Postcard from Myersville

Many thanks to Wesley Paulson, who sent along this illustrated report on Hagerstown & Frederick 150. Wesley writes:

I stopped in Myersville, MD, to see Hagerstown & Frederick 150.  

The car body is nicely displayed in its own room adjacent to the main reading room.  It is visible outside through large windows, reminiscent of SR 1401 at the Smithsonian. Visitors access the car by ramp or steps leading to the rear platform.  The installation uses the sprinkler pipe to simulate trolley poles. 

The folks in Myersville really seem like they outdid themselves; from what I can tell, the cosmetic restoration of car 150 was done very well and it's in a great location for viewing.

It's an attractive car, though not the "classic" H&F combine. But besides being the only preserved car from Columbia, SC, it's also one of only two double-truck streetcars built by Southern Car Company still in existence - and may soon be the only one.

Restoring seats down only one side of the car presumably has a couple of benefits for a display like this, including making it fully wheelchair-accessible.

The platform generally looks reasonable, at least to a layperson. It's nice that they've included what looks like an appropriate controller and brake valve.

It looks like most, maybe almost all, of this wood is original, but they did a nice job of fixing the car up.

Many thanks to Wesley for sending along these photos! It can be surprisingly difficult to find photos online of electric cars that are preserved in this fashion, i.e. single cars in out-of-the-way non-museum locations. When's the last time anyone snapped a photo of this thing, for example? So, if you've got a random streetcar near you that seems to be flying "under the radar," I'm always interested in updated pictures!

Union Traction 429 Runs

This news has been pretty widely disseminated, but I finally got around to updating the PNAERC list. Union Traction 429 ran for the first time a few weeks ago, moving a few feet on a (very) short piece of track laid inside its barn in Russiaville, Indiana. This is quite an impressive feat given that the car was acquired by its current owner, Hoosier Heartland Trolley Company, in 2018 as a car body, and given that HHTC has pretty minimal facilities to work with by most museums' standards. But the organization has a very dedicated group of people all concentrating on this one car, and the results are apparent.

Intriguingly, car 429 is no longer on the correct-type C80P trucks it had when it left its former home, the Indiana Transportation Museum in Noblesville, in 2018. It's now on generally similar C60 trucks from CRANDIC 55, which was scrapped for parts in 2019. Car 429 is running on two motors, and I'm guessing those may be WH 562D3's from the CRANDIC steeplecab, but I'm not sure. Anyway, there's plenty of work left to do on car 429, but the rapid pace of progress is commendable.

In unrelated news that I also happened to come across today, Los Angeles Railway 936 - shown above in a recent photo posted to Facebook by Murphy Zane Jenkins-Henson - appears to be the focus of a restoration effort at the Southern California Railway Museum, née Orange Empire. This is a center-entrance car built in 1914 by St. Louis and known on LARy as a "Sowbelly." Though one of three surviving, all car bodies, this is thought to be by far the best of the three. I'm not sure whether this is a cosmetic restoration or is the start of a full operational restoration; if the latter, it should be quite impressive, as this is one of the most distinctive LARy designs. Any information is appreciated.

Unique Addition to PNAERC

After some consideration, I've just added a new piece of equipment to the PNAERC roster. It's shown above in a screen grab from this video, which dates to 2011. It's a totally unique piece of equipment on PNAERC: an automated, i.e. driverless, transit car that I might consider a "people mover" like you'd see at an airport as much as I'd consider it a railway car. Among its distinctive features is the fact that it operates using two linear induction motors, one in each truck, meaning the axles are free-wheeling even though the car is powered (I'm still not sure how to describe this using my usual terminology). However, it runs on standard gauge track and it was undoubtedly built for operation on a public transit line. Thanks to Richard Schauer, who explained some of the technology to me. I wasn't sure whether a linear induction motor car belonged on PNAERC, but he pointed out that it's similar to a steam locomotive that is geared to a rack - just because it doesn't power the wheels directly doesn't mean it's not a steam locomotive.

So, here it is, on the roster. This particular unit was one of a handful (I think two, but possibly six) prototypes constructed by UTDC in 1982 for the then-new SkyTrain system in Vancouver, British Columbia. It saw operation during testing before the system opened, but I'm not clear whether it remained in service afterward or even whether it was fitted with a normal interior, seats, etc. At some point it evidently went back to UTDC (later Bombardier) in Kingston, Ontario, for use in testing. In 2011, it went to the Canada Science & Technology Museum in Ottawa, where it currently resides in storage (it's in the background here).

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find very much information on it, not even a fleet number. The prototypes were (I think) numbered BC1 and BC2, which narrows it down, but CS&TM just refers to this car as the "ART 100" even though that's the type designation and not the fleet number. It's also painted in a much simplified version of its original livery and appears to be unlettered. Oh, well. If anyone can supply information on it (including mechanical information - there's information online about the early production SkyTrain cars, but not about the prototype cars) it's much appreciated.

Oh, and if you want an explanation of the SkyTrain system that veers from hilarious to insightful to eye-rolling, check this out. Come for the synthesizer music, stay for the close-ups of induction motor operation.

More on the Deaccession List

A couple of different sources have confirmed that Seashore has deaccessed another two cars, adding them to their "re-homing" list of cars to be disposed of. These two haven't yet shown up on the museum's website, but they likely will at some point.

The first is a very famous car, the "Berkshire Hills," the last surviving car from the Berkshire Street Railway. The BSR was an expansive interurban/street railway system that actually - and, probably uniquely among trolley lines - spanned four states. Running the north-south length of western Massachusetts, it had branches into Vermont, New York, and Connecticut. The sole survivor of the line was also its most opulent and famous car, the parlor car "Berkshire Hills," built by Wason in 1903. This car was gorgeous in service, and after retirement in 1932 its body was made into a diner. Seashore acquired the body in 1995 and has had it in storage since (the above photo, of the car under a tarp, is from 2016). Less than two years ago, in late 2021, Seashore even traded with another museum to acquire the correct trucks for the car. But priorities change.

UPDATE: Good news, everyone! Jordan Helzer of the Shelburne Falls Trolley Museum reports that SFTM has arranged to assume ownership of the "Berkshire Hills." The car may not be moved until next year, due to the need for various types of prep work, but the car will be heading to the closest trolley museum to its original stomping grounds. Kudos to SFTM for preserving this car, and thanks to Jordan for the news.

The second car Seashore has deaccessed is Chicago Transit Authority 1, the last of the "high-speed" single-unit PCC 'L' cars from that system. This car was built by St. Louis in 1960 and not long after delivery it received high-speed motors, more modern control and a flashy paint scheme that earned it (and the other handful of cars similarly overhauled) the nickname "circus wagon." In 1974, the CTA sold the car to General Electric for use as a test car. GE used it for testing out modern control equipment - I think that at one point it was fitted with some sort of chopper control - but at some point it just got abandoned out on a siding at the GE site in Erie. It sat there for 20 or 30 years until Seashore acquired the car in 2016 (the above photo, taken in 2016, is from here). The control equipment to restore the car to its high-speed CTA days doesn't exist anymore, and as a PCC "single car" it's far from unique in preservation, but it's the only one of the high-speed cars still around so it's unique to a point.

It's likely that the re-homing will continue. Seashore's strategic plan includes some 34 electric cars listed as "not accessioned," and while that list presumably includes everything that's already on the re-homing list, there are likely a couple dozen more cars yet to go.

And that brings me to an observation that only occurred to me recently: that the greatest extent of the traction preservation movement, in terms of raw numbers of equipment, is right now. For at least 10 years or more, I'd say, the total number of cars on the PNAERC list has hovered around 2,100. For several years it's stayed within about 10 cars, with periodic reductions (like Muni paring down its collection or ITM going under) being offset by influxes of preserved cars (like a bunch of CLRV's or CTA 2400s entering preservation). But that's about to end. There are over 50 cars in Windber, PA, that will be off the list in a matter of months, and Seashore appears likely to remove another 20 or 30 in the coming years as well, though it remains to be seen how many of their deaccessed cars really do find new homes. But the contraction has begun and I don't see it being offset in the future.

Is this bad? Well, not necessarily - and it was certainly inevitable. Over-collecting during the later years of the PCC era in the 1980s and 1990s is to blame for a lot of it, and the "last roundup"-style mass acquisition of car bodies during that same era has also resulted in quite a few cars in museums that are hanging on by a string, figuratively speaking. But a lot of history is likely to go away, too. For every duplicate-twenty-times-over PCC car in Windber that gets scrapped, there may be a "Berkshire Hills." With luck, the traction preservation movement will emerge stronger, with additional resources to put toward maintaining or restoring a more focused collection. Time will tell.