North Shore 162 returns home

North Shore 162, shown in a photo posted by Rob Brogle to Facebook here (no login required), is back in home territory for the first time in nearly 60 years. It's been unloaded in Mukwonago, on the East Troy Electric Railroad, and will be held for future restoration. The car's PNAERC record has been appropriately updated to change its ownership from Connecticut Trolley Museum to ETER. It's in rough shape, but mostly complete and certainly restorable with enough work.

As I've mentioned before, East Troy has been on an acquisition spree lately. They're now up to 25 electric cars, plus a few freight cars that are not on the PNAERC list. But they're somewhat unusual among museums in that most of the preserved cars that passed through East Troy are not currently owned by ETER.

A while back, evidently when I had way too much time on my hands, I made this graph showing the electric cars that I know have passed through preservation in East Troy. The first group in East Troy was The Wisconsin Electric Railway Historical Society. For a while it coexisted with the privately-owned Wisconsin Trolley Museum, which started out in North Prairie, Wisconsin, and then moved to East Troy and renamed itself the East Troy Electric Railroad. This was shortly after TWERHS was "evicted" from the actual East Troy-to-Mukwonago railroad, which was owned by the village of East Troy (confused yet?). In 1988-1989, TWERHS disbanded itself as a museum and sold off its entire collection, mostly to IRM. The size of ETER's collection has risen and fallen over the years. An impressive fleet of South Shore cars was amassed over time, while in the late 2000s and early 2010s there was an aggressive campaign to sell or scrap equipment. But at this point, ETER seems to be on firmer footing - it's no longer privately owned, but is rather run by a more typical nonprofit, and has a solid volunteer base.

As an aside, I should note that a few cars that were sold by TWERHS or ETER were later scrapped by other organizations, and those are shown in the chart as "sold" and not "scrapped." Only cars that were cut up in East Troy - or Mukwonago - are included in the "scrapped" category.

Pullman Electric Car Order List

Among the things that are always helpful in figuring out the histories of preserved electric cars are manufacturer order lists. Order lists for many of the major electric car manufacturers are here. And now, thanks to Bob Webber of the Pullman Library at the Illinois Railway Museum, we can add another. Bob has assembled a list of streetcar and interurban car orders placed with Pullman, located here:

Pullman Electric Car Order List

This list is in a Google Sheets spreadsheet and should be easily searchable. It's drawn from the Pullman electric car order book, which the company kept separate from its steam railroad orders, at least in the early years. For the most part it doesn't include mainline electrics, and does include subway cars, though this isn't 100% consistent.

Looking for information on a specific Pullman order? Contact IRM's Pullman Library to inquire about ordering plans, drawings, photographs, or other documents that may be available.

Charlotte 85 moved to Belmont

I'm a bit late on this one, but I came across a Facebook post from the Belmont Trolley group and noticed that a familiar-looking streetcar could be seen in the background. Sure enough, back on January 3rd of this year, Southern Public Utilities 85, the only preserved streetcar from Charlotte, NC, was moved to a new home in Belmont, NC. The photo above is from the Belmont Trolley Facebook page.

Charlotte 85 was built in 1927 and ran until retirement in 1938, at which point its body was sold. In 1993 the car body was retrieved by the Charlotte Trolley group, restored using trucks and electrical parts salvaged from Melbourne streetcars, and put into service (using a towed generator) on a short stretch of track in Charlotte. The right-of-way was later subsumed into the Charlotte light rail line, and for a brief period car 85 shared the light rail tracks, but at some point it was taken out of service and put into storage. In March 2016 it was sent to the North Carolina Transportation Museum in Spencer.

In Belmont, it's currently stored in the city's public works building (along with two foreign single-truckers, an Oporto car and a Greek car that is itself another refugee from Charlotte Trolley). The plans are to rebuild it with some sort of battery-powered system so that it can run on a short tourist line on the north side of town. Car 85 has had its ownership updated and I've added Belmont Trolley to the PNAERC database, as this is their first domestic electric car acquisition.

For its part, NCTM in Spencer is still home to two electrics on the list - the P&N boxcab locomotive and a New Orleans streetcar in storage - as well as this thing, which is not currently on the list due to a lack of information on it.

Two cars deaccessed by Seashore

As of this past weekend, the Seashore Trolley Museum has deaccessed two of the cars in its collection and is making them available to other organizations.

The first, shown above in 2015 (both photos in this post from this page), is South Shore 32. It's a typical coach from that railroad, built by Standard Steel in 1929, and given how many identical cars are preserved elsewhere, it's not particularly significant. It's in rough shape, and all of its underbody electrical equipment was removed when it was moved to Seashore in the 1980s, but it's complete insofar as all of the equipment is on hand.

The other car is somewhat rarer: Long Island Rail Road 4137, an MP54A1 commuter MU car built by AC&F in 1930. This car is complete, though I don't think it has run at Seashore and it too is in rough shape (though I believe its steel roof has held up better than the canvas one on car 32). There aren't too many LIRR electric cars preserved: only five right now, of which one other besides this car has also been deaccessed by its owner.

It makes a lot of sense for Seashore to deaccess these cars. Neither has ever run in Kennebunkport, as far as I know, and given their huge size neither is a good candidate for normal operation at Seashore in the future. With luck, one or both cars may even find a new home elsewhere.

The Trolley Car Diner Resurfaces

One of the better-known streetcar diners, and one of only a handful included on the PNAERC list, has reappeared after about two years on the lam. Philadelphia 2134, the PCC car shown above, was for many years known as the Trolley Car Diner, an ice cream stand located on Germantown Avenue in Mount Airy. But the diner closed in October 2019, and on April 10, 2020, the car was loaded onto a truck and carted off to parts unknown.

It's now reappeared, still in its hometown, now located in the East Kensington section of north Philadelphia. The photo above, posted to Facebook (no login required), shows the car on display in what is evidently a small "wine garden" that is currently being built (conveniently enough, Google Street View passed this location in May 2022 and the car hadn't arrived yet, so we can confidently nail down its arrival date to sometime in the last 60 days or so).

So the car's owner has been updated to the Mural City Wine Garden. I listed its owner from 2020 to 2022 as "private owner," since it seems to have been sold back in 2019-2020 by the now-defunct Mount Airy diner but its current home didn't exist yet. It appears to still be on its trucks, though of course hollowed out inside. We'll see how it fares in its new location.