Pacific Electric 1299 Runs

Thanks to a Facebook post from Dave Lessig (who also posted a video from which the above image is a frame grab), we have learned that the Southern California Railway Museum has made Pacific Electric 1299 operational for the first time since it left PE in 1956. Its condition has been updated in PNAERC appropriately.

Car 1299 is a unique and very historic piece of equipment. It was built as a trailer for the Portland Eugene & Eastern in Oregon and is the only complete survivor from that line. In 1929 it was sold to PE, which motorized it and rebuilt it into an "officer's car" for use by company officials. This included, among other things, tall solarium windows at both ends. It was used by PE until 1956 but was not sold to Metropolitan Coach Lines with the interurban system, and was apparently retained by PE for a little while. In 1958 it went to the LA County Fairgrounds in Pomona, where it was maintained in good condition and kept as a display piece until 1998, when it went to its current home in Perris (then known as Orange Empire). It's been stored indoors at Perris but until now has never run. Congrats to the volunteers at SCRM who made this happen!

New History for an Old Streetcar

I got a truly fascinating email today from Charlie Lowe of the New York Museum of Transportation in Rush, New York. He took a look through the Pullman order list that was recently added to our Car Builder Order Lists page and found something that solves a longstanding question about a car at NYMT - and gives that car a rather different history.

The car in question is Rochester sand car 0243, shown above. This car was acquired by NYMT from Magee in the early 1970s and, as it was in poor shape, it was disassembled. Unfortunately it has never been reassembled, but the parts are there and someday that will hopefully happen. Its history has been described as: built 1891 by Stephenson as Rochester Railway 162; to New York State Railways (NYSR) Rochester Lines 162 in 1909; renumbered to 243 in 1918; rebuilt to sand car 1918; renumbered to 0243 in 1930; NYSR Rochester Lines became Rochester Transit in 1938; to Rochester Museum of Arts & Sciences 1941, to Rail City (on loan from RMAS) c1956, to Magee (still on loan from RMAS) 1965, back to RMAS in 1973, and to NYMT in 1987.

However Charlie reports that back in 1941, the Rochester Museum of Arts & Sciences had asked Rochester Transit for samples of their oldest and newest cars. They received an hold horsecar (still in existence today); car 0243; and a "modern" Peter Witt, which sadly was too big for them to store indoors and sat outside until it was scrapped in 1950. Anyway, when Rochester had first electrified back in 1890, they had ordered 100 single-truckers from Gilbert. Charlie's question had always been, if the Gilbert cars (of which some were evidently still around in 1941) were older than 0243, why was 0243 chosen for preservation?

The answer lies in the Pullman order list. In 1887, order #508 is listed for 10 cars for the Rochester City & Brighton Railway (actually the Rochester City & Brighton Railroad) for closed streetcars numbered 162-171. Since the car at NYMT is known to have been ex-162, that means it wasn't built by Stephenson in 1891, it was built by Pullman in 1887. That also explains why it has some characteristics of an electrified horsecar and why it has a McGuire Columbian truck (possibly the last one in existence anywhere), a design dating to 1892. This car was probably electrified around 1892-1893 as the Rochester system elected to rebuild one of its newer horsecars to bolster the original fleet of 100 Gilbert electrics. It was in passenger service until rebuilt as a sand car in 1918.

Charlie also points out that the car was renumbered from 162 to 243 while it was still in passenger service, probably around 1909, so my previous listing was incorrect in saying that it was renumbered in 1918. There's a photograph of car 243 in revenue service in Canandaigua, which was a part of the Rochester Lines system.

Anyway, I've updated car 0243's history per Charlie's research. It's now tied for the eighth-oldest electric car on the PNAERC list. Many thanks to Charlie for sending along this remarkable information!

North Shore 354 returned to service

January 21, 2023, was the 60th anniversary of the end of the North Shore Line, and the Illinois Railway Museum held a large event to commemorate the date. The museum ran its five operational NSL interurban cars, but also ran two cars that for some years had been unserviceable. The first was streetcar C&ME 354, shown above, which was returned to service by the museum after some 20 years of disuse. The second was box motor (or "MD car" in North Shore parlance) CNS&M 229, which was put back into service after some eight years of storage. Both cars have had their condition/status updated in PNAERC.

Porto Alegre streetcar preservation update

A huge THANK YOU goes out to Wesley Paulson for tracking down what happened to the two ex-Worcester streetcars in my last post. As it turns out, they were not scrapped! Rather, in September 2020 both cars were moved to the Museu de Arte Contemporanea (you get three guesses on the English translation) there in Porto Alegre, aka MACRS. So that's good news!

Car 193, shown up top in its old location at the police station and below being lifted by crane in front of the MACRS building, is now back on the PNAERC list.

There's also concrete information on the second car that appeared to be located at the police station, shown here during its move. I don't have a car number for this car, unfortunately (I don't have Worcester numbers for either car, but at least for car 193 I have a number I assume is its Porto Alegre fleet number). However there are a few other cars on the PNAERC list for which I'm lacking fleet numbers; as long as I know what company and series the car was from, and can track down its builder and vintage, I figure I have enough to accurately represent it. So I've now added this mystery car to the PNAERC list as well. Hope springs eternal that perhaps a fleet number will be discovered on the car one of these days.

In the meantime, both cars appear to be in storage behind the MACRS building awaiting restoration. There aren't any photos of them on the MACRS site (though there was plenty of local media coverage of their relocation move) but at least one is barely visible on Google Street View if you look closely.

More disappearing streetcars

I'm trying to go through and check up on some of the cars on the PNAERC list that aren't in particularly stable circumstances, and this has yielded yet another car that has vanished. This time it's Companhia Carris Porto-Alegrense 193, a double-truck car built by Osgood-Bradley in 1927. That's a Brazilian streetcar company, but the car is on the list because it was sold to Brazil after retirement from the Worcester Street Railway in Massachusetts. Unfortunately I'm not sure what its Worcester number was, but it was part of their 500-series.

Anyway, two cars of this type (the other unidentified and left off the PNAERC list for that reason) ended up on the grounds of the Police Department in Porto Alegre. Car 193 was fixed up around 2007; the image above is a screen grab from a YouTube video about the car. You can see car 193 on Google Street View (and in some images you can also make out some of the windows of the other car, right beyond it) right up until 2019, but sometime between 2019 and 2022 both cars disappeared.

Given their status - one car definitely seemed to only be a storage shed, while the other had been fixed up but not really historically preserved - my best guess is that they've been scrapped. As such, for the moment at least, I've taken car 193 off the list. It's too bad, because both cars were on their trucks (very rare O-B arch bar types); looked to retain their original underbody equipment; looked like they had solid bodies, even if their interiors had been hollowed out; and were the last two known survivors of the Worcester streetcar system. But so it goes. If anyone finds any information on either car being moved elsewhere for preservation, please let me know.

UPDATE: This mystery has been solved!

The Birney Vanishes

Thanks to Olin Anderson and Wesley Paulson for bringing to my attention an online post stating that two streetcars were auctioned off in 2019 by Daniel Boone Village in Hillsborough, NC, and may have been sold to a mystery buyer in South Dakota. "What now," you ask?

One of the two streetcars I knew about: it's the body of a Birney, shown here in a James Hinman photo from about a decade ago, and for some time it was displayed under this roof on the grounds of Daniel Boone Village, a kind of touristy shopping area (Google Street View). My best guess is that it may have been a Raleigh car, simply because the closest cities to run Birneys were Raleigh and Greensborough and the latter's cars weren't of this design. But that's just a guess - the car is a very standard, run-of-the-mill Birney without much in the way of distinguishing features, so I never added it to the PNAERC list because I couldn't reliably identify it. It's been sitting on my "mystery cars" list along with an assortment of other oddities, rumors, and unidentifiable wrecks. And now, apparently, it has vanished into the ether. If anyone has any information on the car - where it went, and especially where it may have come from originally - I'd certainly be interested.

There was apparently also a second car in Hillsborough, noted as having been the car from "Meet Me in St. Louis" and stored inside. I haven't been able to find any photos of it, but I'm curious whether it's an actual streetcar or just a movie prop. It was auctioned off in 2019, too, so its whereabouts are equally mysterious.

Boeing LRV for Sale

It's been very close to three years since your last opportunity to buy a Boeing LRV, but the good news is that you're getting one (and quite possibly only one) more chance. According to this Craigslist post, one of only four remaining Boeing-Vertol LRVs - Muni 1271, built in 1978 - is up for sale. The above photo, taken from the Craigslist post, is assumed (?) to be recent.

The forlorn LRV has been sitting for quite a while (I'm not certain how long) in a junkyard in Richmond, CA, where it's visible from passing Amtrak trains. While its location in a junkyard would make it seem rather un-preserved, its definitely been kept intact as an historical curiosity (as evidenced by the effort now to sell it) and it appears to retain its trucks and most of its exterior largely unmodified. Let's put it this way: if there were a Muni J-Type or a PE Ten in similar condition in a junkyard, people would be falling over themselves to acquire it.

And yet, this ungainly beast seems likely to go to scrap. One of four LRVs (three Muni and one Boston) still around, it's by far the worst of the lot, and the "local" trolley museum - Western Railway Museum - has one of the nicer examples. Plus, Boeing LRVs were and are notoriously difficult to keep running even in the best of circumstances; even if it's mostly complete, it seems hard to imagine this one could ever move under power again given its finicky electronics. But who knows, someone may buy it and plinth it somewhere.