The Terrible Trolley Rides Again

Today in a dramatic ceremony the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum unveiled its latest restoration project: Port Authority Transit 1713, better known as the "Terrible Trolley." This car, a 1949-vintage PCC built for Pittsburgh Railways, was in 1980 painted in an elaborate livery honoring the Pittsburgh Steelers. The car was acquired by PTM two years ago and since then has undergone a speedy restoration to its 1980 appearance. The car is undoubtedly eye-catching, and as popular as the Steelers are in Pittsburgh, it's sure to raise awareness of the museum with a fan base that may not currently be very familiar with the museum.

As for car 1713, its condition has been updated to reflect that it is in operation at the museum. This means that of the eight 1700-series Pittsburgh cars on the PNAERC list, the only two that are restored and operating are both at PTM. (I should also mention that I recently removed several cars in this series from the list that were at Windber because they had clearly collapsed, making them effectively unsalvageable in my opinion and, therefore, no longer "preserved.") The photo above is from a Railpace post on Facebook.

And in unrelated news, Bill Wall sent along this link and alerted me to the fact that Branford has just celebrated the 125th birthday of its line! The line from Branford to East Haven via Short Beach opened on July 31st, 1900, and has been in operation continuously ever since, which is quite a distinction. Of course, the math  majors among our readership will realize that the trolley museum has operated the line for significantly longer now than did the Connecticut Company. The museum celebrated this anniversary with a ceremony at Sprague Station, in East Haven (photos and information here). Kudos to BERA on this milestone! The photo shown here is from that first link and here.

Update from Branford

Thanks to Bill Wall, who has sent along an update of recent progress in the shop at Branford:

First news item is the reappearance of Montreal Tramways locomotive 5002, which was flooded in 2011 and 2012 by Hurricanes Irene and Sandy. The motors have been redone and while they were out the opportunity taken to rebuild the very worn out trucks. With a newly made center plate, new old stock Red Arrow center door wheels replacing the cracked or broken tiny pie plate wheels, an armature rewound and other work, 5002 hasn't been this good mechanically since it was built. Another one brought back to life...

Thanks to the Amherst Railway Society for their grant supporting this 1917 homebuilt steeplecab.

Connecticut Company car 775 has had the majority of its rattan seats redone just in time for the 125th anniversary (7/31)  of the opening of the original Branford Electric Railway on the very route that is now our museum line. A total of 10 bottoms and 10 seat backs were redone with new material, courtesy of combining two grants from the Mass. Bay RRE and the NRHS, along with some internal support. A special thanks to both organizations for helping to make this happen. Attached you will find some photos of before and after the work was done. 

Ed. note: A how-to guide to restoring rattan seats, written by Bob Yohe of Branford and provided by Bill Wall, is posted on our sister blog Hicks Car Works here.

Tarped Cars on Truck Trailers in the Northeast

Thanks to Bill Wall for supplying news and photos regarding the conveyance of New Jersey Transit 5221, a utility/line car built in 1912, to Branford today. The car was moved by Silk Road from its recent home at the Kinkisharyo plant in Piscataway, New Jersey, and was unloaded in East Haven.

Car 5221 was built by Russell in 1912 as a snow plow and freight motor for the Trenton Terminal Railroad (later Public Service Railroad, then Public Service Coordinated Transport) system in New Jersey. At some point it was rebuilt as a line car, and in that guise it stayed in service on the Newark subway until it was transferred off the property in 2009. The car bounced around: it went to the National Capital Trolley Museum for a while, then was at Lyons Industries in Pennsylvania for truck rebuilding c2016-2017, and afterward ended up in Piscataway. The photo above, from this blog, was taken around 2018, but in 2019 the car was tarped and put outside. (The four photos below were all taken by Bill Wall.)

For five years or so, the car looked like this, tarped with a shrink-wrap "boat tarp" next to the Kinkisharyo building.

But through whatever means, the car was acquired by Branford. Above, it's shown loaded on a trailer.

And these last two photos, taken today, show the car on the line at Branford.

This is only the second line car in Branford's collection, and their first double-truck line car. (Oddly enough, among the "three sisters" that started the traction preservation movement in New England - Seashore, Warehouse Point, and Branford - there are only six line cars preserved among them, and 5221 is one of only two that are double-truck cars.) Car 5221 is one of six intact cars from the PSCT system before the PCC era, and four of those cars are now preserved at Branford.

The second car on the move is shown below (apologies for the thumbnail-sized image, which is a screen grab from a video posted by Seashore). You'd be hard pressed to tell from the tarp, but this is the famous Berkshire Hills, the business car from the Berkshire Street Railway that is the only survivor from that storied system.

This car was built by Wason in 1903, retired way back in 1922, and sold in 1932 for use as a diner. Following a 1994 fire that caused substantial damage, the body was acquired by Seashore in 1995, where it has been stored ever since. The car is now en route to its new home at the Shelburne Falls Trolley Museum, a transfer that has been planned for over a year. This is the second car on Seashore's "re-homing lists" to go to a new home; the first, MBTA line car 3283, also went to Shelburne Falls. The SFTM collection now totals five cars on PNAERC; Seashore's stands at 189 pieces; and the NJERHS is down to six cars while Branford is up one to 91 cars.

ConnCo 1414 Returns Home

Thanks to Bill Wall for sending the above photo and the news that Connecticut Company 1414 has returned home from its 27-year stint at the Lake Compounce Amuseument Park. It was trucked back to East Haven today and will be unloaded at Branford in the morning. UPDATE: Video here

Car 1414 is a big 15-bench deck-roof open car built by Osgood-Bradley for ConnCo in 1911. Part of the Branford fleet from the earliest days in 1948, in 1997 it was loaned to an historic amusement park at Lake Compounce, where it ran back and forth on an 1800' route with a small shed at one end to protect the car. This fairly unique operation seems to have been quite successful for quite a long time, but the amusement park is redeveloping that area and so the car's time there is through. It's operational, so I would guess that it will be making regular appearances in service at Branford. It's one of three cars of this series preserved: sister car 1425 is currently under restoration at Branford, and may join its twin in operation one of these days, while car 1468 is stored in rough but complete condition at Seashore.

C&LE High-Speed Runs

Branford, which of course hosts the PNAERC database, has announced a significant milestone. Cincinnati & Lake Erie 116, their 1930 Cincinnati-built high-speed interurban car, is now operational again for the first time in many years. This makes it one of only two operational ex-C&LE cars anywhere, and the only one of the two in original C&LE livery.

Car 116 ran in East Haven many years ago, but I believe it was out of service by the 1980s and possibly earlier. Branford volunteers restored its roof but for many years it sat with the body in primer. Around 2010, it received a beautiful paint job that returned it to its original deep red color scheme, and over the past couple of years it has seen a remarkable amount of mechanical and electrical work. It was flooded by the hurricanes that hit Branford nearly a decade ago now, which necessitated the rebuilding of the car's motors as well as its PC control group and the fairly complex air system.

There are 12 pieces of equipment preserved from the C&LE: six freight motors, all in various states of disrepair; two 100-series combine bodies; and four "Red Devil" high-speeds that ran on the CRANDIC after their C&LE days ended. Of these four, 111 at Rio Vista (operational but rarely used) and 118 at Seashore (stored for quite a few years now) are in CRANDIC colors, while 119 at Worthington (tarped and deteriorating) and 116 are in C&LE paint.

Northeastern Updates

There are a few updates to the PNAERC data out of museums (and non-museums) in the northeast. First, NYCTA 9075, an R-33ML subway car from New York, was moved over the weekend from its home of 17 years on a plinth in front of Queens Borough Hall. Many thanks to Bill Wall for the striking photo above. Unfortunately, I'm not sure where the car has gone, though online rumors suggest somewhere in New Jersey (which doesn't narrow it down much!). At the time the car was sold, it was said to have been purchased by an art dealer, so make of that what you will. Any updates are appreciated!

Second, there's another update to the ongoing saga of the deaccessed Warehouse Point cars. Halton County Radial Railway has come to an agreement to acquire Canadian National 6714, a boxcab locomotive from the Montreal suburban electrification. The locomotive was built in Toronto (it was news to me that this series of six locomotives were built in three different locations!) so has some local significance in addition to its technological significance. That means that, of the six cars deaccessed by CTM, three have been scrapped and two sold with just one still available: LIRR 4153. Any takers?

And finally, Branford's restoration shop has posted on its Facebook page that the wheel sets and motors have been pulled from underneath their diminutive four-wheel GE locomotive "Amy." Surely one of the more obscure pieces of equipment at the museum, this 1902 industrial boxcab gains a bit of prominence on the PNAERC list because the top line in the alphabetical "Now or Formerly Owned By" search box on the homepage is always Abendroth Foundry, the locomotive's owner. It's been out of service for years but that looks like it will be changing in the near future. The locomotive's condition has been changed to "undergoing restoration."

South Brooklyn steeplecab to Branford

Many thanks to Bill Wall for forwarding the above photo and the news that Branford has acquired the locomotive pictured, New York City Transit Authority 7. NYCTA 7 is a fairly standard GE steeplecab, though fitted with a flat roof for low clearance areas. It was built in 1925 for the South Brooklyn Railway and later in life performed maintenance and switching duties for the general subway system. I believe this was the last locomotive on the New York subway system with trolley poles. Anyway, it's complete and in pretty good shape, so it will make a great addition to the Branford collection. The photo shows the locomotive being loaded today, leaving New York City ground (probably) for the last time, and it is due to arrive at Branford tomorrow. Bill mentioned that Branford extends their thanks to the New York Transit Museum for making this long-sought-after locomotive available to the museum.

While locomotive 7 may have been the last steeplecab with trolley poles on the New York subway system, it's not the last steeplecab. The NYCTA/NYTM still has locomotive 6 on their property, built a few years earlier than 7 but virtually identical. And of course there's the very historic NYCTA 5, the last early-style arch-window GE steeplecab in existence, built in 1910 and now part of the NYTM collection.

UPDATE: Bill has sent along some additional photos of locomotive 7 being loaded onto its Silk Road trailer along the iconic Brooklyn waterfront. These are the locomotive's old stomping grounds, just about where the old South Brooklyn Railway 39th Street Yard and its interchange with the Bush Terminal Railroad were located. All photos are copyright Bill Wall - do not copy without permission.

Where's the rest of it

This isn't directly applicable to the PNAERC list, but Bill Wall from Branford sent this along and it was too curious not to share. It's the faux end of a New York subway car, built to replicate an R-17 type car. Branford's car 6688, of this type, was recently sent out for some movie shoot work, and when it returned to East Haven it was accompanied by this thing. Bill calls this "6688 and one-eighth."

I'm not formally tracking car ends, of course, but from memory I can think of a handful that are at trolley museums. This car end (which I believe is not an actual subway car end) is joined at Branford by a Lake Shore Electric interurban car end (also, I believe, a re-creation) displayed in Sprague. Seashore has its own interurban car end (which may be an authentic one) as well as the front end of a Boston "Type 6" prototype streetcar. PTM used to have the front end of a Pittsburgh PCC attached to the wall of its barn, though I'm not sure where it is now, and IRM has a pair of Illinois Terminal interurban car ends (not on display) built by the IT as spares to use as wreck replacements. Jackson Street Roundhouse in Saint Paul, MN also used to have a Twin City car end as a display piece but I think it's gone now. What am I missing?

ConnCo 855 returns home

 Many thanks to Bill Wall for passing along news, and the photos shown here, of Connecticut Company 855's return home to Branford.

Above the car is shown passing East Haven Town Hall; below it's passing the East Haven Green, while below that it's seen being unloaded at the foot of River Street and shown through the windows of Sprague.

Car 855 was built by Wason in 1905 as Consolidated Railway 512. It was retired and went to Branford in 1947, but as a duplicate in the collection (identical car 865, which is fully restored, is also preserved at the museum) it was soon stripped of parts and its body was placed on the ground. Over the years car 855 saw a few different uses but in 1984 it was cosmetically restored on the outside and placed on display nearby in East Haven outside of the Trolley Square shopping mall. In 1993 it moved again, this time to a spot in front of the Holiday Inn where it served as the East Haven Visitors Center until recently. It has now returned to Branford for the first time in more than 35 years.

Correction and additional information: Bill has written to point out that car 855 has been plinthed on the piece of track shown above, not in River Street (where Branford's line terminates) but alongside it. The car will serve as a welcome sign and landmark for visitors, not to mention an impressive photo op. Its years in various uses have given it a lot of modifications (including, among other things, a metal roof and vinyl windows and siding!) so while Branford is definitely keeping it around, it is not being preserved as an historic artifact.

Finally, as an unrelated aside, the recently-discovered Phoenix streetcar body mentioned here has indeed been moved to the Arizona Street Railway Museum's (aka Phoenix Trolley Museum's) storage site as shown here. The car had already been added to the PNAERC list.

Switching at Branford

Branford has published on their shop's Facebook page (no log-in required) some photos taken during a recent switch move. As with many museums, switch moves like this afford a rare opportunity to get a good look - and good photos - of equipment that is normally ensconced deep inside storage barns. Thanks to Roger Addil, who took the photos, and to Dennis Pacelli, who has granted permission to re-post them, we can now get a look at some recent progress and rarely-seen cars.

The big news here is significant recent progress on restoration of the museum's two oldest double-truck Third Avenue Railway System cars. These cars are really emblematic of the equipment used for decades on that system and it's terrific to see them fixed up. The car above is TARS 884, a rare full convertible car built by Brill in 1909 that sports the three-panel front end that was so common on the system. This car has been completely repainted on the outside and really looks spectacular.

Close behind it is another Third Avenue car, TARS 830, which is a standard closed double-truck car built by Brill in 1908. Exterior restoration on this car was begun more recently and is ongoing, so it has been completely repainted but not yet lettered. Both cars look really stunning. It's hard to believe that they were retired all the way back in 1948!

After that we have a few pieces of equipment that aren't the subject of current restoration projects, but are rarely seen out in the sunlight. This is Brooklyn & Queens Transit 9832, a single-truck snow sweeper built by Brill in 1915. This is the only Brill-built single-truck snow sweeper currently surviving in the U.S., though there are a handful of them still around in Europe.

Cornwall 12 is a standard Baldwin-Westinghouse class B steeplecab built in 1917. It spent most of its service life in northern Utah, running first for the Ogden Logan & Idaho and then for the Utah-Idaho Central.

And finally we have Boston 3271, a typical Differential dump motor built in 1920 that came to Branford in 1976. It has a cab at one end, as was typical of many of these motors, but the cab was removed years ago during a restoration effort that was later suspended. The "house roof" was put over the dump body to protect it during a period when the car was stored outside.

Branford rebuilding updates

The latest newsletter from Branford has arrived and, as usual, it has a trove of information on their massive years-long motor rebuilding project. This effort was begun not by choice but by necessity, following the flooding of the museum by two different hurricanes about a decade ago. The scope of work is remarkable: dozens of cars have had, or will have, their motors rebuilt and in many cases will also see significant mechanical and control system work. By the project's end, it will give Branford a collection of cars in better electrical and mechanical shape than any other trolley museum.

The latest car returned to operation with its motors rebuilt is Rhode Island Company 61, the attractive single-trucker shown above in a photo from Branford's website. Its record on the list has been suitably updated. The newsletter makes the point that car 61 is Branford's oldest electric streetcar that was built as an electric; Third Avenue Railway 220 is a year older but was built as a cable car.

Then there are the cars that are just entering the motor rebuild project. Lynchburg Railway 34, which was the first car ever acquired by Branford, has been jacked up and its motors removed for rebuilding. The same is true, though at the other end of the size spectrum, for Interborough Rapid Transit 3662. This is the only preserved deck-roof IRT car and one of only two preserved IRT Hi-V cars that were built with GE Type M control. It hasn't run in years so its return to operation should be pretty interesting.

The final category includes cars whose rebuilds are in progress. North Shore 709, the museum's representative Chicago area interurban car, has had its motors rebuilt and is awaiting their reinstallation. The same is true of Cincinnati & Lake Erie 116, which has been seeing quite a bit of interior restoration work. And control system overhaul on Brooklyn & Queens Transit 1001, the first production PCC car, has progressed enough to allow reassembly to begin. This car's motors have been rebuilt but its under-floor control equipment was also flooded and has needed significant work.

Atlantic City 250 moves

Thanks to Bill Wall of Branford, who sends word that Atlantic City 250 has been donated by that organization to the North Jersey Electric Railway Historical Society. As shown above, the car has been moved to an industrial property in Piscataway, where it joins several other cars including Public Service Coordinated Transport 2651 and a couple of Newark subway work cars purportedly under the ownership of the United Railroad Historical Society. (I should mention that NJERHS and URHS are related but I'm not precisely sure how, so NJERHS may hold title to those work cars as well.)

Car 250, for its part, is quite historic. It was built during WWI for shipyard service on the Southwestern, which I believe was in Philadelphia, and a few years later was sold to the Ocean Electric Railway. So far as I know, this makes it the only extant car from the long-gone network of streetcar lines that once existed on Long Island east of the New York city limits (EDIT: Jeff Hakner points out that, in fact, Brooklyn Rapid Transit 1792 was leased to New York & Long Island Traction from 1922 to 1924 so car 250 is one of two). In 1928 it went to Atlantic City, eventually ending its career there in 1955 and going to the nascent Trolley Museum of New York. That organization saw its collection move to a number of different places during the next thirty years and car 250 suffered grievously from the outdoor and unprotected storage. In 2007 it was deaccessed by TMNY and Branford acquired it, in part to prevent it from being scrapped, and moved it to an off-site storage location. It has now found a home back in New Jersey as the only non-PSCT car in the NJERHS collection. This is also the latest example of Branford's willingness to transfer cars to homes at other museums, a trait which isn't always common in traction preservation.

Branford updates

I recently got my hands on a newsletter from Branford that included updates of some of the car restoration work being performed there. Some of their restoration projects, such as PSCT 4584 and TARS 884, continue to see regular progress. But there are also a couple of new (or perhaps "new to me" would be more accurate) restoration projects that have resulted in PNAERC listing updates. First, C&LE 116, one of four surviving "Red Devil" high-speed cars, has been noted as under restoration. Though the car is not operational due to flooding, the exterior has been restored and a complete interior restoration is currently underway. There's also ConnCo 1802, a 1917 Wason steel car, which is being repainted and is evidently getting other work done as well. Finally, there was an interesting article on B&QT 8361, a Brooklyn Peter Witt recently acquired in unrestored condition from the Trolley Museum of New York. This noted that the car last ran in 1954 and also listed off the locations that it called home during its wandering years with TMNY. According to the article this was the first car acquired by TMNY, in April 1955, and between 1955 and c1967 it was stored in the B&O yard at St. George on Staten Island. It was then moved to Tansboro, NJ to the Trolley Valhalla site there, but only remained a short time until it was moved again to Morristown c1969. There it stayed until in 1976 it returned home to the Coney Island Shops of the NYCTA, where it was part of a stillborn plan to run historic streetcars on the old South Brooklyn Railway line. It left Coney Island in 1982 for the Brooklyn Army Terminal, whence it left for the permanent TMNY site in Kingston in 1988. Whew!

TARS car restoration work

While there are no fewer than 23 cars preserved from the Third Avenue Railway System in New York, there are relatively few of the panel-ended deck-roof cars that were so closely associated with the company for decades. Of extant TARS cars on the PNAERC list a dozen - more than half - are 1930s-era arch-roof cars that were later sold for overseas use while another five are snow sweepers. Of the other six, three are double-truck closed cars and all three of these are stored in complete but poor condition, victims of benign neglect. At least, that has been the case - car 884, a 1909  Brill convertible and one of the earliest acquisitions by Branford (the photo above shows it around the time of its preservation in 1948), is now the subject of a restoration project. The car was operational until the recent hurricanes that flooded Branford, and had been capable of propelling itself for occasional switch moves. Currently the car is being given an exterior paint job and some interior work although the full scope of the project isn't clear at this point. But it's good to see this rather historic car "under restoration" and not just in dead storage.

ConnCo car work at Branford

The Shore Line Trolley Museum has a somewhat active Facebook page devoted to its shop activities and I noticed that they just recently posted some photos of Connecticut Company 1199 out in the sunlight - for the first time in quite a few years, if I understand correctly. This car is rather historic because it's the newest known Stephenson product in existence, dating to 1907. Intriguingly, Branford most likely also has the oldest Stephenson product in existence, a truly ancient horsecar dating to sometime around 1857 which is also thought to be the oldest preserved street railway vehicle in the world.

For some time 1199 has been stored on the west track of Branford's "Blossom Barn" along with ConnCo open car 614 and Brooklyn "Peter Witt" 8111 with rail access difficult at best. But it appears that it was pulled outside for some cleanup. From the photos it appears to be the recipient of some recent stabilization work; perhaps this is George Papuga's latest restoration project?