Lackawanna 2628 Returns to New Jersey

It's a heavy news week - when it rains it pours! Less than a week after the plan was announced, Lackawanna MU car 2628 has returned to New Jersey from its 37-year home in Industry, New York. The Tri-State Railway Historical Society posted on their Facebook page (no log-in required) with photos of the car arriving at the Whippany Railway Museum in Whippany, NJ, including the photo above. Many thanks to Mike Dodge for bringing this news to my attention!

As mentioned recently, car 2628 is now owned by TSRHS* and they plan for it to be cosmetically restored and placed on display at the old DL&W Montclair, NJ, terminal. For the moment, since it's physically located at Whippany* along with (restored) fellow DL&W car 2454, its "owner" has been updated in PNAERC to the Whippany Railway Museum with a notation that the car is actually owned by TSRHS and is only being stored at WRM.*

*EDIT: Please note corrections here!

La Crosse city car saved

News has arrived that Mississippi Valley Public Service 56, a double-truck city car from La Crosse, Wisconsin, has been acquired for preservation by the East Troy Electric Railroad. The car is a new addition to the PNAERC roster, as it was formerly in private ownership in northern Wisconsin but details on its whereabouts and status were so sketchy that I'd never felt confident in adding it. Now, since its arrival at Phantom Woods yesterday, it definitely qualifies as preserved. Many thanks to ETER volunteer Eric Zabelny for the unloading photos.

Car 56 was built by St. Louis in 1916 for Wisconsin Railway Light & Power, which was later combined with the city system in Winona, MN and rechristened Mississippi Valley Public Service. It's a pretty interesting car - it strongly resembles cars built by St. Louis for Evanston Railway and Johnstown Traction, but this series was fitted with unusual St. Louis 109A maximum traction trucks. It also had K-51 controllers, a type which doesn't appear anywhere else on my list. It's one of three surviving cars from MVPS, but the only double-truck car - the other two are a La Crosse Birney (which, ironically, was deaccessed by East Troy 20 years ago and I believe is in storage in its hometown) and a Winona single-trucker that was the subject of a major and recently completed restoration in Excelsior, MN.

It's nice to see this car saved for preservation. And it's the first time in a while that one of the larger, established, operating trolley museums has acquired an unrestored car body for preservation. The practice was pretty common in the 1980s and 1990s, with Seashore (the "last roundup") and IRM (the rather less dignified "body snatchers") leading the way, but by my count the last time one of the larger trolley museums acquired an unrestored car body that wasn't already preserved elsewhere was 2013, when Edmonton acquired a Regina single-trucker. A number of bodies have been acquired in the interim by smaller organizations, from Hoosier Heritage and Old Pueblo to a gaggle of local history groups, but the larger museums have largely abandoned the acquisition of car bodies.

Changeover!

It's official: we've switched over to the new version of the PNAERC database! Last night our webmaster, Jeff Hakner, officially pointed the main PNAERC site at www.bera.org/pnaerc.html to the new database - formerly known as the "beta test" site - that we have been keeping updated with regular changes. The old database, which had last been updated in 2014, is no longer accessible. We were still getting the occasional query referencing the old database, so this should eliminate one source of confusion.

While we are able to make changes to the data on the site immediately as needed, the photo/media sections are still not able to be updated. So we realize that a lot of the photos are out-of-date, or links broken, but we are still working on the mechanism to be able to update those. Once that is done, I promise that I'll put the call out for recent photos!

Buckeye Lake changes

One of the largest private collections of traction equipment in the country is Buckeye Lake Trolley, a collection east of Columbus, Ohio, near its namesake city. I noticed recently that additional buildings have been constructed on the BLT property, which is a good thing of course. But one result is that some of the equipment that was there has "disappeared" - either into the buildings or into a scrap bin, I don't know. So a few of the cars in the collection have had their statuses changed to "unknown" to reflect this uncertainty. Any updates are greatly appreciated!

A quick run-down of the 21 pieces of equipment located at the main site (follow along using the roster linked above):

Several cars are easy because they're still visible on Google aerial views. These include the three PAT 4000-series rebuilt PCCs, two ex-SLPS/ex-Shaker Heights PCCs, two C&LE freight motors, and a Philadelphia snow sweeper. So that's eight cars.

Then there's the equipment that I believe is probably stored in the barns that have been built over the past decade or so. This includes a trio of quite historic interurban car bodies, CSW&C 121, LSE 7, and CD&M 500, as well as the body of Columbus streetcar 664. Now we're up to twelve "likely" accounted for.

The next group is equipment that's unique, but in rough shape. These could be stored inside or they may not have fared well enough to be moved, I just don't know. Fostoria & Fremont 40, Toledo & Eastern 40, PSTC 63, PAT 1976, and Lake Shore Electric snow sweeper "C" all fall into this category. A few of these cars used to be stored out near the street and are no longer in their longtime spots. I've changed their statuses to "situation unknown."

That leaves just four cars. Two are ex-Cleveland, ex-Toronto, ex-Shaker PCC cars in truly terrible shape (all cars from this series suffered horribly from salt damage owing to their years north of the border). The other two, a Pittsburgh snow sweeper and a cut-down CTA work motor, were only on hand as parts sources, so they may still be knocking around or may have been "parted out." All four of these have also had their statuses changed to "situation unknown."

Lackawanna MU car to be restored and plinthed

Photo courtesy Rochester & Genesee Valley Railroad Museum

The Rochester & Genesee Valley Railroad Museum today announced new plans for its DL&W MU motor car, car 2628. The car is to be transferred in the near future from its current location near Rochester back to its old home territory in northern New Jersey. Ownership will be transferred to the Tri-State Railway Historical Society and the car is to undergo a complete cosmetic restoration in Morristown, after which it will be placed on display at the old DL&W Montclair, NJ station. The Montclair station was the terminus of the first of three DL&W lines to be electrified (the other two being the Gladstone branch and the "main line" to Dover), in 1930, but the Montclair line was rerouted to avoid the old station in the early 1980s and since that time the station has been adaptively reused as a shopping mall.

The PNAERC record for car 2628 hasn't been updated yet, other than to remove the notation - there since 2019 - that the car was available for sale. I'll wait until it's been physically moved to change its ownership But this is certainly good news. The car was one of 141 identical motor cars built in 1930 by Pullman for the Lackawanna electrification project, but while quite a few of these cars are still around, vanishingly few of them are complete. Car 2628 is in that elite group, though its condition has suffered from long-term outdoor storage. In fact, there are only four cars of this type that I'm reasonably confident are complete, with the others being at Steamtown, Mad River & NKP, and URHS. None of those seem to be on anybody's short list for restoration. If the announced plans come to fruition and 2628 is indeed cosmetically - and authentically - restored, it will be the first Lackawanna motor car, and only the second MU car from the railroad, to be restored as an electric car.

Horsepower

Over the weekend I was briefly loaned a book that was issued by the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum back in the 1970s, when it was the Arden Trolley Museum. It was a reprint of a 1925 Westinghouse motor catalog, and listed most - if not all - of the motors Westinghouse had built for street railway use up to that time. Motor number, horsepower, voltage, RPM, and other information was included, along with notes. This has allowed me to add horsepower ratings to a lot of the equipment on the PNAERC list (fun fact: 757 cars on the PNAERC list have, or ought to have, Westinghouse motors, according to my admittedly incomplete listings). The "total horsepower" field may not be all that tremendously fascinating, but it can be useful information. So, does anyone have a similar catalog of GE motors? Or a later Westinghouse catalog that would include post-1925 types?

And in completely unrelated news, the above photo was posted today on the PCC Trolley Club Facebook page by Michael McKinnon. It shows MBTA 3265, which is the first of the Mattapan-Ashmont cars to go through the latest generation of overhaul, and has now shown back up on its old stomping grounds, presumably for burn-in testing. It looks like this rebuild was largely in-kind, and happily the car has kept its attractive orange/cream/silver BER/MTA era livery. This car went to Everett Shops for rebuild back in 2019 along with car 3234, which is still being worked on. I've read that car 3260, which was damaged in a wreck in 2017, may be next in line for work.

Liberty Bell Jewett removed from list

This photo, taken today by John Petsche and posted to the Ahead of the Torch Facebook page (no log-in required), shows what remains of Lehigh Valley Transit 805. This "Liberty Bell Jewett" was built for the LVT in 1912 and was one of the cars not rebuilt as freight motors. I'm not sure what its history was after the LVT quit, but like identical car 801 it ended up as a body and was eventually picked up by someone looking to preserve it. Unlike 801, it seems that it was in markedly decrepit condition even when initially earmarked for salvation, and thereafter was stored outside on a truck trailer just off the highway in Penn Allen, PA. As can be inferred from the above photo, in recent years it's been almost totally consumed by trees during the summer, and it's obvious that the roof is starting to cave in. So while this car had been included on the PNAERC list since it seemed to be set aside for preservation, it no longer seems that the car is either (1) being actively maintained or preserved in any way currently, or (2) likely to survive much longer. So it's off the list. That leaves three preserved LVT cars - the aforementioned 801, car 1030 at Seashore, and Key System 271 at Rio Vista.