Atlanta Streetcar in Limbo

Thanks to Wesley Paulson for pointing me to a Facebook post that contained some unexpected news about Georgia Railway & Power 269: the car has left the Southeastern Railway Museum in Duluth, its home for some 24 years.

Car 269 was built by Cincinnati in 1921 and was used on the line to Duluth, making it the only one of the handful of surviving Atlanta streetcars able to make that claim. As the above photo shows, it's in rough shape and has an end missing, but it's been kept tarped at SERM. However, the car appears to have been sold to a developer called SoDo Atlanta LLC (SoDo = South Downtown). SoDo has removed nearly all the remaining wood from the car, sand-blasted the steel, and moved it into a building at 82 Peachtree Street in the city.

The video on their site says "We imagine the car will become a small restaurant, bar, or unique hospitality experience in the near future." That could go either way; the car could be cosmetically restored as a centerpiece display, like this car or like one of the spaghetti restaurant cars. Or it could end up like this. For the moment, I've updated the car's ownership, but it's still on the PNAERC list. SERM is down to two cars on the list, a MARTA rapid transit car they acquired in 2022 and a second Atlanta streetcar body, Georgia Power 636.

Atlanta Subway Car Preserved

In a slightly surprising piece of news, the Southeastern Railway Museum outside of Atlanta - which has a small collection of electric cars but is mostly focused on steam road equipment - has acquired a car from the initial order for Atlanta subway cars. MARTA 509 arrived at the museum on Wednesday and will be placed on public display there, according to this press release.

This is actually a relatively significant acquisition, historically speaking. First, of course, it has local importance. Car 509 is the first and only MARTA car in preservation, and given the paucity of trolley museums in the southeast and the difficulty in putting large subway cars like this to practical use in a museum setting, may very well be the only MARTA car in preservation for quite a long time. Amazingly, I think it's also only the second electric railway car from Atlanta ever to be preserved intact after retirement (you may have to think hard to guess the first), at least if you only count cars still around today.

Furthermore, this car has some national significance too. During the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, several cities built all-new heavy-rail subway systems, including not just Atlanta but also San Francisco, Washington DC, and Los Angeles. Other than a pair of WMATA cars that have supposedly been squirreled away for safekeeping, but to my knowledge have not yet appeared publicly as historic artifacts, this MARTA car is the first car from any of these modern subway systems to be preserved in the US. (I say "in the US" because this preserved car from the Montreal Metro is also from a modern subway system, albeit a very unusual system built for rubber-tire cars.)

EDIT: Thanks to Richard Schauer for sending a link to this video about the history of car 509 and its donation to SERM. I was quite impressed; the video has a good mixture of technical/design history of the car and general background information on MARTA.