Updates from Warehouse Point

Thanks to Wesley Paulson for reaching out to Bill Wall, and thanks especially to Bill for writing with a series of updates from the Connecticut Trolley Museum, aka Warehouse Point. Bill even sent along a series of photos taken just a couple of weeks ago at CTM. All photos below are taken by Bill Wall except where noted.

First, the good news: as shown above, Connecticut Company box motor 2023 has not been scrapped, as we had previously thought. I got it mixed up with ConnCo 2022, a different box motor which was, in fact, scrapped by CTM a few years back. While 2023 is not in terrific shape, it is very much intact. It's been added back onto the list following a brief absence.

Another mystery solved is York Utilities 72, a 1919 Birney built for the Laconia Street Railway and later sold to York Utilities in Sanford, Maine. This is a body that has been at CTM since 1984, and as seen above, it's still there - it's stored on the ground under a tarp, off in the woods. Its condition has been updated from "unknown" to "stored inoperable."

From there, the news gets less sunny. First, Bill confirms that Connecticut Company 1550 was scrapped by CTM some time back. It's pictured above in a photo that I took back in 2007. This was a typical double-truck suburban car of the type so common on ConnCo. It was built by Osgood-Bradley in 1911 and, unlike nearly all the surviving ConnCo cars, went to Connecticut Railway & Lighting when the system split up in 1936. It was retired the next year and its body came to CTM in 1977.

This 2007 photo shows Bristol Traction 43, a double-truck lightweight safety car built by Wason in 1927 for the Fitchburg & Leominster Street Railway. I don't have any recent views of this car, but I don't think it's a stretch to assume that its condition did not improve over the 15 years after this photo was taken. Bill confirms that this car was dismantled about two years ago. It was the last F&L car in a museum, though there's an F&L body surviving as a house in central Massachusetts. In terms of design, there's a pretty similar Wason lightweight preserved intact at Seashore in the form of York Utilities 88.

Next up is Manchester Street Railway 94, shown above in a photo taken in 2007. Another body, this single-truck, railroad-roof streetcar was built by Wason in 1905. The car showed up at CTM in 1987.

And here it is today, or what little is left of it. Car 94 has completely collapsed, and probably did so closer to 2007 than to today. It's been taken off the list, of course.

And then finally we have Bristol Traction 34, shown above. This is a single-truck arch-roof convertible of pretty unusual design; by the time Wason built it for the Bristol & Plainville in 1917, not too many companies were ordering full convertibles like this. It was also built with an unusual Brill Radiax E1 truck, making it one of just two cars on the PNAERC list that once had that type (bet you can't guess the other one). Finally, according to my notes it arrived at CTM way back in 1948, astonishingly, which certainly makes it one of the very earliest car bodies acquired by a trolley museum anywhere - most trolley museums hadn't even been founded in 1948. But in recent decades it just sat outside next to the CTM shop, slowly becoming more derelict. It's hard to decide when this frog is fully boiled, so to speak, but given the photo above, I think it's safe to consider car 34 to be effectively gone as an intact car. So, I've taken it off the list.

With these changes, the CTM roster is down from three Bristol cars to just one, and down from 47 cars to 43 cars total in the collection. When you add in the two interurban cars, two Chicago 'L' cars, and the locomotive that the museum has also deaccessed within the last five years, CTM has culled its collection by more than 20%.

On an unrelated note, Wesley was able to track down one more car from the "mystery cars" list that, fortunately, is still around. Los Angeles Railway 1030, a Birney body built in 1920 by St. Louis, had disappeared about 10 years ago. It has now turned up, stored under a tarp in a bus lot in Downey, California. I'm not exactly certain who owns it, but it may still be the "Angeleno Heights Trolley Line" group that owned the car a decade ago. The car's status has been updated from "unknown" to "stored inoperable."