It's getting less common for the big trolley museums to add car bodies "found in the wild" to their collections, but smaller museums and individual collectors are picking up the slack. Earlier this week, an individual in Cheyenne, Wyoming, who operates a contract restoration business under the name High Plains Railroad Preservation, acquired and moved Denver Tramways 842. The car, shown above en route to its new home, is a single-ended Peter Witt built in the DT shops in 1924. As far as I can tell, after it was retired at the end of the streetcar era in Denver, it was made into a cabin near Fort Collins, Colorado. There it sat until this week. It's now the most modern of the nine streetcars from Denver on the PNAERC list, even though its construction appears to be entirely of wood with just steel sheathing - not exactly cutting-edge for 1924! It's clearly in rough shape, but HPRP has recently completed a stunning cosmetic restoration of Denver Tramways .04 - owned by the City of Arvada, but for the moment listed on PNAERC under HPRP because that's its physical location - so a bright future for car 842 isn't particularly unlikely. The PNAERC list now stands at a total of 2,087 cars.
