SEPTA Spam Cans to South Elgin

A post today on Facebook revealed that SEPTA 476 and 477, the pair of ex-Chicago Transit Authority 6000-series 'L' cars at the Middletown & Hummelstown, have left the M&H and are headed to the Fox River Trolley Museum.

CTA 6000s are not exactly an endangered species. Besides this set, another seven married pairs (plus half of another pair) are known to exist, and that's not counting another five pairs in Windber that may have already been scrapped. There are also another nine single-unit variants still around, three of which are at FRTM. But cars 476-477 are slightly interesting. Built by St. Louis Car Company in 1951 as CTA 6069-6070, they are the oldest 6000s still in existence, at least going by car number. They're part of the first 200 cars of this type ordered by the CTA - a subtype nicknamed "flat-door" cars for their most obvious distinguishing feature - so these cars weren't built using components from scrapped PCC streetcars like the later 6000s were.

This pair was part of a group of flat-door 6000s sold in 1987 to SEPTA, which was experiencing a critical car shortage on the ex-Red Arrow third-rail line to Norristown due to wrecks and reliability problems with the 1920s- and 1930s-vintage Strafford cars and Bullet cars. Though far from ideal for service on the Norristown line, the 6000s saw use until the new N-1 cars were delivered in the early 1990s. This pair was bought by the M&H in 1994, apparently with the idea of scrapping the bodies and placing the trucks under the SEPTA PCC streetcars that arrived at the same time as a way of standard-gauging them, but that never happened. Cars 476 and 477 sat in the yard in Middletown, usually separated from each other, for a bit over 30 years.

For FRTM, this is a bit of an unexpected acquisition. Nine years ago they got rid of CTA 6101-6102, a pair from this same order that had been backdated by the CTA prior to retirement. The museum has also been focusing more on extending its barn than on growing its collection; they've scrapped or sold five cars in the last five or six years, by my count, and I believe 476-477 are the first electric cars they've acquired since the Trolleyville dispersal back in 2010. Their roster on PNAERC now stands at 20 cars, with "spam cans" comprising a full 25% of the total. FRTM now joins IRM, Seashore, Craggy Mountain Line, and the CTA itself in the ranks of married-pair 6000 owners.

For its part, the M&H is continuing to pare down its traction collection. Other than Lackawanna MU cars, and the Rio open car they plan to keep that isn't on the PNAERC roster, they're now down to just five pieces: Red Arrow 77, supposedly intended to stay in Middletown; SEPTA 2104; KCPS 2; BRT 4550; and SBK 9425.