PCC Going Up for Auction in California

The story behind this post from May seems to be confirmed - per this website, the Bright's Pioneer Museum collection in Le Grand, California, is going to be sold at the end of October in an online auction. Individual lots haven't been listed yet, but a couple of the photos (including the one reproduced here) prominently show Muni PCC 1150, so you can be pretty confident it will be in the auction along with the rest of the stuff.

I have no idea what will happen to 1150, of course - and I'm not even sure whether I'll know after the auction what ended up happening to it - but it would be nice if the car went to a good home. From the photo, it looks practically pristine, without even flaking paint - just some dust and dirt.

Major Thinning of the Exporail Collection

A fascinating, and unexpected, document just issued by the Canadian Railway Museum (CRM, aka Exporail) in Delson-St. Constant, Quebec, just appeared on the Heritage Rail Alliance news feed. CRM has completed a two-year review of its collection and has decided to deaccess 40 pieces of rolling stock. This includes no fewer than eight steam engines; five internal-combustion pieces; seven freight cars; and eight passenger cars. The list also includes 11 pieces of traction equipment, all of them on the PNAERC roster.

CRM's deaccession document is thin on information about the equipment, but it seems very well thought out and their transparency about the process is laudable. They're offering the deaccessed equipment "for exchange, transfer or sale until June 1st, 2025," and they include a prioritization calendar:

December 2024, offered to Canadian railway museums

January 2025, also offered to Canadian museums of other types

February 2025, also offered to Canadian historical associations and government entities

March 2025, also offered to U.S. railway museums

April 2025, also offered to U.S. government entities

May 2025, also offered to other U.S. enterprises

The breakdown of this prioritization timetable seems quite reasonable to me, and I commend CRM on announcing it clearly at the start of the process.

Of course, my interest here is not in Pacifics and Mikados, it's in the traction pieces. I'll confess that I have less familiarity with the CRM collection than I do with any other major traction collection on the continent. It's by far the largest traction museum I've never visited in person. But it's clear that quite a few of the pieces being deaccessed are complete and of real historical significance, so I hope they find good homes.

The first piece on the list is New Brunswick Power 82, a single-truck deck-roof car built by Ottawa in 1906. This is the only carbody on the list of traction equipment - everything else is complete, or at least largely so. This is a unique piece: it ran its whole career in Saint John, NB, and was still a hand-brake car when retired around 1947. I believe it's the only preserved electric car from New Brunswick. It's on some sort of single-truck shop truck and appears to be in nice cosmetic condition.

Next up is Montreal Tramways 1317, a wood-bodied, single-ended PAYE car constructed in 1913 by Ottawa. This car is complete and appears from photos to be in decent, if tired, condition. CORRECTION: I had previously written that this piece was duplicated in the CRM collection by car 1339, but that's not accurate. Car 1317 is actually the only surviving member of the 1200-1324 series, which was the first car design built for the newly unified Montreal Tramways system in 1913. Car 1339 is part of the 1325-1524 series, which was very similar but had an arched roof rather than the railroad roof of the 1200-series cars.

The other Montreal streetcar on the list is Montreal Tramways 1953. This, too, is a duplicate in the CRM collection, and was built as part of the same order as MTC 1959, the museum's most regularly operated streetcar. These cars are single-ended arch-roof cars built in 1928 by Canadian Car & Foundry. Car 1953 was privately owned for many years after retirement and didn't come to CRM until 1975. It's missing seats and some other parts.

Half of the six non-revenue pieces from Montreal Tramways preserved at CRM are on the list, and the first is MTC 5001, an angular steeplecab built in the company shops in 1917. It's virtually identical to MTC 5002, preserved at Branford and currently undergoing restoration work.

The next piece is Montreal Tramways 3151, a single-ended cab-on-flat work motor built by Canadian Car & Foundry in 1925. From the above photo, it appears to be largely intact but in rough shape, and it doesn't seem to have been the focus of much attention in recent years. (Incidentally, the above photo - taken by my father on a trip to CRM in 2002 - seems to be just about the only photo anyone has taken of MTC 3151 in the last few decades. This photo even appears on CRM's own deaccession document!)

Toronto Transportation Commission TP10 is one of only two pieces of TTC equipment preserved at CRM. It's a single-end wedge plow built in 1946 by National Steel Car and retired around the late 1970s. It's identical to TTC TP11, preserved in operating condition at Halton County. From what I can tell, it's largely complete but in rough shape.

The third piece of Montreal Tramways non-revenue equipment is MTC Y5. Of all the equipment on the deaccession list, this is the one that surprises me the most. Y5 is a motorized streetcar truck fitted with grids and a controller for use as a shop switcher. Only a couple of these things still exist in preservation (including another unnumbered example from Montreal, preserved at Branford). This one, homebuilt and dated to 1912, has been (or, at least, was) on display for years in CRM's impressive Exporail pavilion, so it's clearly in good cosmetic shape. It also takes up almost no space.

Then, we get to the interurbans. London & Port Stanley 10, shown here in a photo from the 1970s (I've never been able to find anything more recent), was one of the big all-steel cars built for that system by Jewett in 1915. It's been at CRM since retirement in 1962 but is obviously in rough condition. It's one of three cars of this series in existence (the other two are both at Halton County), and similar car 14 - built two years later and some 12' longer - is under restoration at the Elgin County Railway Museum.

Montreal & Southern Counties 104 is an attractive suburban wood car built by Ottawa in 1912. As with most of the other cars on this list, it appears to be complete but has suffered somewhat from storage outdoors. I'm not very familiar with the M&SC roster, but this car appears largely identical to M&SC 107 at Halton County, except that the latter car is a combine.

A very unusual piece of equipment for the PNAERC roster is next on the deaccession list: Quebec Railway Light & Power 105. This is one of the oldest cars on the PNAERC list, having been built by Jackson & Sharp back in 1889, nearly before "the invention of electricity." It started out as a steam-road combine but was later hauled as a trailer by QRL&P interurban cars like car 401, preserved at CRM. This car is so unusual as an electric car that its significance is somewhat limited outside of Quebec, but as an example of an 1880s passenger car, it seems quite historic. My impression is that it is complete and in moderate to good condition.

And the final piece of traction equipment being deaccessed is Canadian National 6742, a mainline commuter MU trailer built by Canadian Car & Foundry in 1952. It was built for the CN Montreal suburban electric line and joins similar motor car 6734 in the CRM collection. As with QRL&P 105, this is a trailer that's being deaccessed while its matching motor car remains in the collection. Several trailers of this series are operated by tourist railroads that haul them with locomotives, but this this may be the only one of its type preserved in authentic MU configuration.

In summary, this is the largest collection of traction equipment to be deaccessed by a museum in the last decade or so except for Seashore's recent "re-homing" program - but a quick look at what is being offered makes it clear that the equipment being deaccessed by CRM is far more valuable and significant, mainly for its completeness. The museum is also deaccessing more than 25% of its traction collection, which I think is unprecedented for a museum that is relatively stable overall. CRM is being admirably transparent in their process, and I hope that the result is that most or all of these pieces find the best possible new homes.

Muni PCC Available

The Fox River Trolley Museum announced today on Facebook that they are deaccessing two pieces of equipment and making them available to other museums. One of the two pieces is on the PNAERC list: San Francisco Municipal Railway 1030, a "Baby Ten" PCC built by St. Louis Car Company in 1951 as part of the last domestic order for PCC cars ever built. The car came to FRTM in 1983, after it was retired, and ran a few times but was quickly stored because its single-ended setup doesn't work well for the museum's operations. The car is complete, but its poor condition after four decades of outdoor storage may make it challenging to find a taker. It is one of nine cars of this series still in existence (not counting the infamous double-ended Franken-PCC). Of those nine, two have been fully restored: car 1016, beautifully restored to as-built condition at Rio Vista, and car 1040, fully restored to original livery but with some modern accoutrements to permit regular operation on home turf on Muni's F Line. The remaining six cars are all owned by Muni and are in storage; given that they recently scrapped an additional three of this type, it seems unlikely they'd want this one.

Though it's not on the PNAERC list, the other car deaccessed by FRTM is likely more historic than car 1030 by virtue of being unique. It's a flat car built for Chicago North Shore & Milwaukee piggyback service. There are three CNS&M piggyback flats still in existence, but this is the only one from the railroad's second order for longer 60' cars; the other two, one at the Illinois Railway Museum and one at the National Museum of Transportation, are both 40' cars.

Jersey Shore Streetcar Threatened

The Jersey Shore Historical Society of Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania, announced today on their Facebook page that contrary to previous plans, they are not going to acquire the body of Jersey Shore Street Railway 14. The car is currently stored at the Peter Herdic Transportation Museum in Williamsport, PA, but that museum has deaccessed it and wants it gone by August 2024. JSHS had come to an agreement in 2021 to acquire the car (see here) but they've decided that they need the funds elsewhere. If a new home is not found, the car will presumably be demolished.

Car 14 is a body, of course, and it's far from pristine but it looks to be in better shape than a lot of bodies out there. According to information I've received, it was built in 1894 as an open car but its builder is unknown. It originally ran in Philadelphia, first for the Electric Traction Company, then for Union Traction, then for Philadelphia Rapid Transit, where it was numbered 86. It's not clear when it went to Jersey Shore, but on JSSR it was first numbered 101 and was later rebuilt as a one-man car and renumbered 14. The photo above was taken in 2021.

Now's Your Chance

...to own a wooden interurban car of your very own! The car shown above is Northern Texas Traction 407, a parlor trailer built in 1919 by St. Louis Car Company (very late for a wood car). It was a house in Texas for many years after retirement in 1934, but in 2006 it was acquired by the Edwards Rail Car Company for potential conversion into a doodlebug (like this one, which was rebuilt by Edwards from Southern Traction 316). Unfortunately, Edwards went out of business in 2008, and the car has apparently been sitting in the old Edwards building in Montgomery, Alabama, ever since.

The car is now being auctioned off as part of the Royce G. Kershaw Jr. Estate (the source of the above photo) so get ready to place your bids! Car 407 looks fairly solid, but is also obviously stripped down to the shell after its years as a house. The estate includes a 2-6-0 Mogul, an impressive-looking wooden railroad coach, and at least two Edwards doodlebugs*, so car 407 may not exactly be the highlight. It's also not unique: of the five cars built in this series, three are still around. These include car 409, on indoor display near Rochester, New York, and car 411, subject of a beautiful cosmetic restoration and recently placed on display under a shelter in Burleson, Texas.

*EDIT: Olin Anderson points out that one of the doodlebugs is a heavily rebuilt Philadelphia & Western "Strafford car" which is not on the PNAERC list due to how modified it is.

Box Motor for Sale

Thanks to Jeron Glander for alerting me to the fact that Texas Electric 507, a freight motor built by St. Louis Car Company in 1907 for Texas Traction, has been listed for sale on Ozark Mountain Railcar. This car is (at least, to my knowledge, still) owned by the City of Waxahachie, which acquired it in 2018 as outlined here. The web page about the plans for car 507 is still visible here, but it appears that priorities have changed. The asking price for the car is $30,000, which doesn't sound very serious, but I can only assume it's negotiable. The car itself is obviously just a body, but appears more solid than a lot of bodies, presumably because it was mostly inside of a barn for many years.

Car 507 is one of just two TE box motors preserved, and may be the better of the two in terms of condition. It would be a shame to see it cut up - another TE box motor was just recently scrapped - but box motors are a tough sell to railway museums.

Seashore Deaccessing Rapid Transit Cars

Heads up, the new Seashore deaccession list just dropped!

Seashore's major collection rationalization effort, or "re-homing" drive, has turned its attention to the museum's large - and largely undermaintained- fleet of rapid transit equipment. The latest deaccession list includes no fewer than nine cars on the PNAERC list, plus two flatcars from the Boston subway system that aren't on the list.

First up: four of the museum's five massive Cambridge-Dorchester rapid transit cars from what is today the Red Line. Seashore's fleet of 1927 Osgood-Bradley-built 0700-series cars comprises the entirety of the extant early Cambridge-Dorchester fleet. No earlier cars survive, nor are any cars at all from the line preserved anywhere other than Seashore. Anyway, three of the four cars being deaccessed were already technically considered "deaccessed" because they had been acquired just as parts sources and were being used as (largely open-air) warehouses. These three have all been stored alongside Town House Shop for decades. First is car 709, shown below in a 2023 photo from the "re-homing" document.

Second is car 749, shown below in a photo taken in 2007.

And the last of this group is car 754, shown below in a 2023 photo from the "re-homing" document.

The only real surprise, if you could call it that, on this list is the fourth car being deaccessed, car 0753, which is shown below in two photos from the "re-homing" document. 

This car doesn't look like it's in much better shape than the first three, but until now it has been on Seashore's collection list and earmarked for preservation. All four of these cars were in MBTA work service after retirement around 1970 and didn't come to Seashore until the late 1980s. The only Cambridge-Dorchester car Seashore is planning on keeping is car 0719, which it obtained straight out of passenger service in 1970 and which has operated fairly recently. Car 0719 was modernized in 1948 with a new interior layout and seats, meaning car 0753 would have been the last car of this type in its original configuration. All these cars are believed to be mechanically complete, more or less, with Brill 27MCB trucks that might be candidates for use under interurban equipment elsewhere.

After that, there are three MBTA work cars being deaccessed. The only one of these three that has been on the PNAERC roster is car 0575, a mostly-enclosed box motor/crane car homebuilt by Boston Elevated Railway in 1924 (though Seashore's document lists its builder and date as unknown, so who knows). Below is a 2016 photo I took of this car followed by a 2023 photo from the "re-homing" document.

And then there are two subway work flats included here just for completeness, though they're not on the PNAERC list because as far as I can tell they're basically just normal flat cars, albeit with radial Tomlinson couplers. First is car 0503, a wooden flat car built by BER in 1901, and second is car 0579, a steel flat car of unknown origin. These are both 2023 photos from the "re-homing" document.

The next car is Staten Island Rapid Transit 366, shown below in 2016 in a photo I took. This is a standard deck-roof SIRT heavy rapid transit car built by Standard Steel in 1925. It was retired in 1973 and stored for possible heritage use, but nothing ever came of that and in the 1980s ownership was transferred to the Trolley Museum of New York. The car was stored at the Arthur Kill Generating Station until finally it was sold to Seashore in poor condition in 1993. It is one of only two first-generation SIRT MU cars preserved; the other, car 388 at Branford, will likely soon be the last of its kind.

The last three cars on the list are true derelicts, and have never - to my knowledge - even been on live rail at Seashore. They've also already been considered deaccessed, in that they weren't considered part of the historic collection. This trio has long been stored together in the woods a bit away from the main museum campus, where they've served as storage rooms. One is Independent Subway 175, an R-1 subway car built by ACF in 1932. I'm unclear on its precise history, but supposedly this car was a diner in Texas for a while in the 1980s before coming to Seashore in 1995. It's a body and lacks trucks or underbody equipment. The other two cars are, I believe, mechanically complete, including Standard C60 trucks, WH 301 motors and PC-10 control. Boston Elevated car 0986 and car 0996 were both built in 1928 by Wason and are deck-roof all-steel cars from the "Main Line" elevated. They're identical to cars 0997 and 01000, also at Seashore, which are in far better condition. The photos below, taken by yours truly in 2007, show the New York car on the ground flanked by the two 0900s, though I'm not sure which of the two Boston cars is which.

The current "re-homing" document lists a few other cars I already had listed as being available for sale, including CTA 1, MBTA 3037, VEPCO 194, and Laconia Street Railway 17. Oh, and that battery-powered ice truck is still for sale.

But quite a few other cars, including N&P 9, Mobile 49, Ottawa 825, MBTA 3608, South Shore 32, and LIRR 4137, are not on the latest edition of the "re-homing" list. I'm not sure whether any have found new homes, whether all have been written off as hopeless, or whether any have actually been cut up yet. Any updated information on actual scrapping or dismantling of cars is appreciated.

Regardless, although a couple of cars on this new list were acquired for preservation, most were already effectively on the deaccession list - and in many cases are also duplicated by better examples in the Seashore collection. It's hard to argue that getting rid of these cars isn't a good decision for the museum: nothing on this new list approaches the "Berkshire Hills" or even VEPCO 194 in historic significance. That said, many of these cars are mechanically complete, so there may be opportunities for Seashore or other organizations to improve their spare parts supplies or obtain trucks, motors and control equipment for car bodies.

More on the Deaccession List

A couple of different sources have confirmed that Seashore has deaccessed another two cars, adding them to their "re-homing" list of cars to be disposed of. These two haven't yet shown up on the museum's website, but they likely will at some point.

The first is a very famous car, the "Berkshire Hills," the last surviving car from the Berkshire Street Railway. The BSR was an expansive interurban/street railway system that actually - and, probably uniquely among trolley lines - spanned four states. Running the north-south length of western Massachusetts, it had branches into Vermont, New York, and Connecticut. The sole survivor of the line was also its most opulent and famous car, the parlor car "Berkshire Hills," built by Wason in 1903. This car was gorgeous in service, and after retirement in 1932 its body was made into a diner. Seashore acquired the body in 1995 and has had it in storage since (the above photo, of the car under a tarp, is from 2016). Less than two years ago, in late 2021, Seashore even traded with another museum to acquire the correct trucks for the car. But priorities change.

UPDATE: Good news, everyone! Jordan Helzer of the Shelburne Falls Trolley Museum reports that SFTM has arranged to assume ownership of the "Berkshire Hills." The car may not be moved until next year, due to the need for various types of prep work, but the car will be heading to the closest trolley museum to its original stomping grounds. Kudos to SFTM for preserving this car, and thanks to Jordan for the news.

The second car Seashore has deaccessed is Chicago Transit Authority 1, the last of the "high-speed" single-unit PCC 'L' cars from that system. This car was built by St. Louis in 1960 and not long after delivery it received high-speed motors, more modern control and a flashy paint scheme that earned it (and the other handful of cars similarly overhauled) the nickname "circus wagon." In 1974, the CTA sold the car to General Electric for use as a test car. GE used it for testing out modern control equipment - I think that at one point it was fitted with some sort of chopper control - but at some point it just got abandoned out on a siding at the GE site in Erie. It sat there for 20 or 30 years until Seashore acquired the car in 2016 (the above photo, taken in 2016, is from here). The control equipment to restore the car to its high-speed CTA days doesn't exist anymore, and as a PCC "single car" it's far from unique in preservation, but it's the only one of the high-speed cars still around so it's unique to a point.

It's likely that the re-homing will continue. Seashore's strategic plan includes some 34 electric cars listed as "not accessioned," and while that list presumably includes everything that's already on the re-homing list, there are likely a couple dozen more cars yet to go.

And that brings me to an observation that only occurred to me recently: that the greatest extent of the traction preservation movement, in terms of raw numbers of equipment, is right now. For at least 10 years or more, I'd say, the total number of cars on the PNAERC list has hovered around 2,100. For several years it's stayed within about 10 cars, with periodic reductions (like Muni paring down its collection or ITM going under) being offset by influxes of preserved cars (like a bunch of CLRV's or CTA 2400s entering preservation). But that's about to end. There are over 50 cars in Windber, PA, that will be off the list in a matter of months, and Seashore appears likely to remove another 20 or 30 in the coming years as well, though it remains to be seen how many of their deaccessed cars really do find new homes. But the contraction has begun and I don't see it being offset in the future.

Is this bad? Well, not necessarily - and it was certainly inevitable. Over-collecting during the later years of the PCC era in the 1980s and 1990s is to blame for a lot of it, and the "last roundup"-style mass acquisition of car bodies during that same era has also resulted in quite a few cars in museums that are hanging on by a string, figuratively speaking. But a lot of history is likely to go away, too. For every duplicate-twenty-times-over PCC car in Windber that gets scrapped, there may be a "Berkshire Hills." With luck, the traction preservation movement will emerge stronger, with additional resources to put toward maintaining or restoring a more focused collection. Time will tell.

Streetcar for Sale

It was only a month or so ago that Los Angeles Transit Lines 1435 came up on this very blog. It took me that long to figure out where it had ended up (the answer was the Southern California Fairgrounds in Perris, California). But it appears that it's not sticking around: it's just been listed for sale.

The photos are from the auction website where it's being sold here (link may not work for more than a few days). The listing says it needs to be removed from its current location by September 21st, which is in just a couple of days, so that's not auspicious. It remains to be seen what happens to the car after that.

Car 1435 is a Class H-3 double-truck steel car built by St. Louis in 1924 for Los Angeles Railway. It ran until 1959, when it was sold to a private owner. The owner stored it for years at the (then) Orange Empire Railway Museum, but it left there in 1975 and according to some sources it hit a bridge during transport which caused roof damage. Later, in the 1990s, it was stripped for parts to restore cars in the Muni historic fleet in San Francisco. By the early 2000s it was stored at the old Pacific Electric building and given a coat of paint, but nothing was really done with it. Orange Empire (now Southern California Railway Museum) moved the car to their site in Perris in 2016, I believe just to keep it from being cut up, and then in 2018 it was moved to its current location at the nearby fairgrounds.

It's one of five H-type LARy cars preserved, and one of three H-3 class cars, so it's not particularly significant - especially given that the others are all complete and this one definitely isn't.

North Dakota streetcar for sale

There's only one preserved electric car in the state of North Dakota, and it's for sale. Grand Forks Street Railway 102, shown above in a 2016 photo from the Heritage Rail Alliance website, is a 1911 single-truck deck-roof car built by American. At one time, cars of this exact design were common in dozens of smaller Midwestern cities, but examples of the type are quite rare today. This car was fixed up, with body restoration seemingly done in a relatively authentic manner, and given a gas engine so that it could be used to carry people through Fort Lincoln Park near Bismarck. According to this article from the Bismarck Tribune, though, the operation is now for sale. Holdings include a few miles of track, car 102, and a replica open car that appears to have seen more regular use in recent years. It sounds like the owners are trying to sell the entire operation as a package deal, and want everything to remain intact and in situ. Time will tell whether that happens.

Meanwhile, in unrelated news, Laddie Vitek sends along this Mike Trosino photo taken back in April at the Electric City Trolley Museum. It shows Philadelphia C-127, a 1923 double-truck Brill snow sweeper, operating for the first time at ECTM. This sweeper is the only survivor of a sizable collection of electric cars once owned by the late Ed Mitchell in Uniontown, PA. In 2011, after Mitchell died, the collection was disposed of. Nearly all of the cars had been stored outside in very poor condition and were scrapped; of the three cars stored inside, the only one that escaped the torch was C-127. It was stored in Baltimore from 2011 until 2020.

At that point, ECTM acquired the trucks from scrapped sister car C-124, which had had its trucks regauged to standard gauge by its then-owned, Grand Rapids Electric Railway. ECTM also opened up an indoor storage spot by selling CA&E 453 to IRM. Car C-127 was then moved to Scranton, and since then it has received roof and electrical work to make it operational. Restoration work is continuing, but it is now the second Philadelphia snow sweeper preserved in operational condition, joining car C-145 in Baltimore.

Another round of Seashore deaccessions

Seashore is continuing with a program of thinning their collection. Following the deaccession of two cars in July and a third in November, they've just announced plans to "re-home" an additional six cars. So get your shopping lists ready - here's what's slated to leave Kennebunkport, one way or another:

First up is Laconia Street Railway 17, shown here in a photo from the Seashore announcement taken within the past week. It's the body of a double-truck wooden streetcar built in 1901 by - you guessed it - hometown car builder Laconia, and according to my notes is technically privately owned but has been stored on the ground at Seashore since 2001. At one time it was a very nice example of an early double-truck New England city car (in-service photo here) but as can easily be seen, it's in rough shape. Supposedly it's one of two Laconia Street Railway cars in existence, but the status of the other - a Birney body at Warehouse Point - is uncertain and that car may have been scrapped.

Next up is Newport & Providence 9, shown here in a 2019 Scott Linscott photo. Open car bodies are always kind of insubstantial, but this one is less solid than most, and sources suggest it collapsed over one of its trucks last year. Another Laconia product, it was built in 1904 and was a house in Newport after retirement. It was at the Old Colony & Fall River Railroad Museum for a time in the 1980s and came to Seashore in 1990. Oddly enough, sister car 8 was also turned into a house and is not only still in situ, it's an AirBnB!

Virginia Electric Power 194 is next, shown here in a 2022 photo from the Seashore announcement. This car was built in 1911 by the Southern Car Company for the Richmond & Henrico, joining the Richmond city system three years later. It's one of just five Southern electric cars still in existence and the only surviving streetcar from Richmond that isn't a Birney. Its design is a bit unusual, sporting an early arched roof and all-wood construction but with steel-sheathed sides (in-service photo of identical car). It's also a body, though, and is pretty badly wracked in addition to missing most of one end.

Next on the list is another car from the Old South, Mobile Light & Railroad 49, shown here in a 2022 photo from the Seashore announcement. It's the body of a single-truck streetcar built in 1930 by Perley Thomas. It's unfortunate that the car is in such wretched shape because it's kind of significant, actually. Seashore says it's the last single-truck streetcar ever built in the U.S., which I believe. It's also a rare example of a single-truck Perley Thomas car and it's the only streetcar preserved from Mobile I've been able to identify (a second car is supposed to be stored in a warehouse in its home city but I haven't been able to find much information on it). If you're wondering what exactly you're looking at in the above photo, the end of the car fell off or was removed and has been stowed inside the body. An in-service photo of this series can be found here.

Things could be worse, though. Next on the list is Ottawa Transportation Commission 825, shown here in a 2020 photo from the Seashore announcement. A once-handsome deck-roof double-truck car built in 1923 by (who else) Ottawa Car Manufacturing Company, today car 825 is just a shell - and not much of a shell at that. The car's deck roof collapsed into the car body sometime in the late 2010s and the Seashore announcement notes that the car's frame is broken. Like N&P 9, this car probably isn't leaving Kennebunkport intact. This car is the only example of its series preserved, however Ottawa cars 854 and 859 are extremely similar and are preserved intact in Canada.

The last electric being "re-homed" in this round is Boston Elevated Railway 3608, a side dump motor built by Differential in 1926. It's one of three side-dump motors from Boston in the Seashore collection and is a bit unusual; built using equipment from an older dump car, it has Taylor trucks rather than the usual Diffco arch bars. It's the only car in this deaccession round that isn't a body, the only one that is a work car, and the only one from Boston. It's been at Seashore since 1954, longer than most trolley museums have existed.

The "re-homing" document also includes South Shore 32, which was part of the July 2022 deaccession round, but doesn't include LIRR 4137 or MBTA 3283, also deaccessed in 2022. I'm not sure whether they've found takers or whether they've already been disposed of. And there are some non-electric pieces in the latest deaccession round, including a 46-foot long wooden caboose and a URTX reefer.

Boeing LRV for Sale

It's been very close to three years since your last opportunity to buy a Boeing LRV, but the good news is that you're getting one (and quite possibly only one) more chance. According to this Craigslist post, one of only four remaining Boeing-Vertol LRVs - Muni 1271, built in 1978 - is up for sale. The above photo, taken from the Craigslist post, is assumed (?) to be recent.

The forlorn LRV has been sitting for quite a while (I'm not certain how long) in a junkyard in Richmond, CA, where it's visible from passing Amtrak trains. While its location in a junkyard would make it seem rather un-preserved, its definitely been kept intact as an historical curiosity (as evidenced by the effort now to sell it) and it appears to retain its trucks and most of its exterior largely unmodified. Let's put it this way: if there were a Muni J-Type or a PE Ten in similar condition in a junkyard, people would be falling over themselves to acquire it.

And yet, this ungainly beast seems likely to go to scrap. One of four LRVs (three Muni and one Boston) still around, it's by far the worst of the lot, and the "local" trolley museum - Western Railway Museum - has one of the nicer examples. Plus, Boeing LRVs were and are notoriously difficult to keep running even in the best of circumstances; even if it's mostly complete, it seems hard to imagine this one could ever move under power again given its finicky electronics. But who knows, someone may buy it and plinth it somewhere.

Another Seashore deaccession

The Seashore Trolley Museum is underway with its "fourth round of re-homing" and in addition to the South Shore car and Long Island Rail Road car mentioned here back in July, there's a third car that's available: MBTA 3283, a line car built in 1949. Car 3283 is pretty unremarkable; it's the only car on the list built by Henry Dow, but Dow wasn't a car builder, it was a local company that (if I recall correctly) mostly built houses. The most interesting thing about the car is probably the story, on Seashore's deaccession listing, about its involvement in a major head-on collision with another work car in 1969 that killed a man and injured 16 more, in part the result of the crews of both cars having been drinking. Ah, the good? old days...

Regardless, the car arrived at Seashore in 2007 and ran briefly before it was sidelined with electrical issues. If you're interested in 3283, there's a catch: Seashore is keeping the trucks, motors, and electrical equipment. Only the body is available. With the market for line car bodies pretty slim, this car will mostly likely end up scrapped, but only time will tell for sure.

Two cars deaccessed by Seashore

As of this past weekend, the Seashore Trolley Museum has deaccessed two of the cars in its collection and is making them available to other organizations.

The first, shown above in 2015 (both photos in this post from this page), is South Shore 32. It's a typical coach from that railroad, built by Standard Steel in 1929, and given how many identical cars are preserved elsewhere, it's not particularly significant. It's in rough shape, and all of its underbody electrical equipment was removed when it was moved to Seashore in the 1980s, but it's complete insofar as all of the equipment is on hand.

The other car is somewhat rarer: Long Island Rail Road 4137, an MP54A1 commuter MU car built by AC&F in 1930. This car is complete, though I don't think it has run at Seashore and it too is in rough shape (though I believe its steel roof has held up better than the canvas one on car 32). There aren't too many LIRR electric cars preserved: only five right now, of which one other besides this car has also been deaccessed by its owner.

It makes a lot of sense for Seashore to deaccess these cars. Neither has ever run in Kennebunkport, as far as I know, and given their huge size neither is a good candidate for normal operation at Seashore in the future. With luck, one or both cars may even find a new home elsewhere.

New York subway car being auctioned off

Now is your chance to have your very own New York subway car. NYCTA 9075, an R33-ML type car built in 1963, is being auctioned off by the Borough of Queens according to this article (and a few others). The article says that this is the last car of its kind, but that's manifestly not true, as there are at least ten other R33 cars in preservation and likely more knocking around the subway system. Car 9075's record has been updated to reflect that it's for sale, and with luck I'll find out who buys it and where it ends up going, even if it's into a scrap dumpster.

Some real money was put into plinthing this car back in 2005, including a substantial concrete pad, but it was probably inevitable that its owners would tire of maintaining it. I was surprised to see, in one of the photos, that at least part of the car's interior looks completely original (well, end-of-service original). I had thought it was being used as some sort of visitor's center, but perhaps it was just an exhibit piece. But electric cars put to uses like this usually have a finite shelf life (example). I'm surprised the relatively nearby MPB-54 chamber of commerce is still in use.

As an aside, if you're wondering why these cars are on the PNAERC list when cars on the ground (i.e. diners, private homes, and other "chicken coops") aren't, the reason is trucks. If a car is complete enough to retain its trucks and underbody, then I'll typically consider it sufficiently intact to be considered "preserved" even if it's in non-railroad use.

M&O Subway cars for sale

Many thanks to Andy Nold for sending along this link to an auction of three ex-M&O/Tandy Subway electric cars. Of the three cars in question, I believe that only two are currently on the list: Tandy 1 (not to be confused with the other Tandy 1) and Tandy 4. Both of these are squared-off "Winnebago-style" Tandy subway cars whose bodies are basically of late-1970s vintage, but whose electrical and mechanical equipment - and probably portions of the frame - started out as PCC cars. Tandy 1 was built off of Boston PCC 3166, a 1945 Pullman-Standard product, while Tandy 4 was built from DC Transit 1506, a St. Louis product of similar vintage. As for the third car, which is largely gutted, I'm not even sure what its identity is. I believe that all three have been owned by North Texas Historic Transportation, but word on the street is that NTHT is either contracting or folding altogether and it appears these three cars are being auctioned off by the local transit agency. So if you want air-electric PCC car parts, here's your ticket. The cars are located in a lot here.

And if anybody has more information on the existing Tandy cars, I'd appreciate it. My roster of ex-Tandy cars (I've used Tandy interchangeably with M&O on the list although the latter preceded the former as operators of the subway line so they're really not synonymous) is a bit of a mess. Of the seven cars on that particular list, only three are what I'd consider definitely accounted for: the "other" car 1, now restored and on display; car 2, a "Winnebago" style car, owned by McKinney Avenue and currently in storage; and DC Transit 1540, an unrebuilt PCC which returned home to Maryland. The other four include two of the cars now up for auction and two other cars that were bought by Brookville. But I'm not even sure they still exist - Brookville may have scrapped them at some point - and there's evidently a third (gutted) car in that lot in Fort Worth that's not on my list. Help is needed!

MYSTERY SOLVED: The mystery of the surviving Tandy cars ended up being solved - the two Brookville cars were confirmed scrapped, and the cars up for auction described in this post failed to find buyers and were similarly cut up.

Highliners for sale

The Hoosier Valley Railroad Museum in Indiana announced on Facebook (no log-in required) that it is deaccessing its two Metra, ex-Illinois Central, "Highliner" MU cars. Cars 1502 and 1529, both from the first order for Highliners built by St. Louis in 1971, were retired around 2007 and were acquired by HVRM in 2008. The museum actually bought four of the double-deck cars but the other two, 1521 and 1617, were scrapped not long afterwards in 2010.

This group Highliners to be retired back in 2007 included cars Metra wanted to retire first, and HVRM has suggested that it's unlikely 1502 and 1529 will leave on their own wheels (though they arrived that way), so the two cars up for sale are likely not in great condition. Presumably they will end up being scrapped. I'm not exactly sure why HVRM acquired them in the first place but Highliners were snapped up by a few different organizations including the Mendota Railroad Museum, Boone & Scenic Valley, and the Museum of the American Railroad, apparently because they were cheap and plentiful. The only museums that have Highliners and are capable of running them are Boone and IRM and only the latter has actually operated its cars.