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.
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