Streetcar for Sale

It was only a month or so ago that Los Angeles Transit Lines 1435 came up on this very blog. It took me that long to figure out where it had ended up (the answer was the Southern California Fairgrounds in Perris, California). But it appears that it's not sticking around: it's just been listed for sale.

The photos are from the auction website where it's being sold here (link may not work for more than a few days). The listing says it needs to be removed from its current location by September 21st, which is in just a couple of days, so that's not auspicious. It remains to be seen what happens to the car after that.

Car 1435 is a Class H-3 double-truck steel car built by St. Louis in 1924 for Los Angeles Railway. It ran until 1959, when it was sold to a private owner. The owner stored it for years at the (then) Orange Empire Railway Museum, but it left there in 1975 and according to some sources it hit a bridge during transport which caused roof damage. Later, in the 1990s, it was stripped for parts to restore cars in the Muni historic fleet in San Francisco. By the early 2000s it was stored at the old Pacific Electric building and given a coat of paint, but nothing was really done with it. Orange Empire (now Southern California Railway Museum) moved the car to their site in Perris in 2016, I believe just to keep it from being cut up, and then in 2018 it was moved to its current location at the nearby fairgrounds.

It's one of five H-type LARy cars preserved, and one of three H-3 class cars, so it's not particularly significant - especially given that the others are all complete and this one definitely isn't.