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.

Silverliner Preserved

When interurban fans think of Silverliners, they're picturing this beauty and its ilk. But the Silverliner that's the subject of today's post is a bit more homely, albeit also significantly higher capacity, at least when it comes to seating.

The Reading Company Technical & Historical Society has announced on Facebook that Reading 9001, a "Silverliner II" electric commuter coach, has been acquired for preservation from SEPTA. The car was built by Budd in 1963 using grant money and was in service until 2012. Apparently, SEPTA has been holding onto it for about a dozen years for the purpose of preservation, but finally put it up for sale - and the RCT&HS purchased it. Since 2019, the car has been stored at Frazer, as shown above, but the plan is to move it shortly to the society's site in Hamburg. It's now been added to the PNAERC list.

Car 9001 is a behemoth, at 85' long, roughly 101,000 lbs., and seating 124 people. It began life with mercury arc rectifiers but these were later changed to silicon diode rectifiers. It also has a late-1980s vintage transformer that replaced its original PCB model. While far from the newest heavy rail commuter EMU car preserved - the ex-IC Highliners and the handful of preserved "Metropolitan" type cars from the New York era date to the early 1970s - car 9001 does have the distinction of being the most modern car from the Philadelphia area currently on the PNAERC list. For now, it's still listed under SEPTA ownership, but it will be moved over to RCT&HS ownership as soon as it rolls into Hamburg. Many thanks to Jacob Wiczkowski for alerting me to this one!

PCCs Return to Philadelphia

I'm a couple of weeks late on this, but SEPTA has put its heavily rebuilt PCC-II cars back into regular service on Route 15 for the first time since the line was bustituted at the start of 2020. Some, maybe most - but I don't think all - of the 2300-series cars have undergone a major in-kind overhaul and are now back in service. The trouble is, I'm not sure which cars are still being rebuilt or have yet to be rebuilt. Anyone have an updated fleet status report? Here's what I know, or at least think I know:

2322, 2324, 2327, 2328, 2332, 2333, 2337 - overhauled, in service

2320, 2321, 2325, 2329, 2330, 2331, 2334, 2335 - not sure whether these have been overhauled or whether they are in service

2323, 2326, 2336 - currently undergoing overhaul?

Photo above by Marc Glucksman

Philadelphia PCC-II Overhaul Program

A recent post on a PCC group on Facebook, made by a SEPTA employee, brought readers up to date on the overhaul program currently underway at SEPTA. That agency has a fleet of 18 "PCC-II" streetcars - Philadelphia PCC cars that were torn down to their frames and rebuilt by Brookville around 2004-2005, complete with new (though "PCC-inspired") control and motors as well as sealed windows and A/C. After about 15 years the cars were all pulled from service and they're now going through an in-house overhaul. This job, unlike the last one, is generally sympathetic, and they're emerging more-or-less indistinguishable from how they went in.

Of the cars in the fleet (list here - note that this is not an all-inclusive list of cars on PNAERC owned by SEPTA), four have already been overhauled and outshopped: 2332 (outshopped June 2021), 2328 (outshopped August 2021), 2337 (outshopped June 2022), and 2322 (outshopped within the last few weeks). Four more are currently in the shop being overhauled: 2324, 2326, 2327, and 2333. The remaining 10 cars are still waiting their turn. Cars undergoing overhaul have been noted as "undergoing restoration;" cars that haven't yet gone into the shop are "stored operable;" and cars that have been overhauled are described as "operated often." This may be a bit aspirational for the moment, but sooner or later it's bound to come true.

Spam cans to the Carolinas

The Friends of Philadelphia Trolleys Facebook page (no log-in required) reports that the last pair of ex-CTA "spam can" rapid transit cars, SEPTA 482 and 483, have at long last left Philadelphia and are on the road to a new home in North Carolina. The above photo is from the announcement.

The two cars in question are among the earliest CTA 6000-series 'L' cars built that are still around. They were constructed in late 1950 or early 1951 by St. Louis Car Company as CTA 6089-6090, like all 6000s a married pair. As part of the CTA's initial order for 6000s they were not built using components from scrapped PCC streetcars but were designed to utilize standard PCC components like windows and control equipment.

Most of the CTA's fleet of 6000s was retired during the mid-1980s when the 2600-series (today the eldest CTA cars in service) was delivered. By 1986 there were still some 6000s in service but most had been retired and in storage. In the meantime the SEPTA ex-Philadelphia & Western line between Norristown and 69th Street in Philadelphia was practically in a state of collapse. Several accidents and fires occurred in 1985-1986 that took cars - some 60 years old - out of service and the operations over the P&W were actually suspended for a few months in the fall of 1986 for lack of equipment. Desperate for rolling stock, SEPTA purchased ten pairs of retired 6000s in rough shape from the CTA and put seven of them into service in late 1986, cannibalizing the other three pairs for parts. These cars permitted the resumption of service on the P&W line and comprised the majority of the service fleet on the line until the new N-5 cars arrived in 1993-1994.

Amazingly, all seven pairs of 6000s sold to SEPTA are still around, although all have been victims of benign neglect over the past 25 years. Five sets, including at least one pair that was never repainted by SEPTA and retains its CTA Bicentennial color scheme, are in storage at VESCO in Windber, PA. Another pair is at the Middletown & Hummelstown. And that leaves 482-483, which have been sitting alongside 72nd Street Shop on the Norristown line for 25 years. I'm not sure why this pair stuck around so long however I think that they were retained for a couple of years after retirement from passenger service as "brine cars" for spraying ice melt on the third rail.

Where they're headed is the Craggy Mountain Line in Woodfin, North Carolina. Since its creation a decade ago, CML has amassed the largest - and by far the oddest - collection of traction equipment in the Carolinas. Joining two local Asheville single-truck streetcar bodies is the body (on trucks) of a New York IND subway car and, now, a pair of ex-Chicago Philadelphia rapid transit cars. What CML plans to do with the cars isn't entirely clear but they are, at least, the organization's first complete (or at least mostly complete) electric cars. For its part, SEPTA hasn't run out of semi-derelict rapid transit cars on its property yet.