Lake Shore Electric car moved

Blaine Hays photo

There are four steel interurban cars from the Lake Shore Electric preserved. Car 174 is a body on trucks that was cosmetically restored by a museum in Newark, Ohio; cars 171 and 181 are car bodies stored in poor condition at Seashore and Northern Ohio, respectively; and that leaves LSE 167, the only one of the four that wasn't part of the 1918 order from Jewett. Car 167 was built by that company, too, but dates to 1915. It's been privately owned for decades, and by the 1990s had been fixed up quite nicely on the exterior. It even acquired (or kept?) truss rods and was placed on CTA 4000-series MCB trucks with some electrical equipment hung under it for appearance.

Unfortunately a quarter century sitting on a siding at a tourist railroad in Wellington, Ohio didn't do the car any favors. It has now made its way to Avon Lake, Ohio, and has been set down behind the old LSE Beach Park station. Its trucks are stored alongside it. Plans for it are uncertain, but LSE freight motor 38 was cosmetically restored (sort of) a few years ago and plinthed out in the parking lot in front of the Artstown Gallery shopping center, so perhaps car 167 will join it. Thanks to Bill Wulfert for passing along this news, which comes via a NORM newsletter.

As far as I know, the other electric car owned by the same family, an Interstate Public Service freight motor that was heavily rebuilt by American Aggregates into a diesel-electric, is still on the siding in Wellington. But corrections and updates are always appreciated.

Winnipeg Railway Museum closing

It's been reported that the Winnipeg Railway Museum in Winnipeg, Manitoba, is closing at the end of this year. The museum is housed in the city's railway station, which is also used by VIA and is apparently now being eyed by a public transit project. So they've lost their lease and are being evicted. The article about this event includes some fairly optimistic language from museum representatives, and it sounds like this was expected sooner or later, so hopefully they have a workable plan in place to relocate. This is just another reminder than any museum that doesn't own its own land is living on the precipice of eviction.

WRM is home to two pieces of electric equipment. The more significant, pictured above in a photo from this 2018 article, is Winnipeg Electric Railway 356. Even though the Winnipeg streetcar system remained in operation until 1955 - and was using big wooden deck-roof cars right up until the end - not a single car from the system was preserved intact. A number of cars were sold as bodies, and a handful are still around in various stages of disrepair, but this is the only streetcar from Winnipeg that can be considered preserved. As of 2018 it was undergoing restoration work.

The other is Hudson Bay Mining & Smelting 95, one of two heavily-rebuilt electric locomotives from that Flin Flon operation to be preserved. This one is an oddity: a four-wheel 250-volt switcher built by GE in 1928. I have very little information on its history or electrical/mechanical equipment.

M&O Subway cars for sale

Many thanks to Andy Nold for sending along this link to an auction of three ex-M&O/Tandy Subway electric cars. Of the three cars in question, I believe that only two are currently on the list: Tandy 1 (not to be confused with the other Tandy 1) and Tandy 4. Both of these are squared-off "Winnebago-style" Tandy subway cars whose bodies are basically of late-1970s vintage, but whose electrical and mechanical equipment - and probably portions of the frame - started out as PCC cars. Tandy 1 was built off of Boston PCC 3166, a 1945 Pullman-Standard product, while Tandy 4 was built from DC Transit 1506, a St. Louis product of similar vintage. As for the third car, which is largely gutted, I'm not even sure what its identity is. I believe that all three have been owned by North Texas Historic Transportation, but word on the street is that NTHT is either contracting or folding altogether and it appears these three cars are being auctioned off by the local transit agency. So if you want air-electric PCC car parts, here's your ticket. The cars are located in a lot here.

And if anybody has more information on the existing Tandy cars, I'd appreciate it. My roster of ex-Tandy cars (I've used Tandy interchangeably with M&O on the list although the latter preceded the former as operators of the subway line so they're really not synonymous) is a bit of a mess. Of the seven cars on that particular list, only three are what I'd consider definitely accounted for: the "other" car 1, now restored and on display; car 2, a "Winnebago" style car, owned by McKinney Avenue and currently in storage; and DC Transit 1540, an unrebuilt PCC which returned home to Maryland. The other four include two of the cars now up for auction and two other cars that were bought by Brookville. But I'm not even sure they still exist - Brookville may have scrapped them at some point - and there's evidently a third (gutted) car in that lot in Fort Worth that's not on my list. Help is needed!

MYSTERY SOLVED: The mystery of the surviving Tandy cars ended up being solved - the two Brookville cars were confirmed scrapped, and the cars up for auction described in this post failed to find buyers and were similarly cut up.