Three More Off the List

Many thanks to Wesley Paulson, who continues to track down cars on the "status unknown" list and send me updated information. Of the latest batch, one car, Lackawanna 4322, is intact and undergoing restoration work in the Catskill Mountain Railroad's yard in Phoenicia, New York. But his other two updates are removals.

Lackawanna 3565, a standard 1930 Pullman-built motor car shown above in a 2015 photo, had been stored derelict on the St. Louis Iron Mountain & Southern for years and was formally deaccessed by the tourist railroad back in 2022. At some point later that year or in 2023 the car was indeed cut up. It's been removed from the list.

The second car to be removed is Worcester Consolidated Railway 038, a cab-on-flat locomotive homebuilt by the Worcester system in 1912. This car has always been on the Seashore Trolley Museum's roster - it was acquired by that museum way back in 1946 - but was listed as "disassembled," so I don't have any photos of it. I had increasingly suspected that Seashore may have written it off, and correspondence from their Executive Director, Katie Orlando, confirms that this is the case. This was the last Worcester Consolidated Railway car preserved in the US, though there are two arch-roof cars from the system known to still exist in Brazil. I've taken 038 off the list, which reduces the number of Seashore cars on the PNAERC list to 190.

The third car to be removed, shown above, is ConnCo box motor 2023. Our own webmaster, Jeff Hakner, confirms that this car was demolished by the Connecticut Trolley Museum at some point within the past few years. Car 2023 was homebuilt by ConnCo in 1910 and at the ends of its career was fitted with a diesel generator so that it could operate as a switcher after the wires came down. I recall seeing it in 2007 and taking the above photo, but the car may have been disposed of not long after that - I can't find any images more recent. With this, the CTM roster on PNAERC is now at 46 cars and the total number of cars on the list is 2,091.

As an aside, speaking of Worcester 038, "disassembled" cars on the PNAERC list are an odd little subset. I have a policy that any electric car that's at a museum goes on the list, even if the museum doesn't consider it accessioned, because of how common it is for something that's deaccessioned to hang around for a long time, and sometimes become "re-accessioned." And as for whether a car is "at" a museum, I generally rely on the museum itself to make that call. This means that there's a handful of cars on the list that you'll be hard pressed to recognize, or in some cases track down at all. With the loss of 038, I think the only car on the list that's "completely" disassembled may be Staten Island Midland 157, owned by Branford but stored off-site in an indeterminate number of pieces. There's also Veracruz 6 in Fort Smith; I'm honestly not sure how intact this car is, only that it's in some state of disassembly. There are a few cars that have been mostly reduced to a flat car, including Los Angeles Railway 59 at Travel Town, Rochester 0243 at the New York Museum of Transportation, and St. Louis Public Service 850 at the National Museum of Transportation, which is notable in that its disassembly occurred quite rapidly and unexpectedly due to a tunnel lining collapse at the museum decades ago. Finally, there are a couple of cars like Chicago Surface Lines 1467 at IRM and Des Moines 512 at Boone that have been reduced to a skeletal framework, but are at least generally recognizable as electric cars. How many of these cars will be reassembled again? Your guess is as good as mine.