Locomotives Faring Poorly

I'm still working on tracking down recent (to the extent possible) photos of all 2,100 or so pieces of equipment on the PNAERC list, so that we can update all the photos at once, and a couple of surprises recently appeared. I'm hoping that perhaps I can "crowd-source" some answers.

The first mystery involves Ferrocarril Mexicano 1012, one of the big three-truck mainline boxcabs built for the electrification in Mexico by GE in 1923. This locomotive has, for some time, been plinthed along the railroad's main line in Ciudad Mendoza near Veracruz. Above is what it looked like from Google Street View in 2012.

And above is the same view from June of this year. I daresay something's missing. Anyone have any idea where the boxcab went? I have a sinking feeling that the simplest way for it to exit the scene may have been in scrap dumpsters, and I haven't been able to find any evidence online of it being relocated, but I'm hoping that perhaps it was moved somewhere else intact. EDIT: this locomotive is confirmed scrapped. More info here.

And then, moving further south, we come to Ferroclub Argentino, which was just recently featured here for the cosmetic restoration of one of their ex-Pacific Electric steeplecabs. I just came across a rather startling photo of one of their other ex-PE steeplecabs, Ferrocarril General Urquiza 951, ex-Pacific Electric 1591:

That's more than a little ominous! Until recently, at least, this locomotive was in tired shape (as can be seen from the paint job) but still had its trucks. The photo comes from this website, an online petition that I believe has something to do with the organization's trackage being seized or scrapped, but Google Translate did not make it very clear. Anyone know for sure whether 951 has, in fact, been scrapped?

A Second CLRV Heads South

The Facebook page of the Seashore Trolley Museum confirms that the CLRV they purchased back in 2020, Toronto Transit Commission 4068, is en route from its three-year storage location at Halton County to Kennebunkport. The car is shown above being winched onto a flatbed truck earlier this week. Seashore has constructed a car-length piece of Toronto-gauge panel track in their bus display area on which to put this car. Car 4068 is the second CLRV to be preserved south of the border, joining car 4034, which moved to the Illinois Railway Museum in 2019 and has likewise been stored on a piece of Toronto-gauge panel track since.

I'm not certain what the long-term plan for car 4068 is. When it was acquired three years ago, a second car, 4133, was also moved to Halton County with the aim of scrapping it for parts for 4068. As far as I know, 4133 is still at Halton County, but I'm not certain whether Seashore still plans to strip it for parts or whether they've decided to make 4068 a permanently static display piece.

As an aside, of the 14 total CLRVs preserved, two more are stored at Halton County on behalf of their owner, the American Industrial Mining Museum aka Buckeye Lake Trolley, until they can be moved south to the States; two have been retained by the TTC; and one is in private ownership in Ontario. That leaves no fewer than six of the cars that have been acquired by Halton County.

Camp Out in an LRV

You may recall that back in January, I posted that one of the four surviving Boeing-Vertol LRVs, San Francisco Municipal Railway 1271, had been put up for sale. I finally got around to following up on this, and as weird as listing an LRV on Craigslist is, the tale gets weirder.

It appears that in March, car 1271 was sold to a couple from Geyserville, California, who moved it to their rural property there. Their plan is to open a campground centered around this piece of, er, history, which is unusual enough in itself. They're even naming the campground in honor of the car: the project has been dubbed Camp MUNI at Rancho Margarita, which I guess is the preexisting name of the property. And if that isn't unique enough, the whole project has even been the subject of a Kickstarter campaign - and if the numbers at the above link are to be believed, a successful one. Both images in this post are screen grabs from a video posted of the LRV being craned into place (above) and sitting serenely in its bucolic new surroundings (below).

So, car 1271's ownership has been updated. The Kickstarter link has a couple of quirky videos, including a tour through the (mostly tunneled) LRV taken before it was moved from its former site at a Richmond, California, junkyard. Equipment like this that ends up on private property is typically very difficult to track, but I'll do my best to keep tabs on this car. And if you go camping in car 1271, send me some photos and let me know how things went.

Pacific Electric in Argentina

Many thanks to Marcelo Soto, a volunteer with Ferroclub Argentino, the largest rail preservation organization (I think) in Argentina. Marcelo posted photos of the just-completed cosmetic restoration, or restauración estética, of one of their steeplecabs, and I was rather surprised when I saw the result.

Sure enough, it's an honest-to-goodness Pacific Electric steeplecab. There are five pieces of equipment on the PNAERC roster listed under Ferroclub, and they're all ex-PE pieces that later went to the General Urquiza Railway out of Buenos Aires, where Ferroclub is located: three steeplecabs, one boxcab locomotive, and an ex-Hollywood car that GUR turned into a line car. Anyway, until recently the locomotive above was listed on PNAERC as GUR 953 and it looked like this. Marcelo had posted before that the locomotive was being repainted, and I assumed it would emerge from the work in GUR guise, but Ferroclub elected to go with the locomotive's older (though not quite original) guise.

So, its primary identity in PNAERC has now been changed to Pacific Electric 1592, the number it wore from 1947 - when PE bought it from Central California Traction, its second operator after original owner Red River Lumber Company - until about 1960, when it went to South America. Granted, it still wears a few later modifications like buffers and MCB trucks salvaged from ex-PE Elevens, but it's hard to deny that it looks terrific. They even got little details like the safety messages right. Kudos to Marcelo and the other volunteers at Ferroclub for this remarkable transformation!

Boxcab Returns to Canada

The photo above was posted today on the Connecticut Trolley Museum's Facebook page and shows Canadian National 6714 being craned onto a flatbed truck for the trip back home north of the border. CN 6714 is a mainline electric boxcab built in 1917 by GE for the suburban electrification out of Montreal. Along with the rest of its class, plus some English Electric-built boxcabs built slightly later, it remained in service a a remarkable 78 years and wasn't retired until 1995. This is one of four identical examples preserved, and until now has been the only one in the United States.

CN 6714 never really fit in at CTM, though, as it dwarfed most of their other equipment and its 2,400V DC design meant it couldn't operate. It was deaccessed in 2018 and, as mentioned here last year, ended up being acquired by the Halton County Radial Railway, near its place of construction in Toronto. It's now en route to Ontario, so I've changed its PNAERC record to reflect its new place of residence.

That means that CTM has disposed of all but one of the six cars it deaccessed in 2018. Three have been scrapped and two sold. To my knowledge, only LIRR 4153 remains in East Windsor. The size of the museum's traction collection, at least as far as PNAERC is concerned, now stands at 47 cars.

Seashore Deaccessing Rapid Transit Cars

Heads up, the new Seashore deaccession list just dropped!

Seashore's major collection rationalization effort, or "re-homing" drive, has turned its attention to the museum's large - and largely undermaintained- fleet of rapid transit equipment. The latest deaccession list includes no fewer than nine cars on the PNAERC list, plus two flatcars from the Boston subway system that aren't on the list.

First up: four of the museum's five massive Cambridge-Dorchester rapid transit cars from what is today the Red Line. Seashore's fleet of 1927 Osgood-Bradley-built 0700-series cars comprises the entirety of the extant early Cambridge-Dorchester fleet. No earlier cars survive, nor are any cars at all from the line preserved anywhere other than Seashore. Anyway, three of the four cars being deaccessed were already technically considered "deaccessed" because they had been acquired just as parts sources and were being used as (largely open-air) warehouses. These three have all been stored alongside Town House Shop for decades. First is car 709, shown below in a 2023 photo from the "re-homing" document.

Second is car 749, shown below in a photo taken in 2007.

And the last of this group is car 754, shown below in a 2023 photo from the "re-homing" document.

The only real surprise, if you could call it that, on this list is the fourth car being deaccessed, car 0753, which is shown below in two photos from the "re-homing" document. 

This car doesn't look like it's in much better shape than the first three, but until now it has been on Seashore's collection list and earmarked for preservation. All four of these cars were in MBTA work service after retirement around 1970 and didn't come to Seashore until the late 1980s. The only Cambridge-Dorchester car Seashore is planning on keeping is car 0719, which it obtained straight out of passenger service in 1970 and which has operated fairly recently. Car 0719 was modernized in 1948 with a new interior layout and seats, meaning car 0753 would have been the last car of this type in its original configuration. All these cars are believed to be mechanically complete, more or less, with Brill 27MCB trucks that might be candidates for use under interurban equipment elsewhere.

After that, there are three MBTA work cars being deaccessed. The only one of these three that has been on the PNAERC roster is car 0575, a mostly-enclosed box motor/crane car homebuilt by Boston Elevated Railway in 1924 (though Seashore's document lists its builder and date as unknown, so who knows). Below is a 2016 photo I took of this car followed by a 2023 photo from the "re-homing" document.

And then there are two subway work flats included here just for completeness, though they're not on the PNAERC list because as far as I can tell they're basically just normal flat cars, albeit with radial Tomlinson couplers. First is car 0503, a wooden flat car built by BER in 1901, and second is car 0579, a steel flat car of unknown origin. These are both 2023 photos from the "re-homing" document.

The next car is Staten Island Rapid Transit 366, shown below in 2016 in a photo I took. This is a standard deck-roof SIRT heavy rapid transit car built by Standard Steel in 1925. It was retired in 1973 and stored for possible heritage use, but nothing ever came of that and in the 1980s ownership was transferred to the Trolley Museum of New York. The car was stored at the Arthur Kill Generating Station until finally it was sold to Seashore in poor condition in 1993. It is one of only two first-generation SIRT MU cars preserved; the other, car 388 at Branford, will likely soon be the last of its kind.

The last three cars on the list are true derelicts, and have never - to my knowledge - even been on live rail at Seashore. They've also already been considered deaccessed, in that they weren't considered part of the historic collection. This trio has long been stored together in the woods a bit away from the main museum campus, where they've served as storage rooms. One is Independent Subway 175, an R-1 subway car built by ACF in 1932. I'm unclear on its precise history, but supposedly this car was a diner in Texas for a while in the 1980s before coming to Seashore in 1995. It's a body and lacks trucks or underbody equipment. The other two cars are, I believe, mechanically complete, including Standard C60 trucks, WH 301 motors and PC-10 control. Boston Elevated car 0986 and car 0996 were both built in 1928 by Wason and are deck-roof all-steel cars from the "Main Line" elevated. They're identical to cars 0997 and 01000, also at Seashore, which are in far better condition. The photos below, taken by yours truly in 2007, show the New York car on the ground flanked by the two 0900s, though I'm not sure which of the two Boston cars is which.

The current "re-homing" document lists a few other cars I already had listed as being available for sale, including CTA 1, MBTA 3037, VEPCO 194, and Laconia Street Railway 17. Oh, and that battery-powered ice truck is still for sale.

But quite a few other cars, including N&P 9, Mobile 49, Ottawa 825, MBTA 3608, South Shore 32, and LIRR 4137, are not on the latest edition of the "re-homing" list. I'm not sure whether any have found new homes, whether all have been written off as hopeless, or whether any have actually been cut up yet. Any updated information on actual scrapping or dismantling of cars is appreciated.

Regardless, although a couple of cars on this new list were acquired for preservation, most were already effectively on the deaccession list - and in many cases are also duplicated by better examples in the Seashore collection. It's hard to argue that getting rid of these cars isn't a good decision for the museum: nothing on this new list approaches the "Berkshire Hills" or even VEPCO 194 in historic significance. That said, many of these cars are mechanically complete, so there may be opportunities for Seashore or other organizations to improve their spare parts supplies or obtain trucks, motors and control equipment for car bodies.

Conundrum on the Eastern Shore

Many thanks to Jack Rzepecki, who has sent along some photos that shed light on one (actually, two) of my longstanding mystery cars. The cars in question comprise a pair of Reading MU cars that for many years have been sitting on a siding on the edge of picturesque Chestertown, Maryland, on the state's Eastern Shore. These two appear to have been part of the Reading MU fleet that went to a motel in Wilkes-Barre, where the cars were divided by a wall in the center of the car into two motel rooms per car. I've seen details like the A/C units cut into the car sides, room numbers inserted into the headlight number boards, and gacky medium-green paint before, when I stumbled across car 805 from this collection back in 2000 (that car has since been cut up). I'm not certain, but I believe all of the MU cars that went to Wilkes-Barre were unrebuilt 800-series cars retired in the late 1970s and were never renumbered in the 9000 series.

The problem: Back in 2000, I was able to find car 805's number under the green paint on the side of the car. But the cars in Chestertown look to have been stripped or sandblasted at some point; no car numbers were visible on the exterior. Anyone happen to know where else on a Reading MU car a number might be found - perhaps over the window inside the cab or something? Any recommendations are appreciated! I wouldn't mind adding these cars to the PNAERC list, but I'd like to be able to ID them first.

Anyway, the more interesting of the two cars in Chestertown is the south car, parked between a caboose and the north MU car. I believe this is the only survivor of a small group of motor cars that the Reading ordered for use as motor-trailer pairs. Most of the RDG MU fleet consisted of two-motor cars, but there were a handful of these pairs. These cars had Commonwealth trucks, unlike the weird Taylor trucks on the rest of the MU fleet, and had four motors. They were also single-ended, not double-ended, since they were evidently designed to be semi-permanently coupled to a trailer. I think I had a copy of a RDG MU roster at one point but I haven't been able to locate it.

I believe the entire RDG MU fleet had WH AB control, with these XM37 "elevator" style controllers, and AMUE brakes.

The northern car, shown in the next five photos, is a typical two-motor, double-ended car from the 800-series.

Jack even took this great video as a walkaround of the cars!

So, to summarize, any information that might help us ID these two on a future visit is appreciated. And a huge thank you to Jack for the investigating!

Give Me an S, Give Me a T

Arguably the most significant - but almost certainly the most expensive - traction preservation project of recent years has been the Danbury Railway Museum's effort to save the two New York Central mainline electric locomotives marooned in Glenmont, New York. As shown in the above photo posted on Facebook by DRM today, they have conquered some truly remarkable hurdles and managed to save the two locomotives.

The two pieces of equipment in question are both very historically significant. The older of the two, New York Central 100, was the first "S-motor" ever built, emerging from Alco/GE in 1904. It was the prototype for one of the most successful of the early heavy electric locomotive designs and when it was retired in 1964, the cash-strapped NYC still found the wherewithal to preserve it. Unfortunately, it was given over to the nascent American Museum of Electricity in Niskayuna, near Schenectady, but the group ended up failing before it really got off the ground. Sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s the locomotive was transferred to the Mohawk & Hudson Chapter NRHS. It is one of three S-motors preserved.

The other piece is New York Central 278, the only surviving "T-motor" from the line. This boxcab, built in 1926 by GE, is a good showcase of the progress that had been made in the 20+ years since the S-motors were built. It remained in service into the late 1970s, and upon retirement ended up the the M&H Chapter mentioned above. Unfortunately for both locomotives, this group seemed to largely founder by the late 1980s, which is around when they shoved their collection - including 100, 278, and a few other pieces of non-electric equipment - into a siding on the grounds of a power plant in Glenmont. There the equipment sat moldering for some 35 years or so, as the NRHS chapter essentially dissolved and rail access to the siding was irretrievably cut.

Within the last year, the power plant site became the focus of a huge redevelopment effort, and the equipment had to go - intact or not. The other pieces of railroad equipment were cut up on-site, but DRM mounted a huge fundraising campaign to get the locomotives disassembled and moved. In the image above, L-R is half of 278's running gear; 100's running gear; 100's body; 278's body; and the other half of 278's running gear. What a project!

Until now the two locomotives have remained on the PNAERC roster listed under M&H Chapter ownership, since I make a practice of only changing ownership when a car is moved and not when it's sold on paper. But now that the locomotives have been extracted (even if they haven't yet quite made it all the way to Danbury), I've changed them to DRM ownership.

This acquisition elevates DRM into the same league as the Illinois Railway Museum and the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania in having a large and diverse collection of mainline electric equipment. They'll now have 10 pieces, including two very historic locomotives, a unique third rail-powered wrecker, and seven MU cars built between 1954 and 1975. Kudos to DRM for this notable achievement.