Friday, January 6, 2023

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.

No comments:

Post a Comment