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.