MU Cars West!

A Facebook page called Northwest Daylight Productions posted today that the three ex-Knox & Kane, ex-Lackawanna MU motor cars recently owned by the Heber Valley Railroad in Utah have been sold to the Roaring Camp tourist railroad operation in Felton, California. All three cars - 3568, 3571, and 3593 - have apparently been moved or are in transport. These cars are, frankly, in rough shape. They weren't maintained very well in their later years on the Knox & Kane and, as effectively backup equipment, have received only minimal service (and no paint) since arriving in Utah in 2005. They're definitely not up to the standards of Heber Valley's beautiful fleet of heavyweight cars they acquired from Canada a few years ago.

The above photo, from the aforementioned Facebook post, shows a common problem with the 1930 Lackawanna motor cars: the aluminum roof sheathing separating from the tops of the steel car sides. Thanks to Sean Bowen for alerting me to the cars' arrival in California and to David Wilkins for confirming the sale by HVRR.

Unless the Roaring Camp organization is planning to expand into a new market, these cars are presumably intended to go into service between the home base in Felton and the beachfront in Santa Cruz. I've had the chance to ride both the short, but mountainous, narrow-gauge railroad in Felton and the standard-gauge line down to the beach (see here) and both trips were very enjoyable. When I rode the standard-gauge line, the equipment in use was ex-Boston & Maine wood cars, which made for a very nice experience. Hopefully, these MU cars are being used to bolster, rather than replace, the wood fleet on this line.

Saltair additions and a deletion

So it came to my attention, due to a thread over on RyPN, that the Utah State Railroad Museum in Ogden has a pretty nice online roster which includes a fair amount of information on their collection - including the four pieces of traction equipment they own. Only two of these, Bamberger "Bullet" car 126 and Salt Lake & Utah freight trailer 851, were already on my roster. The other two, big Salt Lake Garfield & Western ("Saltair") open car trailers whose numbers are unknown, were not on my roster. That has now been corrected.

The two cars (now on the roster here and here) are from the 301-313 series of cars, built in the company shops in 1922 using parts from older 1890s-era freight cars. The museum's website roster has a great deal of mechanical information on these cars which has also allowed me to flesh out the listing for an identical car at the Western Railway Museum in Rio Vista (that car is thought to be fleet number 306). Both of the cars owned by the Ogden museum are stored, along with the Bamberger "Bullet" car body, at the Ogden Business Depot on the north side of Ogden near the county fairgrounds. The Google Maps aerial photo above shows, from left to right, one of the open cars; the "Bullet" on a flatcar; the other open car; and the remains of dome car "Moon Glow." There's also a brief article (with photos) about the open cars, forecasting a restoration which I believe has not yet happened, at this link.

And the roster linked above also contained a piece of information about yet another example of these big Saltair open cars which I was able to confirm independently, namely that the fourth of the previously surviving examples of this type was scrapped at the Heber Valley Railroad in 2009 following serious damage from a fire set by an arsonist. So that car has been removed from the roster, leaving Heber Valley on the PNAERC list with only three Lackawanna MU cars used in locomotive-hauled train service.