Open Car Off the List

Thanks to Murphy Jenkins of the Fort Smith Trolley Museum for confirming that Veracruz single-truck open car 6, which had been listed as being in a state of disassembly, has been permanently disassembled and can be considered to be gone. Components from the car are going into identical car 9, which is expected to be made operational (I believe converted to double-end operation) at FSTM. I would guess that parts will also make it into other restoration projects at FSTM, which is a bit unusual in that nearly all of their (now nine-car) collection is single-truckers.

Car 6 was built in 1908 by Brill and retired in the mid-1960s, after which it spent a few decades under the ownership of the Texas Transportation Museum, where I believe its condition declined significantly before it went to FSTM in the mid-1990s. There are now three Veracruz single-truck open cars remaining: besides car 9, an ex-Trolleyville car acquired by FSTM in 2009, there's "car 001" (formerly car 8) on display under a very nice pavilion in its home city and car 19, another ex-Trolleyville resident which is in regular operation at the Illinois Railway Museum. Both of the other two cars were backdated by re-adding original-style deck roofs, so car 9 is the only one of the trio preserved in its later arch-roof guise.