More New York Subway Cars in North Carolina

Craggy Mountain Line, the privately owned museum/tourist line in western North Carolina, announced on its Facebook page today that it has taken delivery of a pair of New York subway cars. R32-type cars 3432 and 3433. The cars, which make up a married pair, were built by Budd in 1964. They're the fifth and sixth R32 cars on the list but the first pair preserved off the New York subway system. They're not the first subway cars from the Big Apple at CML; the body of an R6 from 1934, car 983, resides there too as a display piece.

The CML roster now consists of a seven cars: beside the three New York subway cars, there's a pair of ex-Philadelphia, ex-Chicago "spam cans" and a pair of Asheville streetcar bodies. This strange mixture is entirely stationary, and as far as I know, there are no current plans to electrify.

On a totally different topic, I found out that SMS Rail Lines in New Jersey acquired a sixth Lackawanna MU car back in 2021. I knew about the first five they purchased that year - three from the Stourbridge Line in Pennsylvania and two that had been plinthed for decades next to the New York Central Hudson line at Croton-on-Hudson. But a sixth, car 3567, also made its way to the SMS yard in Bridgeport, NJ. This car, which is a typical 1930 Pullman-built motor car from the Lackawanna suburban electrification that has been de-electrified during its preservation career, has led a varied and unfortunate existence the last couple of decades. It was at the Maine Coast Railroad in the 1990s, after which it made its way to the Turner Island Railroad, which didn't last long. For the last 15 years or so it was stored, in steadily deteriorating condition, on the Southern Railroad of New Jersey at Winslow Junction.

When it arrived at SMS in summer 2021 it presented a sorry appearance, but after a tear-down in their shop it was apparently kicked out. Its appearance as of late 2022 is shown below (photo from here). This doesn't seem like an improvement, though it's hard to fault SMS for wanting to remove that aluminum roof, which is a source of problems for just about all the preserved Lackawanna motor cars. The future of this particular specimen is, at best, uncertain.