Austin Birney Located

Thanks to Steve Baron for alerting me to a Facebook post from yesterday that brought to light a car I wasn't aware existed. Austin Street Railway 63 is the last surviving (as far as I know!) car from that city's system. It's always fun to find a previously unknown survivor.

This car is a Birney, obviously enough. According to Harold Cox's book on Birneys, Austin 63-65 were acquired secondhand from Southwestern Gas & Electric, the street railway in Texarkana, Arkansas. The date of their acquisition is uncertain, but the Texarkana system shut down in 1934, so that's as good a guess as any. Unfortunately, the Texarkana numbers of the three secondhand cars are unknown; that city had a total of 10 Birneys, of which four were built by American in 1919, two were built by Cincinnati in 1921, two more were built by American in 1923, and then there were two Brill-built cars purchased secondhand from Boston.

So now we get to the fun part: sleuthing by process of elimination. First, I suspect this isn't a Boston car, mainly because those cars had an unusual single marker over the center window. Then, as luck would have it, we have an in-service photo here that shows this exact car, number 63. You can tell from the photo that it's got a Brill 79E1 truck, which - according to builder's order lists, at least - rules out the two Cincinnati-built cars. Remarkably, the two orders Texarkana placed with American also had different types of trucks. The four cars built in 1919 had Brill 78M1F trucks, which differ noticeably from the 79E1 (a photo of one of the 1919 Texarkana cars with 78M1F trucks is here).

So, there we have it. My tentative conclusion is that this is a 1923 car, built by American on order #1354, and that its Texarkana number was either 28 or 29. I can't be absolutely certain - either owner of the car could have swapped trucks - but I'm comfortable enough to put that information down for car 63 on the PNAERC roster. Either way, it's a moderately significant car as Birneys go, given that it's the last survivor from both the Texarkana and Austin systems. It looks well taken care of at the moment, and hopefully that continues. The PNAERC list overall now stands at 2,089 cars.