Four New Cars for Danbury

Ending 2025 on a positive note, the Danbury Railway Museum last week received a quartet of new cars for its growing collection of mainline electric equipment. Metro-North M3A-type cars 8002, 8003, 8106, and 8107 were brought onto the museum grounds in a late-night move. Thanks to Jordan Helzer for alerting me to this Facebook post, and to DRM and Marc Glucksman/River Rail Photo for the above picture from that post.

The four identical M3A cars were built in 1984-1985 by Budd and ran for their careers on the old New York Central electric division to Croton-on Hudson and White Plains. They're similar to the two M2 cars already at Danbury, which ran on the old New Haven, but unlike those cars they're "pure" 600V DC cars and do not have equipment for high-voltage AC operation. They also don't have pantographs. Most of the M3A class is still in regular service, but these were early retirees and were donated to DRM by Metro-North for preservation. The DRM traction collection has now grown to 15 pieces, quite an impressive collection and one that is exclusively mainline electric in nature, while the overall PNAERC roster is 2,086 cars.

Sheridan Streetcar Relocated

Sheridan Railway & Light 115, the only electric car from Wyoming to be preserved in its home state, has been relocated. According to this article on the Sheridan Media site, the car was moved in November from its recent location in a construction company yard along Higby Road to a new site southwest of Sheridan on the property of the Sheridan Community Land Trust's Big Goose Natural Area. There, the plan is to construct a shelter over the car and, presumably fix it up.

I'm really not sure how many electric railways ever operated in Wyoming, but I wouldn't be surprised if they could be numbered on one hand. I believe car 115 is one of only two Wyoming streetcars in existence, the other being an ex-Cheyenne Birney preserved at the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan. It was built by American in 1911 and it's pretty typical of single-truck deck-roof cars American built for a lot of cities. One unusual aspect is that it was built for single-end operation, with doors on only one side, however it was equipped with controllers at both ends and seems to have been operated in double-ended fashion as a necessity, at least initially.

And in unrelated news, thanks to Olin Anderson for passing along word that the Tacoma "turtleback" streetcar body that was located at the Ballard Terminal Railroad in Seattle has been demolished. I was never able to figure out this car's number, and between that and having virtually no solid information on it, it never made it onto the PNAERC list, though I did have on my "non-preserved cars" list. My best guess is that it was a 200-series cars identical to car 202, which is preserved in Arlington.

More Cars Deaccessioned by Seashore

(UPDATED - see bottom of post) It's been a little while since there have been any updates to Seashore's re-homing plans, but news has arrived of a few updates. Specifically, three more cars have been marked for disposition.

The first car, shown above in a 2020 photo, is MBTA 0997. This is a 1928 Wason-built rapid transit car built for the Main Line Elevated in Boston. It's been at Seashore since 1981. It's identical to car 01000, which is restored and operational, but 0997 hasn't run in a number of years and looks to be in rough - albeit complete - condition. It's been made available for re-homing. (Seashore actually has four cars from this series, but the other two, 0986 and 0996, are in semi-derelict condition back in the woods and have never been considered part of the historic collection.)

The next recent addition to the re-homing list is SEPTA 1018, a Philadelphia-Delaware Bridge car built by Brill in 1936. The above photo, taken way back in 2008, is the most recent image of this car I can find, making it unusually elusive. Identical car 1023 is also at the museum; a decade or so ago that car was painted in original blue and silver colors and was even made operational for a time, but car 1018 has remained in its end-of-service Broad Street Subway "dip" red livery and has never, to my knowledge, operated at Seashore. Cars 1018 and 1023 are two of six cars of this class still in existence, with the others including a pair on PATCO in Lindenwold (albeit modified for work service), a car stored at Fern Rock Yard in Philadelphia, and a car preserved at the Rockhill Trolley Museum

The last car added to the deaccession list is Atlantic City 299, shown here in 2016. Of the three cars, this one is the most historically significant but is also in the worst condition by far. It's a double-truck lightweight streetcar built by St. Louis in 1925 for Fort Wayne, Indiana, making it the last extant car from that city and (I believe) one of only six streetcars in existence from any city in the Hoosier State. It ran as Fort Wayne Street Railway 552 until it was sold to Atlantic City in 1946, where it was modernized a bit and renumbered 299. It was retired in 1955 and its body was sold to someone in Cross Keys, NJ, where it remained until Seashore got it in 1988 as part of their "last roundup" carbody collecting campaign. For a time, the car was stored in the Fairview barn, but recently it seems to have been moved outside and it has now been slated for scrapping due to the condition of the body.

UPDATE: Seashore has also confirmed that they've recently scrapped Ottawa Transportation Commission 825, a 1923 Ottawa-built car body described here that was in atrocious condition. There are two other Ottawa 800s preserved in Canada, albeit from the 1927 order, and between that and the truly skeletal nature of car 825, it's hard to say this is much of a loss (the above photo was taken back in 2016, before the car's roof caved in). I've removed car 825 from the PNAERC roster, leaving Seashore with 187 cars on the list and a grand total of 2,082 cars on the list in all.