A Plus and a Minus

Today, I've got a new car on the list and another piece of equipment taken off. First, the good news: Northeast Rail Heritage Inc., the enigmatic owner of an Amtrak AEM7 as described here, now has a second piece of equipment on the list. SEPTA 238, pictured above, is the last Silverliner III MU car built in 1967 for the Pennsylvania Railroad. This car was retired in 2012 but remained on SEPTA property until 2023, when it was shipped off to a scrapper in Morrisville, PA, along the Delaware River. It never quite made it, though, and it's been sitting on a siding in Morrisville a short distance from its destination for a couple of years. A few months ago, NERHI went after it and they were successful in obtaining the car from the scrapyard. They haven't moved it - and I'm not sure where they even want to move it to, since they don't appear to have a physical site of their own, either owned or rented - but they do claim to own it, so I've added it to the PNAERC list. The group wants to someday restore it to "Yellowbird" livery it wore in the late 1980s, when it was assigned to Philadelphia Airport service.

And in less fortunate, but certainly not unexpected, news, Ferrocarril General Urquiza steeplecab 951 (shown above) has been removed from the list. This locomotive was built by Baldwin-Westinghouse in 1920 for Central Limones, but never went to that operation; stored by B-W for a few years, it ended up being sold to the Pacific Electric in 1923 as their number 1591. It went to Argentina in 1951 and ran on FGU for a number of years, acquiring trucks and electric equipment off ex-PE "Elevens" along the way. It ended up as part of the Ferroclub Argentino museum collection in Buenos Aires, but sometime around 2022 it found itself on an isolated siding and illegal scrappers cut up its trucks. The museum stopped the scrapping, but the locomotive's body remained dumped on that site, as shown above. The remains were cut up at an uncertain later date. This leaves four pieces of equipment on the list belonging to Ferroclub, of which three are ex-PE locomotives.

The Fourth AEM-7

A brand-new preservation organization announced today that they've acquired Amtrak 927, an AEM-7 electric locomotive built in 1981 by Electro-Motive. This is the fourth AEM-7 to be preserved and the second example that was rebuilt by Amtrak with AC propulsion equipment and traction motors. Number 927 has obviously lost a few parts, but is assumed to be essentially complete, judging from the above photo from today's announcement. The locomotive has been sitting for quite a few years in the dead line, recently in Davisville, Rhode Island, and was supposedly next in line to meet the torch when its now-owners stepped in.

So, what is this organization? It's called Northeast Rail Heritage Inc., and depending on which of their pages you look at, they were founded in either 2023 or 2024 (they are described as a 501(c)3 nonprofit, so perhaps the group was created in 2023 and gained nonprofit status this year?). Their website is nicely done but limited in scope, and other than general information about the significance of  the AEM-7, it mostly consists of board member bios. Amtrak 927 is their first acquisition; since they don't seem to have a museum site at the moment, I've set their location in PNAERC as the location of their rolling stock collection: Davisville, RI.

As a point of obscure trivia, among mainline electric locomotives, the AEM-7 is now second only to the GG-1 in terms of how many have been preserved. It has passed up the S-motor, "Little Joe," and Ferrocarril Mexicano boxcab types, all of which can boast of three preserved examples apiece.