Berkshire Hills Arrives Home

Thanks to Jordan Helzer, who has sent the photos shown here of the famous parlor car "Berkshire Hills" being unloaded last week at the Shelburne Falls Trolley Museum. This returns it much closer to its original stomping grounds in western Massachusetts; indeed, SFTM is less than 20 miles as the crow flies from the old Berkshire Street Railway route through North Adams.

As seen above in a Sam Bartlett photo, the car body has been moved inside the SFTM barn, probably the first time it's really been kept under cover since it was sold by BSR back in 1932. It's been placed atop correct-type Brill 27A trucks that were acquired by Seashore in 2022 from IRM, which itself had salvaged them long ago from a North Shore Line snow sweeper that was scrapped back in the 1960s. SFTM obtained the trucks a year or so ago from Seashore and has cleaned them up and painted them in the meantime. With this acquisition, the SFTM traction collection stands at five pieces, all from the Bay State.

Tarped Cars on Truck Trailers in the Northeast

Thanks to Bill Wall for supplying news and photos regarding the conveyance of New Jersey Transit 5221, a utility/line car built in 1912, to Branford today. The car was moved by Silk Road from its recent home at the Kinkisharyo plant in Piscataway, New Jersey, and was unloaded in East Haven.

Car 5221 was built by Russell in 1912 as a snow plow and freight motor for the Trenton Terminal Railroad (later Public Service Railroad, then Public Service Coordinated Transport) system in New Jersey. At some point it was rebuilt as a line car, and in that guise it stayed in service on the Newark subway until it was transferred off the property in 2009. The car bounced around: it went to the National Capital Trolley Museum for a while, then was at Lyons Industries in Pennsylvania for truck rebuilding c2016-2017, and afterward ended up in Piscataway. The photo above, from this blog, was taken around 2018, but in 2019 the car was tarped and put outside. (The four photos below were all taken by Bill Wall.)

For five years or so, the car looked like this, tarped with a shrink-wrap "boat tarp" next to the Kinkisharyo building.

But through whatever means, the car was acquired by Branford. Above, it's shown loaded on a trailer.

And these last two photos, taken today, show the car on the line at Branford.

This is only the second line car in Branford's collection, and their first double-truck line car. (Oddly enough, among the "three sisters" that started the traction preservation movement in New England - Seashore, Warehouse Point, and Branford - there are only six line cars preserved among them, and 5221 is one of only two that are double-truck cars.) Car 5221 is one of six intact cars from the PSCT system before the PCC era, and four of those cars are now preserved at Branford.

The second car on the move is shown below (apologies for the thumbnail-sized image, which is a screen grab from a video posted by Seashore). You'd be hard pressed to tell from the tarp, but this is the famous Berkshire Hills, the business car from the Berkshire Street Railway that is the only survivor from that storied system.

This car was built by Wason in 1903, retired way back in 1922, and sold in 1932 for use as a diner. Following a 1994 fire that caused substantial damage, the body was acquired by Seashore in 1995, where it has been stored ever since. The car is now en route to its new home at the Shelburne Falls Trolley Museum, a transfer that has been planned for over a year. This is the second car on Seashore's "re-homing lists" to go to a new home; the first, MBTA line car 3283, also went to Shelburne Falls. The SFTM collection now totals five cars on PNAERC; Seashore's stands at 189 pieces; and the NJERHS is down to six cars while Branford is up one to 91 cars.

Boston Line Car Moves to Shelburne Falls

Thanks to Ellie Flint for the above photo and for reporting the news that earlier today Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority line car 3283 touched down at the Shelburne Falls Trolley Museum. This line car, built by Henry E. Dow (a local house builder) for the Boston MTA in 1949, was deaccessed by the Seashore Trolley Museum late last year and offered up for sale. At first, Seashore intended to strip and retain the car's electrical equipment, but in the end it was offered to SFTM as a complete car.

Car 3283 is the Massachusetts museum's fourth electric car, their third MBTA car, and their first piece of traction work equipment. Their plan is to repair the electrical fault that sidelined the car some years back at Seashore and put it back into operation. Kudos to them for preserving a piece of equipment that otherwise might have been dismantled.