Industrial locomotive on the chopping block

A recent Facebook post here (no log-in required) states that Phelps-Dodge 15, the diminutive locomotive shown in the photo above from the Facebook post, is to be scrapped unless a purchaser can be found. A comment made by the poster of the original notice suggests that the locomotive's owner, Old Pueblo Trolley, is short of funds and that the locomotive is being disposed of to raise cash. Presumably its marginal usefulness - besides being an industrial locomotive, it's also designed to operate on 250 volts and couldn't run alongside the foreign streetcars OPT has run in the past - also plays a role.

The locomotive is one of four identical homebuilt "calcine motors" from the P-D Douglas Works still in existence. Locomotives identical to this one are also preserved in Douglas, Phoenix, and Apache Junction. As such its loss would not be a significant historical blow. Still, it would be a shame to lose a complete 1906 industrial locomotive so hopefully it ends up somewhere intact - and hopefully OPT is not forced to further thin its collection due to the current crisis.

Muni PCC scrapped

I happened upon information stating that Muni 1121, an ex-St. Louis Public Service PCC car, was cut up sometime within the last year or so. As such it's been removed from the PNAERC list. The car, shown above, was built in 1946 as SLPS 1713 and ran in that city until it was sold to San Francisco in 1957. There it ran into the early 1980s and, according to my scant records, was sold by Muni in 1988. I'm not sure to whom it was sold, but by the mid-2000s it had surfaced in the collection of Old Pueblo Trolley in Tucson, Arizona where it was kept at their East 18th Street storage yard amidst a collection of mostly buses. OPT had to vacate that location recently, though, and while most of their streetcars were moved to a new indoor facility in South Tucson, car 1121 was not an accessed part of their collection and was not worth moving. After several years of the car being available to other museums, with no takers, it was scrapped. It is not a significant historic loss, as there are a lot of these ex-SLPS 1700s still around including one that has been completely restored to original condition.

Phoenix 44 lives!

What once was thought lost now is found. Thanks to the Old Pueblo Trolley e-newsletter - and Richard Schauer, who forwarded me a copy - I have learned that Phoenix Street Railway 44 is still in existence. Car 44 is the eldest of the three surviving PSR cars and the only one of the three that was not part of the 1928 order for American-built lightweight cars that closed out streetcar service in the city in 1948. Rather, car 44 - which is only a body, and a pretty decrepit one at that - was a 1913-built California car (though it may have been rebuilt as a closed car - see here). A lot about it I don't know, including when it was acquired by the Arizona Street Railway Museum in Phoenix, but for years it was stored in their small barn next to the pride of their fleet, PSR 116.

However when I visited ASRM in late 2016 I found that car 44 had disappeared at some point in the preceding few years, its spot assumed by PSR 504, a sister to car 116 that has the unusual distinction of being (I believe) the only streetcar preserved in the country that once served as a monkey house at the zoo. Anyhow, given car 44's poor condition I assumed it had been scrapped. But I was wrong and it has turned up in the collection of Old Pueblo Trolley in Tucson. It was recently moved to their new building in South Tucson where it is stored safely indoors. OPT has a larger collection of cars than ASRM, a collection that includes a smattering of foreign equipment, but car 44 is their only native Arizona streetcar. If anyone knows exactly when it was moved to Tucson I'd be interested to know.

As for ASRM, they are in the process of being evicted from their longtime home at Deck Park on the north side of downtown Phoenix. This was always a claustrophobic location and permitted the museum only a two-track barn and a "main line" about 400' long. So given the impetus to move to more expansive digs, they have chosen... not to! The museum is apparently moving to an even smaller lot about a mile away in a light industrial area. I hope that their decision to eschew the potential of a larger property further away from the city center in preference for a more confined, but central, location turns out better than it has for some others.