Pittsburgh PCC off list

Well, apparently it's Pittsburgh PCC Week. The latest update following the updated information on Pittsburgh 4006 is that a different PCC car from that city, car 1705, has been scrapped. This was another one of the 1700-series cars built by St. Louis in 1949. It was sold in 1996 to Power Superconductor Applications in New Castle, PA, where it joined several other Pittsburgh PCC cars. In 2013, as PSA was getting rid of its last PCCs, this car was acquired by the Midwest Electric Railway Museum in Mt. Pleasant, IA. The photo above is a screen grab from this video of the car shortly after acquisition. MERM had hoped to add an all-electric, and therefore all-weather, car to their fleet, but the car's attractive appearance belied its true condition and it turned out to have been extensively stripped of parts. A proposed sale to an ill-fated start-up railway museum in California in 2018 fell through and car 1705 was sold to a scrapyard in 2019. It has been removed from the list.

The Pittsburgh 1700s, while still not exactly uncommon in preservation, are certainly seeing their ranks thinned. Not counting cars rebuilt as 4000s, and excluding six cars in deplorable condition at VESCO, there are now only six 1700s left.

Pittsburgh 4000 goes missing

Thanks to Nicholas Katz for pointing out that Port Authority Transit 4006, which has been sitting for around 15 years in a parking lot at the west end of the truncated Superior Viaduct in Cleveland, has gone missing. The car - shown above in a 2019 photo from here - is one of the PCC cars heavily remanufactured by PAT in the 1980s and renumbered into the 4000-series. This car was rebuilt in 1987 using 1949-vintage PCC car 1767 as a core and was retired in 1998. For a few years it was stored in Columbus behind a semi-derelict industrial facility on West Nationwide Boulevard (I recall seeing it there in 2002) but then that facility got renovated and sometime in the mid-2000s it showed up in the parking lot at 2401 West Superior Viaduct in Cleveland.

UPDATE: Many thanks to Wesley Paulson and Dave Hamley for getting to the bottom of this one. Car 4006 was indeed moved back to Buckeye Lake, Ohio, where its owner is based, in August 2021. There it joins fellow 4000-series cars 4011 and 4012 along with a collection of other miscellaneous cars.

BCER streetcar placed on display

Within the last few weeks a new history museum has opened in North Vancouver, BC, and one of its headline exhibits is a restored streetcar body. British Columbia Electric Railway 153, a double-truck semi-convertible built by Stephenson in 1908 (and, incidentally, the newest Stephenson product in existence), is on prominent display at the new Museum of North Vancouver. MONOVA, as it has dubbed itself, is described in this article that's also the source of the above photo.

The streetcar, which was retired in 1946, was a cottage at Ryder Lake for four decades before being acquired by the City of North Vancouver in 1986. From 1991 until 2021 it was stored at Fen Burdett Stadium and was the subject of a lengthy restoration project that wrapped up fairly recently. It's nice to see the car placed on display in such a visible location. Its ownership has been updated from the city to MONOVA and its status changed to "displayed inoperable."