Milwaukee parlor car off the list

Thanks to Sean Bowen of the East Troy Electric Railroad for relating the news that Milwaukee Street Railway 200 has collapsed. It was recently deaccessed by that organization because its condition had deteriorated beyond the point of reasonable salvation, and its location made it essentially impossible to retrieve intact. The car has been removed from the PNAERC list.

Car 200 was built in the company shops in 1892 as a single-truck parlor car. It was rebuilt in 1907 for use as a hospital car, and in 1919 it was rebuilt again for use as a tool car. It was retired in 1931. Its body was acquired in 1986 by The Wisconsin Electric Railway Historical Society and moved to East Troy, where a few years later ownership was assumed by ETER. For many years the car sat in the barn at East Troy. In 2009, during a major collection purge that saw ETER dispose of several PCC streetcars and 'L' cars as well as an interurban car body, car 200 left East Troy (pictured above). It was moved to Spring Green, where an off-site group of volunteers planned to rebuild it with a steel frame.

This effort didn't get very far, though it does appear that they did some disassembly and installed that steel frame. By the late 2010s, the off-site group had essentially melted away and for a time the car's condition and whereabouts were something of a mystery. But it turned up again in 2020, by which time it looked like the photo above. As I mentioned, it's been in a location that made retrieval very difficult, so ETER wasn't able to get it out of Spring Green and bring it back to East Troy. With the loss of car 200, the ETER collection stands at 24 cars and the overall PNAERC list includes a total of 2,083 cars.