South Shore 32 Scrapped

In a post today on the Ahead of the Torch Facebook group, it was confirmed that Seashore has scrapped South Shore interurban car 32. This is no great loss; of the 40 coaches operated by the CSS&SB between the 1920s and the early 1980s, no fewer than 27 - a full two-thirds - are still in existence, including "flanking" cars 30, 31, 33, and 34. This particular car was in particularly bad condition because its frame was damaged during transportation to Maine. It was deaccessioned by Seashore in 2022 but found no takers; Seashore coordinated with East Troy volunteers to allow that museum to harvest some parts off the car this spring. The Seashore collection, at least on the PNAERC roster, is now down to 185 cars, and the overall roster stands at 2,088 pieces.

Postcard from Canada

I owe a big thank you to our official researcher, Wesley Paulson, who just returned from a visit to the Halton County Radial Railway in Canada and sent several updates and photos to help fill out and update the PNAERC list.

Wesley was able to nab some photos of cars at HCRY that are pictured on the PNAERC roster, but whose images are either poor or outdated. Above is TTC C1, a 1911 derrick, which has deftly evaded most photographers visiting the museum. The only photo I had of this car dated to (I think?) the 1990s.

This single-truck rail grinder, TTC RT7, was rebuilt from a Toronto Civic Railway streetcar. I didn't have any decent photos at all of this car, though that's understandable given that it's not on public display.

Every museum has one or two cars that were disassembled, either in part or in full, for a restoration project that then stalled. TTC 1704, shown here, is awaiting a future restart of a major rebuilding. This car is identical to TTC 1706 at Branford.

Wesley also got some mechanical information I was missing. And above is an "oops," though it's not immediately obvious. TTC 4089 is part of the TTC's historic fleet, all of which are currently stored at HCRY while their carbarn is rebuilt. It's a standard CLRV built in 1979. The "oops" is that until now, it's been listed on the PNAERC list not as 4089 but as 4081. That's been corrected now, though.

Another update was that TTC 4024, a CLRV also built in 1979 and pictured above in 2022, was scrapped last year. This is no particular loss; it was acquired from TTC in 2020 as a parts source. It's now been removed from the PNAERC list, leaving an even dozen CLRVs on the list in addition to two articulated ALRVs.

Finally, speaking of ALRVs, TTC 4207 is part of the TTC historic fleet that's now at HCRY, but until now I hadn't noted it as being at Halton County. That's now been corrected. Thanks again to Wesley for all this helpful information!

Long Island MP54 Scrapped

News comes from Facebook today that Long Island Rail Road 4137, shown above in 2016, has been scrapped at the Seashore Trolley Museum. A lot of equipment was salvaged from the car to benefit cars at other museums, including seats and electrical parts that will go to New Haven "Washboard" MU combines preserved in Danbury.

Photo posted 5/28/2026 on Ahead of the Torch

Car 4137 was an MP-54A1 third-rail commuter coach built by AC&F in 1930 as LIRR 1137. It was retired in 1972 and sold to Seashore, so it's been in Kennebunkport for longer than it was in service. The car never ran at Seashore, though, and over the past decade or two its condition had deteriorated markedly. It was offered to other organizations for preservation back in 2022 but found no takers.

This reduces the number of LIRR cars on the PNAERC list to four, but of those, one is a "tunneled" static display piece and a second has been deaccessioned by its owner. The only LIRR MP-54 that seems to be in solid condition is car 1149, on display at the fairgrounds in Syracuse. (There's also unusual double-deck trailer 200, preserved on Long Island.) MP-54s have not fared well in preservation; they seem particularly prone to rusting out, and their size and unsuitability for operation has meant they've rarely found homes except as "stripped" coaches on tourist railroads. There are 12 MP-54s on the PNAERC list when ex-PRR examples are included, but besides the three LIRR examples listed above, three are hulks due to be scrapped, five have been stripped of their electrical equipment and turned into tourist railroad coaches, and the remaining car is stored outdoors in rough shape.

Seashore's collection on the PNAERC list is now 186 pieces, and there are 2,090 cars on the list in total.

Even More 'L' Cars

We'll forgive you if you're getting a bit of 'L' car fatigue, but I've been notified that another pair of Chicago Transit Authority rapid transit cars has been preserved. This time it's CTA 2401 and 2402, the first pair of 2400-series cars built by Boeing-Vertol in 1976. They're shown above in an October 1976 photo from here. Unfortunately, I can't find any recent photos of them, nor is there any information about them online other than a statement on the CTA's heritage fleet page about having an eight-car train of 2400s. These cars are generally identical to the other six 2400s kept by the CTA for preservation except that they were part of a subset of these cars that were rebuilt in 1995 for use pulling work equipment such as flat cars. Their grids and control groups were beefed up, they had sockets added for jumpers, and they acquired red-and-white strips in place of the more typical red/white/blue stripes, but those were about the only modifications. Of the 10 cars of this type on the PNAERC roster, these are the only two that received work-motor modifications. This increases the CTA historic fleet to 18 cars: eight 2400s, four 2200s, four 6000s, and two 4000s.

The IRM 'L' Car Fleet Grows

A pair of new - and in this case, "new" means "42-year-old" - rapid transit cars arrived at the Illinois Railway Museum on Friday, fresh from the Chicago Transit Authority. CTA cars 2871 and 2872, a married-pair set, are 2600-series cars built in 1984 by Budd. This was one of the last orders for railway cars built by Budd, and in fact the last cars of this order were also the last rapid transit cars ever completed by the Philadelphia car builder. This particular pair went into service a couple of years before that and were just retired, making them the newest CTA cars in preservation. Many cars of this series are still in service, and with deliveries of new 7000-series cars having slowed to a trickle, some of the remaining 2600s may be in revenue service for a while yet.

With these new arrivals, the IRM collection listed on PNAERC has grown to 147 cars - second only to Seashore in quantity - of which 42 are rapid transit cars. Cars 2871-2872 are the first electric cars acquired by IRM in six and a half years, which I believe is the longest such "drought" in the museum's history. On average, IRM has acquired two electric cars per year, every year, for its entire 73-years history. (And to be fair, the museum has been adding railroad and rubber-tired equipment to its fleet at a steady clip during these last few years.) The PNAERC list overall now stands at 2,089 pieces.

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-5* 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 (correction: thanks to Bill Wall, who reminds me that just recently they received the Rio open car that had been owned by Wendell Dillinger!). 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.

*Thanks to Bill Wulfert for the correction

Trenton Sweeper Moves

Thanks to Bill Wall and Wesley Paulson for sending me updates of recent news on the last surviving piece of equipment from the Trenton & Mercer County, New Jersey Transit 5246, a snow sweeper built by Russell in 1921.

Today, the sweeper was moved from its recent storage location at the Bloomfield NJT light rail shops to Titusville, NJ (above photo by Bill Wall). There, its new owner, Liberty Historic Railway, has an indoor storage location arranged for it (I'm not clear on why the sweeper has been boat-wrapped - I guess extra insurance?). This piece of equipment has had quite the tumultuous couple of decades. I'm not sure when it was last used by NJT, or when it last ran, but in 2011 it was moved from the Newark subway system to the Baltimore Streetcar Museum for storage. It remained there until 2020, when it went back to NJT and was stored outside at the Bloomfield facility. As far as I know, it's been owned by the North Jersey Electric Railway Historical Society during this period, but it is now owned by LHR. As the last surviving T&MC piece of equipment, it's quite historically significant.

Its condition is, shall we say, unusual. That's because it's really "a tale of two sweepers" in a single car body. The photos above and below were posted a week ago by NJERHS. The first two photos show one end of 5246, looking like it's almost ready to "put the pole up and go," as they say...

...and then there's the other end of the sweeper, where the roof has failed and partially caved in, among other structural issues. We've all seen cars where a leak in one spot caused localized deterioration, but I don't think I've ever seen quite such a night-and-day difference between two ends of the same car as here. I assume that half of it was tarped and half wasn't, or maybe one end was under a downspout off a building or something. Anyway, LHR has their work cut out for them. That group is back up to two cars on the PNAERC list, while NJT itself is down to one car, PSCT 28 - but I'm actually not certain who owns that car, and it's not on NJT property, it's a "gate guardian" at the Kinki-Sharyo plant in Piscataway.

Seashore Re-Homing List Update

The latest Seashore Trolley Museum "re-homing list" update has dropped, and it adds a handful of cars to the various pieces still hanging out on the list from previous editions of the list.

The most significant addition to the list is Harrisburg Railways 811, shown above in a 2016 photo. One of two Harrisburg streetcars in existence, this double-truck, arch-roof semi-convertible was built by Brill in 1918. It's of generally similar design to the other extant Harrisburg car, 1914-vintage car 710, but has steel sides. As can be seen, it also has some serious structural issues. It's the only car of its series in existence, so it's technically unique, but it's not remarkably historic.

Another addition to the re-homing list is Cleveland Transit System 113, a "Bluebird" PCC rapid transit car built in 1958 by St. Louis. This car hasn't been included in Seashore's published re-homing lists, but it was deaccessioned a couple of years ago and has been listed on PNAERC as "available for sale" since early 2024. This car is a Trolleyville alumnus, and came to Seashore in 2010 as part of that museum's dissolution. It's one of three single-unit "Bluebirds" in existence, with the other two - car 109, restored and operational, and car 112, which is probably in similar condition to 113 - both at Northern Ohio.

The other new car on the list is MBTA 0579, which isn't on the PNAERC roster. It's a flat car from the Boston 'L' system and is fitted with a small cab for use as a shove platform, but as far as I can tell, it's not electrified. The photo above is from the museum's re-homing document.

There are also quite a few cars on the latest re-homing document that have been carried over from previous editions. Boston Elevated Railway "Cambridge-Dorchester" subway cars 0709, 0749, 0753, and 0754; "main line elevated" cars 0986 and 0996; work motor 0575; and flat car 0503 (not on PNAERC), as well as New York subway car 175 were all added to the list in November 2023. Chicago Transit Authority 1 was added in October 2023, Laconia Street Railway 17 was added in March 2023, and Boston PCC 3037 has been on the list since all the way back in June 2020.

There are a lot of cars that were on previous editions of the re-homing list but are not on the current version, so it's unclear how many might still be available to other museums and how many are now slated for scrapping. Three cars added to the re-homing list in December 2025 are missing, namely MBTA 0997, SEPTA 1018, and Atlantic City 299, as is Staten Island Rapid Transit 366, added to the list in November 2023 alongside the Boston 0700s. Virginia Electric Power 194, Mobile 49, and Boston 3608 were added to the list in March 2023. South Shore 32 and Long Island Rail Road 4137, both added back in July 2022, as well as Boston PCC 3328, added to the re-homing list in 2020, have recently been stripped for parts and are known to be on the short list to be scrapped soon. Other assorted Boston PCCs listed as available back in 2020, including cars 3069, 3174, 3327, 3331, 3338, and 3344, are missing from the latest version of the list.

Finally, a couple of cars that were never included in published "re-homing" lists are slated to leave Kennebunkport. These include Roanoke "Master Unit" 51, transferred to the Roanoke NRHS chapter in 2024 but not yet moved, and SEPTA "Bullet" car 208, which is being stripped for parts prior to scrapping.

Atlanta Streetcar in Limbo

Thanks to Wesley Paulson for pointing me to a Facebook post that contained some unexpected news about Georgia Railway & Power 269: the car has left the Southeastern Railway Museum in Duluth, its home for some 24 years.

Car 269 was built by Cincinnati in 1921 and was used on the line to Duluth, making it the only one of the handful of surviving Atlanta streetcars able to make that claim. As the above photo shows, it's in rough shape and has an end missing, but it's been kept tarped at SERM. However, the car appears to have been sold to a developer called SoDo Atlanta LLC (SoDo = South Downtown). SoDo has removed nearly all the remaining wood from the car, sand-blasted the steel, and moved it into a building at 82 Peachtree Street in the city.

The video on their site says "We imagine the car will become a small restaurant, bar, or unique hospitality experience in the near future." That could go either way; the car could be cosmetically restored as a centerpiece display, like this car or like one of the spaghetti restaurant cars. Or it could end up like this. For the moment, I've updated the car's ownership, but it's still on the PNAERC list. SERM is down to two cars on the list, a MARTA rapid transit car they acquired in 2022 and a second Atlanta streetcar body, Georgia Power 636.

"Almond Joy" Car Arrives in Kingston

The Trolley Museum of New York announced today on their Facebook page that SEPTA 618, one of two preserved "Almond Joy" cars from the Market-Frankford Elevated in Philadelphia, has arrived at the TMNY site in Kingston. The car has been listed under TMNY ownership since May 2025, which is when it departed its former home at the Seashore Trolley Museum in Maine, but it had been kept at an intermediate storage facility for the last 10 months before it landed at its new home. Car 618 is a single-unit (as opposed to part of married pair) car built by Budd in 1960.

I'm a little hazy on the end of its career, but I believe it was one of a handful of these cars kept around for work service after the remainder of the Budd fleet was retired in 1999. Regardless, in 2002 the car went to Seashore, where it was joined by a pair of standard-gauge ex-PATH "K car" trucks that had been placed under a different "Almond Joy" car that had seen use on the standard-gauge Norristown high-speed line from 1989 to 1992. Those trucks had been set aside upon retirement for exactly this purpose, i.e., making an "Almond Joy" car usable at a standard-gauge trolley museum. Car 618 was never placed on those trucks, though, and spent its time at Seashore on a truck trailer. It was conveyed to TMNY in January 2024. Sometime soon, it will be put on standard-gauge trucks for the first time at TMNY.

EDIT: Many thanks to Mark Wolodarsky of TMNY, who sent along this account of car 618's history: The car was retired in early 1999, and was prepped for preservation by the shops at Bridge Street. It was moved to 69th Street Yard in March 1999 where it was loaded onto the dolly that it remains on. It was then moved to the SEPTA Midvale Bus garage for storage, where it remained until being moved to Seashore in 2002. We hope to put it onto its trucks this year. We are raising funds for the cost of a crane rental.

Open car removed from list

I found out this past weekend from a Liberty Historic Railway volunteer that Five Mile Beach Electric 20, a double-truck open car body that had been stored for many years in a warehouse in Wildwood, New Jersey, is no more. I knew the car had been acquired in 2019 by LHR and had been shipped to Gomaco in Iowa for evaluation, but hadn't heard anything more. As it turns out, the car's condition was bad enough that it partially collapsed en route, and the remains were dismantled. The car has been removed from the PNAERC list, leaving just a single car owned by LHR and a total of 2,085 cars on the list overall.

Meet Me in Perris

Someone I know recently visited the Southern California Railway Museum in Perris, and I persuaded them to take photos of some of the bodies stored at the museum there. There are a few cars on the PNAERC list with no photos, including several at SCRM, and I'm hoping that our readers can help me identify some of the cars that are kept there in storage. I'm grateful for any information on the below cars!

To the left is Fresno Traction 51, which is pretty hard to mistake for anything else, but in the middle here is an unidentified Birney that we'll call "Birney #1." My guess is that it's one of two Los Angeles Railway Birneys preserved at the museum, 1003 and 9007, but does anyone know which?

Here's a wider shot that shows the aforementioned Birney #1 on the left. On the right is a body that I'm reasonably certain is Los Angeles Railway 2501, the experimental low-floor car built in 1925. But what's the car in the middle? It looks like a deck-roof car with a Huntington end, but there are several cars that it could be.

This one is a complete mystery.

That's certainly Los Angeles Railway 3084 on the right, a deaccessioned PCC body, but what's the car on the left? It looks like a LARy Huntington standard, probably a Class B, but it could be 807, 836, or a different car.

I'm pretty sure this is Los Angeles Railway 744 - I already have a photo of this car on the list, and that's the car it's assigned to - but confirmation would be appreciated.

Let's call this Birney #2 - as mentioned earlier, I figure this is either Los Angeles Railway 1003 or 9007, but I don't know which.

This photo, and the below one taken looking from the other direction, appear to show a Pacific Electric car. My best guess is that it's PE 511, but can anyone confirm that?

I really don't mean to bash SCRM with this post; every large trolley museum has cars in poor condition, and overall SCRM has done very well in moving the majority of their historic collection into indoor storage. But I'd like to get photos assigned to as many of the cars on the PNAERC list as possible, and this is the best way I can think of to do it for several cars in Perris that have no obvious photographic record. As I mentioned earlier, information is greatly appreciated.

PCC Updates from the Fox River

There are a couple of PCC-related updates from the Fox River Trolley Museum in Illinois. The first is that San Francisco Municipal Railway 1030, the 1951 PCC shown in the above photo taken on Saturday, has been scrapped along with a diesel. This car has been stored out of service for decades and was offered to other organizations more than a year ago. Given its condition, there were no takers. This car was far from unique; eight other cars from this series are preserved intact, and both the first and last members of the class have been beautifully restored by their respective owners. FRTM now has 18 cars included on the PNAERC roster.

But wait, there's more PCC news from FRTM. The above PCC 'L' car, Chicago Transit Authority 45, was repainted late last year in its 1970s-era "mint green and alpine white" livery. It has worn these colors for roughly 20 years, since its days at the East Troy Electric Railroad, and in recent years the paint had faded. When ETER conducted a major culling of its own collection in 2009-2010, the only one of its three CTA "singles" to be sold rather than scrapped was this one. It's been in regular use at FRTM ever since. (The above photo is from the FRTM Facebook page; thanks to Anderson Pries for emailing me about car 45's repainting and for sending me photos which I regrettably managed to lose.)

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.