Hershey Transit Car Dismantled

I believe this "news" is a year or two out of date, but a report came across my Internet browser that Hershey Transit 3 has been dismantled. I have, accordingly, taken it off the PNAERC list.

One of two Hershey Transit cars known (until now) to exist, car 3 was built as a semiconvertible combine by Brill in 1903 for the Hummeltown & Campbellstown Street Railway. It later went to Hershey, at some point got rebuilt as a line car (in-service photo here), and was retired in 1948. It has actually been in preservation for a long time: its body was acquired way back in 1965 by Trolley Valhalla, and later made its way to Buckingham Valley Trolley Association and Electric City Trolley Museum before the car went home to Hershey in 2006. The photo above shows it being moved into the old car barn in Hershey, where the local historical society was storing it (and is currently embarked on a major restoration of Hershey Transit 7, an all-steel suburban car).

Car 3's condition was extremely poor, so it was dismantled. Major components have been saved (thanks to Joel Salomon for the above photo of one of the car's ends), but if car 3 arises in the future, I would imagine it will be more of a replica than a restoration. The PNAERC list now stands at 2,086 cars total.

And in unrelated news, the Fox River Trolley Museum has acquired ex-Rio de Janeiro open car 1719 from the Middletown & Hummelstown. More information is here. This is a standard Rio double-trucker and actually spent about 20 years in South Elgin, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, when it was owned by Wendell Dillinger and stored at the museum. This change doesn't affect the PNAERC list, but it's interesting nonetheless.

Middletown Update

Thanks to Bill Wall for sending along photos and updates of the Middletown & Hummelstown collection being thinned. Four cars were scrapped over the last few days. The first two, shown below in photos taken a few months ago, were Chicago Transit Authority S371 and S372. These were CTA 4000s rebuilt in 1972 as work motors, sold in 1979 to the Buckingham Valley group, and then acquired by the M&H in the mid-1980s for parts.

These cars are certainly no big loss, especially given their condition, but it is kind of interesting how drastically the ranks of surviving 4000-series work motors have been thinned in recent years. From seven or eight examples a decade ago, there are now only two CTA S-series 4000-type work motors still in existence: S373 at IRM, stored in rough condition, and S374 at Northern Ohio, not accessioned and stored in poor condition.

The third car that has been cut up in Middletown is MBTA double-end PCC 3323, ex-Dallas Railway & Terminal 605. This car was at Branford from 1980 to 1992 and went to the M&H as part of a trade deal, but was in extremely poor condition thanks in part to salt damage from its years in Boston. The photos below were taken by Bill Wall. Trucks from one of the work motor 4000s are visible next to the PCC.

There are now 11 Dallas double-end PCCs on the list, or 10 if you discount the car in Windber that is due to be scrapped anytime. All but one of those is at Seashore.

And the final car, other than a Pullman heavyweight car that is supposedly getting cut up this week, is Philadelphia snow sweeper C121, shown below in photos by Bill Wall.

Parts from this car are being salvaged for use at other trolley museums. (Edit: C121 isn't being fully dismantled until Tuesday, but enough of it was gone by Monday evening to justify taking it off the list.) I was never really clear on the history of C121; my records suggest it was retired in 1975, but I don't know how it got to the M&H, which didn't really exist until the mid-1980s. Anyway, as with the CTA 4000s and the PCC, this is not a big loss from a perspective of historical significance. There are still eight of these big Philly sweepers in existence, a couple of which are in very poor shape but several of which are very nicely preserved.

When Wendell Dillinger died in 2023, there were 24 cars on the PNAERC list under M&H ownership. That number is now down to 15. Besides eight Lackawanna MU cars, the fleet now consists of four Philadelphia cars (a PCC, two ex-CTA "spam cans," and a Red Arrow 80-series car); two Brooklyn cars (a convertible and a box motor); and the ex-Kansas City steeplecab. The PNAERC list in its entirety now stands at 2,087 cars.