Let's Work on a PCC

Following on the heels of the return of the Terrible Trolley, more PCC restoration news has come to light. It appears that working on restoring PCC cars is all the rage these days!

First up is DC Transit 1430, a wartime (prewar-style) car built in 1944 by St. Louis for the Washington, DC system. One of only five Washington PCC cars still in 1) the US, and 2) its original form, and the only member of its series extant, the car was retired in 1962 and made its way to the Rockhill Trolley Museum. It remained there, stored outdoors, until 1997, when it went back to home territory at the National Capital Trolley Museum. NCTM volunteers have now started working on the car, starting with cleaning up and repainting the interior, so its status has been changed to "undergoing restoration." Thanks to Wesley Paulson for the update on this car. The above photo is from here.

Next comes San Francisco Municipal Railway 1153, which was built by St. Louis in 1946 for the hometown streetcar system as St. Louis Public Service 1742. It went to Muni in 1957 and upon retirement in 1982 it was acquired by the Western Railway Museum. It has been stored at WRM ever since, mostly as a static display piece as far as I can tell, but that looks to be changing. As shown in the above photo (from here), car 1153 has been brought into the WRM shop for mechanical work. It is receiving a rebuilt MG set and possibly other work. Its status, too, has been updated to "undergoing restoration." There are 21 cars from this series on the PNAERC list, but most are in rough shape - I'd opine that car 1153 is in better shape than all but two or three of the others.

And finally we have this, which is just a thumbnail (I can't find the original image, posted earlier this week) purporting to show SEPTA 2336, one of the system's modernized "PCC III" cars. This car has been undergoing another overhaul for something like a year and a half, but the novel development is that it is supposedly being painted in "Gulf Oil" colors rather than in traditional PTC green and cream like the rest of the PCC III fleet. Time will tell whether it rolls out of the shop in this livery. Although the "Gulf Oil" livery is among the more distinctive applied to PCC cars, only one car has heretofore been repainted in these colors.

The Auto-Railer - UPDATED

It's rare for me to even mention anything with an internal combustion engine in relationship with PNAERC, but on occasion, something pops up that's cool enough that even I can't manage to find it uninteresting. And so, courtesy of some timely photos and information from our friend Bill Wall, I present the Evans Auto-Railer.

Back in the 1930s, there was a small market for rail buses, with many of the examples built going to traction lines to either replace or feed into electric railway operations (see the Grafton rail bus and the slightly later Houston-North Shore rail bus, both preserved at the National Museum of Transportation). Around 1935, a company called Evans started building modern, streamlined rail buses patterned after the city buses of the day. These weren't normal rail buses, though, because they had both rubber tires and railroad wheels - think Hy-Railer - and could operate both on and off the tracks. Evans called them Auto-Railers, and only one has survived to the present day.

Pictured here, it has just been acquired by the National Capital Trolley Museum. That's a good home for it because it came from the Arlington & Fairfax in Virginia, an electric line that had just taken down its wires. It was built in 1936 and only ran on the A&F until 1939, which is when that line was abandoned. This example was sold to the Arcade & Attica in western New York, where it resided until it went to Clark's Trading Post in New Hampshire in the late 1950s. It has been there ever since. Other examples went to interurban lines including the Washington & Old Dominion and the Chicago South Shore & South Bend.*

So, congratulations to NCTM on saving this quite distinctive piece of history. The Auto-Railer wasn't very successful; I think the A&F, with its 13 examples, was by far the largest operator. These can't have been terribly popular with riders accustomed to large, heavy streetcars. Incredibly, the seating capacity appears to have been 27 people, which sounds horrifying given that the thing doesn't appear that much larger than a Chevy Suburban.

*Intriguingly, although historic records claim that A&F 109 went to the South Shore, that number is clearly evident on the example shown here that's going to NCTM. So, which Auto-Railer went to the South Shore?

UPDATE: Bill Wall kindly provided an additional photo of the front of the Auto-Railer that clearly shows the number, even though most of the paint has worn away: 109. The number is located over the front headlight in the same location and typeface used by the Arlington & Fairfax, so I would presume that this was, indeed, A&F 109. 

This was definitely not the Auto-Railer that ended up on the South Shore. Bill reports that the example now at NCTM has a complete interior and ceiling, plus it clearly lacks add-ons the CSS&SB one acquired such as square headlight surrounds and some rooftop accoutrements. Ideally, it would be nice to find South Shore Line records showing the previous fleet number of the Auto-Railer they received and rebuilt as an overhead line truck; barring that, it may be difficult to figure out what that thing's A&F number had been, since it's now known that it wasn't A&F 109.

UPDATE #2: More information from Bill Wall comes in the form of this 1962 photo of Auto-Railer 109, purportedly taken at the White Mountain Central (Clark's Trading Post, I presume) and labeled "Grasse River." The photo is from this page.

This thing was clearly in rough shape even 60 years ago! The Grasse River Railroad was an unusual short line railroad in upstate New York which was also home to the distinctive wooden doodlebug now preserved in operational condition at the Strasburg Railroad. This thing appears to have gone from the A&F to the GRR, possibly via the Arcade & Attica. How much use it saw, if any, on the GRR is unknown. Note that when this photo was taken, the South Shore was still using their Auto-Railer as a line car!

Capital Traction Single-Trucker Runs

Thanks to Wesley Paulson for sending along the above photo of Capital Traction 522 running at the National Capital Trolley Museum for the first time following the restoration of its body and exterior, as well as replacement of its work car-era Brill 21E truck with an authentic Lord Baltimore truck (which I didn't realize is a replica constructed in recent years by Lyons Industries - an impressive feat!). There's also video of the car running here. The operational restoration was made possible in part by volunteers from the Baltimore Streetcar Museum who helped with rewiring and brake work. Car 522 is quite historic, of course; it's one of the oldest existing cars from the Washington system and it's the oldest currently in operation. That Lord Baltimore truck is a rarity, too - there are only five cars in existence with this type, including three cars at BSM and Capital Traction 303 (of the same type as car 522) in the Smithsonian. Congratulations to NCTM on this major step forward!

In less happy news, thanks to Andy Nold for passing along the news that the body of El Paso Electric Railway 111 has been scrapped. This car, which was in extremely rough condition, was the last survivor from El Paso Electric Railway (the predecessor of El Paso City Lines) and the only non-PCC streetcar from El Paso known to still exist. A "Stone & Webster" type turtleback-roof car, it was built in 1912 for El Paso as a trailer but later transferred to Northern Texas Traction and motorized [corrected]. It had been stored in Azle, Texas, under the auspices of the now-defunct Northern Texas Historic Transportation group.

EDIT: The two below photos of car 111 were taken by Andy Nold. He writes, "...the car was in great shape. Only known 12-window Stone and Webster turtleback in existence. The photos are after the new owner of the land beat it up with a backhoe."

A move and an addition

The big news for today is that the National Capital Trolley Museum has acquired DC Transit 1470 from the Virginia Museum of Transportation in Roanoke. The news was report in a Facebook post (no log-in required). Car 1470 is a standard postwar Washington DC PCC car, built in 1945 by St. Louis Car Company, and bears some of the unique features of DC postwar cars such as air-electric brakes, taller-than-normal side windows, and a prewar style windshield. It also has an unusual automatic pole-lowering device. It joins the only other DC postwar car preserved domestically, car 1540, in the NCTM collection but it is in much better condition. Despite some 45 years of outdoor display in Roanoke, car 1470 was maintained in generally good condition from all appearances and may be a good candidate for restoration to operational condition. It was always a bit of an oddball display in Roanoke and it's great to see it back home at National Capital.

This is just the latest Washington DC car to be returned to home territory from initial preservation elsewhere. It follows prewar PCC car 1430, acquired from Rockhill in 1997; center-entrance car 650, brought home from Branford in 2002; and sweeper 09, repatriated from Rockhill in 2012. Other than PCC cars sold abroad or heavily rebuilt for service elsewhere, nearly every preserved car from Washington is now preserved in or near DC. EDIT: Many thanks to Wesley Paulson of NCTM for the photos of car 1470 now included in this post.

And on an unrelated topic, I've also added a new car to the list. It's not a newly-preserved car but it has just recently come across my radar as a significant piece of traction history. The car in question is Chicago Transit Authority S314, a work car preserved at the Fox River Trolley Museum. It has recently been cosmetically restored and is apparently in use. I'd seen it before but had been under the mistaken impression that it was essentially a piece of non-traction railroad work equipment. However it turns out that, while not self-propelled, it is fully 600v-powered (including a prominently mounted D3F pump) and has quite the illustrious traction heritage. It was built by Chicago City Railway as a cab-on-flat work car, later sold to the Calumet & South Chicago, and served the Chicago Surface Lines for decades.

National Capital anniversary

Congratulations to the National Capital Trolley Museum on their 50th anniversary. Thanks to regular contributor Wesley Paulson for making me aware of this milestone and for sending along a couple of photos taken during a commemorative event on the 19th. Above, the museum's three operating cars from the Capital Transit system: PCC 1101, single-trucker 522, and snow sweeper 09. These three have very different histories with NCTM. The PCC is a longtime member of the museum's operating fleet, while 522 has been at NCTM for decades but only recently underwent a significant restoration effort. The newest (though not youngest) member is 09, which only came to the museum in 2012.

And here's a photo that includes some of the museum's equipment from further afield. A Toronto PCC, Third Avenue Railway car from New York, and a single-trucker from Belgium round out the lineup. All are shown in front of the museum's beautiful car barns that were constructed around a decade ago.

Capital Transit sweeper running again

Thanks to Wesley Paulson for forwarding along a good piece of news: Capital Transit 09, an 1899 McGuire-Cummings snow sweeper preserved at the National Capital Trolley Museum in Wheaton, Maryland, is now running again after several years out of service. NCTM members had to repair some of the car's resistance grids but it's back in service as shown in the above and below photos forwarded by Wesley.

Car 09 is one of seven hometown cars preserved at NCTM but it's the only piece of non-revenue equipment. When retired in 1962 the car was sold to Louis Buehler of Railways to Yesterday (now the Rockhill Trolley Museum) and it was moved to Orbisonia to join the growing collection of traction equipment there. Following the catastrophic fire at NCTM in 2003, in which two Washington DC snow sweepers - one of them car 07, an identical sister to 09 - were destroyed, a plan was hatched to see car 09 returned to home territory. This plan came to fruition in 2012 when car 09 went to NCTM and in exchange Rockhill received Iowa Terminal 3, a slightly newer McGuire-Cummings sweeper that had been stored at Branford since 2005.

Wesley also sent along an interesting piece of history: the bill of sale from DC Transit in 1962 when car 09 was sold to Louis Buehler. A complete, operating, 19th-century snow sweeper went for the princely sum of $200 in those days. What a steal!

Capital Traction 27 update

Many thanks to Wesley Paulson of the National Capital Trolley Museum, who has sent along this update of the restoration work being done on Capital Traction 27 (later DC Transit 766):

Restoration nears completion on Capital Traction 27 (Kuhlman 1918). Long familiar as "766", its post-1933 merger roster number, Capital Traction 27 now wears the livery from its early 1930s rebuild.  The Museum decided to restore the car to the 1930s time point to interpret a standard two-man car from that era.  A restoration to an as-built status was determined to be too extensive since the car retains most of the modifications from the rebuilding, including seating and mechanical changes.  It was necessary to remove modifications made by Capital Transit when the car was converted to one-man operation in 1944, including a treadle door and opening the platform doors on the "blind side" of the car.

Interior restoration included stripping paint and varnishing exposed wood surfaces, replacing the ceiling lining, and reupholstering the seats (not shown).  All window frames were rebuilt or replaced.  A traditional fare register will be installed but the original linkage through the car was destroyed in the 2003 fire, having been removed when the car arrived at the Museum in 1970. 

The current project does not include a mechanical restoration.  The car was rewired in this phase of the project, but new brake piping must be installed before the car can operate on its own.  Current plans are to display the car for its 100th birthday in Streetcar Hall.  And open the interior for inspection on special event days.

The restoration was supported by the 20th Century Electric Railway Foundation, the Chevy Chase Land Company, Monarch Paint Company, the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County, the Maryland Historic Trust, Heritage Montgomery, and many generous individual donors.

Keith Bray, Bruce Thain and Ed Blossom provided professional services in support of the project over many years.

Miscellaneous changes

There haven't been any major changes recently, but a few minor ones have been made relating to restoration progress at a couple of different museums. First, National Capital has released a photo of single-trucker 522, which has recently been cosmetically restored. More information can be found here. It had been on a Brill 21E (modified for rail grinding use) but Baltimore Streetcar Museum traded them a correct older-type Lord Baltimore truck for the car. In turn, car 4662 at BSM is supposed to have a Brill 21 but had been placed on a Lord Baltimore shop truck many decades ago. I'm not positive whether 4662 will receive 522's Brill 21 (confused yet?) but I suspect that it will get some sort of 21 truck.

And in other news, the Illinois Railway Museum has gotten "L" car 24 running for the first time since 1958. See here for photos. The car had formerly been listed on PNAERC as Chicago Rapid Transit 1024 but the restoration project which is now in its later stages has backdated the car to its earlier owner and number, Northwestern Elevated Railroad 24.