Three of a Kind

Thanks to Jacob Wiczkowski for alerting me to this post from the Western Railway Museum a few days ago. Their third BART cars has arrived! Following the arrival of an "A2" car in August and a "B2" car in September, they've now acquired "C1" car number 329. This car has led a less eventful existence than the other two, never having been renumbered or rebuilt, and is the only one of the trio to retain its as-built DC motors. It was built by Alstom in 1987 as a flat-end motor car, a way for BART to adopt a fleet more adaptable to changing needs for train lengths when compared with the original fleet, which consisted entirely of blind motors and "end cars" that couldn't easily be run mid-train.

This likely completes BART's presence on the PNAERC roster, at least for a while. I don't believe the system has retained any of its own first-generation cars for historic purposes, and certainly none of the giant 5'6"-gauge cars have gone to any other museums. With this arrival, WRM has a total of 69 cars on the PNAERC list, with 2,088 cars on the list in all.

A Streetcar from the Magnolia State

Thanks to Bill Wall for alerting me to this article from late August that describes an exciting development. The last (known) surviving Vicksburg, Mississippi, streetcar, which was discovered four years ago as reported right here, has now officially been preserved at a museum. The car body has been restored, as shown above, and moved to The Old Depot Museum, which is the local history museum and happens to be located in the old railroad depot.

Kudos to the folks in Vicksburg who turned this from just another "streetcar body found in a house and then shoved into storage somewhere" into a rather attractive display piece. Unfortunately, I still don't know anything about the car! I haven't managed to dig up any Vicksburg rosters. They apparently numbered their cars by tens, so builder records suggest that cars 75, 105, 115, 125, and 135 were all built by St. Louis Car Company between 1913 and 1916. Cars 145, 155, 165, and 175 were Birneys bought secondhand, and this car definitely isn't a Birney, so my guess is that it's in the 75-135 series. But I don't know what happened to numbers 85 and 95, so I can't even say with confidence that this is a SLCC product.

Nevertheless, even with as little information as I have, the car is certainly preserved and displayed, so I should add it to the PNAERC list. It's been added and is now the only car on the list to hail from the Magnolia State (though this car is preserved in Mississippi, it's from over the border in Memphis). If anyone happens upon a photo, roster, or any other information that might shed some light on the single-truck pre-Birney cars used in Vicksburg, please drop me a line.

And with that, I think I'm down to just four states that aren't represented by cars preserved on the list: Alaska, Hawaii, New Mexico, and South Dakota. Don't confuse that with states where cars are preserved; I mean that I don't think there are any cars on the list that ran in those states in regular service. I'd say 46 out of 50 ain't bad. As for states where cars are currently preserved, I think we're at 47/50, missing only Hawaii, New Mexico, and Vermont.