Mexico City LRV Added to List

Many thanks to Jacob Wiczkowski, who emailed me to point out that a new car was added last year to the collection of the Museo de Transportes Electricos, or Museum of Electric Transportation, in Mexico City.

SDTE car 018 is a light rail vehicle, the first to be preserved in Mexico as far as I know. It was built for the Xochimilco light rail line, which was built in the mid-1980s as an upgrade of the city's last streetcar line. When the streetcar line was closed for upgrading in 1984, the plan was to rebuild PCC cars for use on the new line, but virtually all the PCCs were destroyed when the shop collapsed in the 1985 earthquake. SDTE had new LRVs built using the old PCC trucks and equipment, but they proved unreliable, so a dozen all-new LRVs were built in 1990-1991 by Mexican car builder Concarril (today part of Bombardier). Car 018 is part of this series, and not only is it the first car on the PNAERC list built by Concarril, but I believe it's the first car on the list built by an actual Mexican car builder. The only other cars on the list built in Mexico were homebuilt by street railway companies.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any mechanical or electrical information at all about the SDTE Concarril cars - even basics like their wheel arrangement (which I assume, but don't know, to be B-2-B) are uncertain. Any specifications on these cars would be greatly appreciated! SDTE 018 is the 15th LRV on the PNAERC list, the sixth unique type of LRV on the list, and the 2,087th car on the list as it stands now.

A Plus and a Minus

Today, I've got a new car on the list and another piece of equipment taken off. First, the good news: Northeast Rail Heritage Inc., the enigmatic owner of an Amtrak AEM7 as described here, now has a second piece of equipment on the list. SEPTA 238, pictured above, is the last Silverliner III MU car built in 1967 for the Pennsylvania Railroad. This car was retired in 2012 but remained on SEPTA property until 2023, when it was shipped off to a scrapper in Morrisville, PA, along the Delaware River. It never quite made it, though, and it's been sitting on a siding in Morrisville a short distance from its destination for a couple of years. A few months ago, NERHI went after it and they were successful in obtaining the car from the scrapyard. They haven't moved it - and I'm not sure where they even want to move it to, since they don't appear to have a physical site of their own, either owned or rented - but they do claim to own it, so I've added it to the PNAERC list. The group wants to someday restore it to "Yellowbird" livery it wore in the late 1980s, when it was assigned to Philadelphia Airport service.

And in less fortunate, but certainly not unexpected, news, Ferrocarril General Urquiza steeplecab 951 (shown above) has been removed from the list. This locomotive was built by Baldwin-Westinghouse in 1920 for Central Limones, but never went to that operation; stored by B-W for a few years, it ended up being sold to the Pacific Electric in 1923 as their number 1591. It went to Argentina in 1951 and ran on FGU for a number of years, acquiring trucks and electric equipment off ex-PE "Elevens" along the way. It ended up as part of the Ferroclub Argentino museum collection in Buenos Aires, but sometime around 2022 it found itself on an isolated siding and illegal scrappers cut up its trucks. The museum stopped the scrapping, but the locomotive's body remained dumped on that site, as shown above. The remains were cut up at an uncertain later date. This leaves four pieces of equipment on the list belonging to Ferroclub, of which three are ex-PE locomotives.