'Tis the Season in Ontario...

...for finishing up electric car restorations!

First up, the Elgin County Railway Museum is closing in on completion of their lengthy and comprehensive restoration of London & Port Stanley 14. Wesley Paulson sent me this link advertising a debut, of sorts, for car 14 coming up at the end of May. There's also a photo:

Car 14 is a "stretched" L&PS car built by Jewett in 1917. It's been under restoration at ECRM for quite a few years and has seen a tremendous amount of wood and other components replaced or rebuilt.

And second, Sandwich Windsor & Amherstburg 351 has finally been dedicated and placed on display in its brand-new pavilion on the Windsor, Ontario, riverfront. This car was professionally restored - by which I mean torn all the way down to the underframe and rebuilt, with most if not all wood replaced - between late 2018 and 2019. After more than five years in storage, it was dedicated today in Windsor. Many thanks to Jon Fenlaciki for sending a series of photos detailing this event.

Car 351 is shown in its new home

The building includes historic exhibit space

Here we see how car 351 looked when it was extracted from a house in 2017

Mayor Drew Dilkens of Windsor looks through the car

L-R: John Stefani, Bernard Drouillard (Windsor area railway historian), Salina Larocque (Windsor City Parks), Norm Krentel, Jon Fenlaciki

Bernard Drouillard is on the left as Mayor Dilkens makes some remarks

The Windsor Streetcar

It's been nearly five years since the frame-up restoration of Sandwich Windsor & Amherstburg 351 was completed. The work was done by an automobile restoration contractor retained by the City of Windsor with the goal of putting the car on display on the Detroit River waterfront. That hasn't happened yet, but I believe progress is being made toward constructing a shelter at Legacy Park.

In the meantime, car 351 has remained in storage, and very few photos of it have appeared online since restoration was completed. Until now! Thanks to Jon Fenlaciki, who visited the car today and sent in the below pictures.

The car originally had Standard O-50 trucks, but from other photos I believe these are Brill 27MCB trucks salvaged from an unknown rapid transit car.

Windsor streetcar restoration completed

Thanks to Laddie Vitek, who forwarded me this link that documents the completion of restoration work on Sandwich Windsor & Amherstburg 351. This historic car, whose history is outlined here in a post I made almost exactly a year ago, has been the subject of one of the most extensive and exacting restoration efforts ever performed on a streetcar. It seems the work is now complete and the car will, at some point, be moved to its new display location on the Windsor waterfront near the Ambassador Bridge. For the time being, and until it is actually on display, the car's condition has been updated from "under restoration" to "stored inoperable." The notation that it's a "body only" has also been removed, which is always a nice milestone to achieve.

A brand new streetcar for Christmas

Merry Christmas! For 2019, how would you like a brand new 101-year-old streetcar?

It was only slightly more than a year ago than this item was posted about a streetcar that had been retrieved from inside a house and acquired by the City of Windsor in Ontario. The car in question, Sandwich Windsor & Amherstburg 351, is a very historic piece of equipment. It's the more intact (believe it or not) of only two streetcars in existence to have run on Staten Island and is one of only a few streetcars built for the U.S. War Board during WWI. It was built to a Public Service of New Jersey design by the Cincinnati Car Company, though this series may have actually been shipped as kits and assembled in New Jersey, and as such it carries some PSNJ spotting features like high-mounted side windows with arched tops, deep letterboards over the end windows, and perhaps most unusually the "monitor" roof that PSNJ used that was something of a cross between a deck roof and a Stillwell roof. The car ran on Staten Island for only eight years before it went to Ontario, where it saw a further 13 years of use until it was retired in 1939.

And that leads us to RM Auto Restoration of Chatham-Kent, Ontario. RM was contracted by the City of Windsor to rebuild car 351 as a display piece for the town and the result is turning out to be what is almost certainly the most extensive and meticulous historical restoration of a streetcar ever attempted on this continent. Mario Van Raay of RM, with whom I was put in contact by Bill Wall of Branford, has supplied a number of photos that detail the progress of this remarkable restoration up to the present time. The project is also being tracked on a City of Windsor web page which among other things includes an in-service photo of an identical car.

 When car 351 arrived at RM in late 2017 it was rough, to say the least.

 Much of one vestibule and nearly half of one side of the car had been completely removed when it was a house. This had to be no small operation; the car was built with steel girders extending halfway up the sides of the car beneath the windows.

 The car's interior wasn't any better.

This photo shows pretty well the unusual roof profile of these cars. This type of monitor roof was virtually unique to Public Service Coordinated Transport of New Jersey, so this is an extremely rare example of a non-PSCT car with the design.

By January 2018, RM was well into the tear-down process, making sure to very carefully document the original fabric of the car at every step. This is where their experience in high-end automobile restoration has to have come in quite handy.

Not much left of the car's platform, but certainly the evidence of long-gone controllers and brake piping will be invaluable when it comes time to install replacements for those items

The interior seating arrangement of the car was changed during its service life, probably when it went to Windsor from Staten Island, and those changes were visible in the holes left over from seat pedestals long since removed.

The roof structure is interesting; I'm honestly not sure exactly what was here, but I'm guessing that the steel roof ribs were covered with a Masonite-like material.

By May 2018 the car was torn down completely, reducing it to its steel frame and girder sides. 

Note the section of girder on the left that was chopped away during the car's use as a house.

Presto - new steel sides! Quite a bit of structural steel work was done to the car's framing.

By July it was time to get the rebuilt frame painted and to start the reassembly process.

If that isn't the nicest-looking streetcar frame I've ever seen I don't know what is.

 All new roof ribs ready to reinstall...

 ...sandwiching the original steel car lines, which have been cleaned up and painted.

And here's one of the bulkheads with quite a lot of new wood.

And that brings us to the present day. The photo at the top of this article shows car 351 as it looks now, with a virtually all-new superstructure and an incredible amount of custom-made new wooden framing.

Note in the above photo that there's a cut-out in the platform; I believe this is where a treadle step goes, and it's since been installed as shown in the photo at the top of this post.

I'm running out of superlatives to describe this project, but you can judge for yourself. Many thanks to Mario and to Bill for sending along these photos. I can't wait to see the finished product - it will really be a stunner.

Windsor car body to be restored

A newspaper article here that was linked from RyPN suggests that the city of Windsor, Ontario has decided to fund the restoration (cosmetic, presumably) of Sandwich Windsor & Amherstberg 351, a body that was recently donated by an individual to the city. The car originally ran on Staten Island; more information is at this post. As part of this decision the car's donation to the city was also accepted, so it has been updated from being privately owned to now being owned by the City of Windsor.