Penn Ohio PCCs

It was brought to my attention that a post made yesterday on Reddit, of all places, includes photos of the rarely seen Pittsburgh PCCs at Penn Ohio Electric Railway in Ashley, Ohio. That may be a misnomer at this point; the person who posted the photos says they recently purchased the property the cars sit on, and the two remaining PCCs just came with the purchase. There used to be a third PCC, Pittsburgh 1713, which was conveyed to the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum last year. That leaves two: air-electric 1639 and 1949 sealed-window postwar car 1728.

These two cars have been listed as being "for sale" since 2017, but the post makes a couple of things pretty clear. First, when PTM acquired car 1713 last year, the owners of the three cars made these two available to the museum as parts sources. As such, at least some of the more valuable parts and components have been scavenged to help keep cars in the PTM fleet operating. Second, the current owners have no particular interest in these cars being moved somewhere else to rot away. Their current intention is to scrap both, and the PNAERC listings for both cars have been updated to reflect that.

This isn't a huge historical loss, as there are other examples of both 1600- and 1700-series Pittsburgh cars preserved, most notably at PTM. But there aren't as many as you might think. If you discount the cars remanufactured as 4000s and the six soon-to-be-cut-up 1700s in Windber, car 1728 is one of just seven 1700-series cars still in existence. Of the other six, two are at PTM, two are plinthed outdoors, one is in private hands and one is nicely stuffed and mounted at the Heinz Museum in Pittsburgh. It's unlikely any besides the two at PTM will ever run again. As for 1600s, car 1639 is one of four cars from that 1945 order still around; the other three include car 1644 at Northern Ohio Railway Museum, modernized car 1799 at PTM, and the heavily rebuilt car with the LRV front end at Buckeye Lake.

A Terrible Acquisition

Congratulations to the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum on their newest acquisition, shown above in a post from their Facebook page today. The new arrival is Port Authority Transit 1713, a typical 1700-series PCC built in 1949 by St. Louis. As evidenced by its rather modern paint job, this car ran very late: it was still in service into the late 1990s and wasn't sold into preservation until 1998. Since that time it's been in private hands in Ohio, part of a small collection of Pittsburgh PCCs known as Penn Ohio Electric Railway. It, and the other two PCCs in the collection, have been for sale for a while. So what makes this car special?

That's right - car 1713 is the famous, or perhaps infamous, "Terrible Trolley." Pittsburgh had a lot of PCC cars with one-off paint schemes, but this car got one of the better known ones. Sometime around 1980 it was painted up for the Steelers, with "Terrible Trolley" painted on the side among various other embellishments (above photo taken in 1986 by Peter Ehrlich). By 1987, the car's livery had changed again to original Pittsburgh Railway colors (shown here), but that didn't last too long either. It ended its days in modern LRV colors, painted up like the 4000-series rebuilds, though this car remained a relatively original 1949 PCC car until the end. From the sounds of it, PTM is indeed planning on restoring this as the "Terrible Trolley." It should be quite the attention getter!

PCCs for sale

A recent post on RyPN at this link suggests that the owner of Penn Ohio Electric Railway, the private collection of three Pittsburgh PCC cars located near Ashley, Ohio, has put the trio up for sale. Of the three cars, one is an air-electric - car 1639 (built in 1945 and said to be partly disassembled following some uncompleted restoration work), car 1713 (built in 1949 and said to be in rather good condition), and car 1728 (also from 1949 and said to be in poor condition and mainly good as a parts source). All are, of course, Pennsylvania gauge.