Louis Public Service (as SLPS 1733, 1737, and 1715, respectively) and were acquired by Muni from SLPS in 1957. Car 1125 was retired by Muni in the early 1980s and stored until scrapped, while the other two passed through private ownership (1106) and something called the Western Railroaders Hall of Fame (1108) before being bought back by Muni in 2003 as potential rebuilding candidates. The photo above shows car 1108 back in 2008.

The third group includes two Pittsburgh 4000s (not to be confused with CTA 4000s), PCC cars that were very heavily rebuilt by Port Authority Transit in the late 1980s to extend their service lives. These two, PAT 4008 and 4009, used 1949-vintage PCC cars 1709 and 1700 as cores for their 1989 in-house rebuilding efforts, but as a practical matter there was more 1989 than 1949 content in them despite their PCC-esque outward appearance. They were bought by Muni in 2001 for potential rebuilding but their unique rebuilt features and sealed windows made them iffy candidates.

The final two cars scrapped were ex-SEPTA PCC cars from Philadelphia built by St. Louis in 1948. One, SEPTA 2133, was acquired by Muni back in 1990 and partly disassembled as San Francisco was considering buying Philadelphia cars for its F-Market Line heritage project. At one point this car was supposed to be car 1064, the 15th ex-Philadelphia car rebuilt for the new line, but its condition was thought to be too deteriorated at that point and it was just stored. Then there is Muni 1054, ex-SEPTA 2121, bought by SFMR in 1994 for F-Market Line service. It was rebuilt and repainted in attractive Philadelphia Rapid Transit silver-and-cream colors (a livery today worn by nearly identical car 1060). It ran in regular service in San Francisco for about 8 years but in November 2003 it was rear-ended by a speeding LRV. Fortunately nobody was killed but the PCC car was so badly damaged that it was judged irreparable.

Photo above: Peter Ehrlich, from NYCSubway.org