Wednesday, July 20, 2022

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.

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