Streetcar for Sale

It was only a month or so ago that Los Angeles Transit Lines 1435 came up on this very blog. It took me that long to figure out where it had ended up (the answer was the Southern California Fairgrounds in Perris, California). But it appears that it's not sticking around: it's just been listed for sale.

The photos are from the auction website where it's being sold here (link may not work for more than a few days). The listing says it needs to be removed from its current location by September 21st, which is in just a couple of days, so that's not auspicious. It remains to be seen what happens to the car after that.

Car 1435 is a Class H-3 double-truck steel car built by St. Louis in 1924 for Los Angeles Railway. It ran until 1959, when it was sold to a private owner. The owner stored it for years at the (then) Orange Empire Railway Museum, but it left there in 1975 and according to some sources it hit a bridge during transport which caused roof damage. Later, in the 1990s, it was stripped for parts to restore cars in the Muni historic fleet in San Francisco. By the early 2000s it was stored at the old Pacific Electric building and given a coat of paint, but nothing was really done with it. Orange Empire (now Southern California Railway Museum) moved the car to their site in Perris in 2016, I believe just to keep it from being cut up, and then in 2018 it was moved to its current location at the nearby fairgrounds.

It's one of five H-type LARy cars preserved, and one of three H-3 class cars, so it's not particularly significant - especially given that the others are all complete and this one definitely isn't.

Wrong Fair

Back in 2019, I posted here that Los Angeles Transit Lines 1435 - or, at least, its body - had been sold by the Southern California Railway Museum to the Riverside County Fairgrounds in Indio. Except, it turns out that I had the wrong fairgrounds - and the wrong Riverside County Fairgrounds, no less. The new Riverside County Fairgrounds is in Indio, but the old Riverside County Fairgrounds was in Perris, just a couple of miles from SCRM. After the fair moved to Indio, I guess, it changed its name to the Southern California Fairgrounds. And sure, enough, there's the car on Google Maps in an image captured in 2022. Car 1435's history has been corrected.

Orange Empire updates

Many thanks to Chris Baldwin of the Orange Empire Railway Museum, who has sent a series of updates on their equipment. These are all changes from the previous status of the listed cars.

Recently-acquired LAMR 144, recently-overhauled LARy 525, and LARy PCC 3001 are all now listed as "operated occasionally." Muni 171 and LAMTA 3165, which in the past saw occasional use, are now "displayed operable." PE Birney 331, PE office car 1299, and LATL standard cars 1423, 1450, and 1559 are now officially out of service and are listed as "displayed inoperable" (formerly they'd been listed as "operated occasionally" or "displayed operable"). Similarly, PE "Blimp" 314 is now out of service but is in storage. LATL PCC 3100 and LARy 1201 are now seeing more use and the status of both cars has been changed to "operated often."

There are a few more substantive changes than switches to whether a car is judged operational or how often it operates. PE steeplecab 1624 is now undergoing restoration, starting with an interior paint job and some wiring and electrical systems repair. The locomotive has been in rough shape for years but it's complete and an excellent candidate for full restoration. LARy 665 is another car that is now under restoration; this longtime regular service car has gone into the shop for a general overhaul.

Longtime regular service car PE 717, a "Hollywood" car that for years was painted fancifully in a "Valley Seven" livery but was more recently returned to as-built colors, has been put into storage following an incident that caused some damage. The car is operational but requires repairs before going back into public operation. Marty Bernard photo.

And LA car 1435, shown above in a photo from about a year ago, has been sold to an individual and moved off-property for preservation. This car was acquired as a body and is a duplicate (triplicate?) of two other complete cars in the OERM collection so it was not intended to be kept at the museum. I'm working on tracking down where it went. UPDATE: thanks to John Smatlak and Gary Starre from OERM, who relate that car 1435 has been transferred to the Riverside County Fairgrounds in Indio, where the plan is to cosmetically restore it and place it on display. EDIT: Update here