The San Diego Heritage Fleet Contracts

Thanks to Chris Baldwin for sending along updates regarding the heritage fleet in San Diego, which is run by the transit agency but goes by the moniker San Diego Vintage Trolley. SDVT has recently scrapped two of the cars in their collection, so their historic fleet now numbers four.

The first car scrapped, shown above, was San Francisco Municipal Railway 1123. It was built by St. Louis in 1946 as St. Louis Public Service 1728; went to Muni in 1957; and was sold to Tahoe Valley Lines in 1994, where it sat in dead storage in 2005. When San Diego started up their heritage trolley effort in 2005, the first two PCCs they acquired were 1122, which was renumbered 529 (this car was restored and put into service in 2011), and this one. Car 1123 was going to become SDVT 530 (you can see that number over its headlight in the above Peter Ehrlich photo from 2009), but sometime in the early 2010s this plan was shelved and ex-Newark PCC 10 was rebuilt as 530 instead. This car had been stored under a tarp for years.

After SDVT acquired cars 1122 and 1123 in 2005, they picked up Muni 1170 in 2006 (this car was briefly given the number 531, but was then cosmetically restored with the number 539 and given to a nearby museum in 2013). Their next acquisition, shown above in a 2016 photo, was SEPTA PCC 2186, built by St. Louis in 1948. This car went to the Museum of Transportation in Missouri in 1994 and was sold to SDVT in 2009. It was initially given the number 532, then a couple of years later it was reassigned as 531. It was stripped down to a shell in the early 2010s, but this rebuild was never finished; Chris reports that the project was cancelled and the money instead used to refurbish LRV 1001. This car, too, has been scrapped. This leaves only the two operational cars, 529 and 530, and SEPTA 2785, acquired directly from SEPTA in 2010 and supposedly assigned the number 533.

The PNAERC roster has been updated to remove cars 1123/530 and 2186/532/531. I've also changed the operating fleet of two PCCs and an LRV from "operated often" to "operated occasionally." Chris relates that the PCCs, at least, are rarely if ever run these days, so it may be that "stored operable" would be more accurate.

The PNAERC list currently stands at 2,085 cars in total.