MU Cars to SMS Rail Lines

Thanks to Marc Glucksman of River Rail Photo for alerting me to the fact that the three Lackawanna MU motor cars formerly at the Stourbridge Line tourist railroad in Pennsylvania have, in fact, been purchased by SMS Rail Lines in New Jersey. The three cars - 3509, 3519, and 3596 - were all built in 1930 by Pullman and were modified as locomotive-hauled coaches by the Stourbridge Line. As sometimes happens, I'm a bit late on this one - photos here show that the cars were at SMS in 2021, likely the year they arrived there. The image above, taken by Tim Darnell, shows car 3519 in November 2021 with its step wells off, suggesting that the cars may have arrived not long before that. The PNAERC roster has been updated to reflect that all three cars are now in storage at SMS.

Because of a quirk of how I maintain the PNAERC roster, this has also resulted in another car having its "owner" changed. There are a number of cars on the list that are not physically located at the site of their owner - either they're on loan, or they're out for repair, or they're at a satellite location of some sort. In these cases, I do one of two things based on the car's physical location. If it's located somewhere already on PNAERC, like another museum, then the car is listed with that collection rather than its legal owner (and its owner is noted in the comments). If you're visiting Halton County and you come across this car, it's easy to find without a lot of searching. However if a car is located somewhere not on PNAERC - a random workshop, railroad siding, field, or somewhere else that may be tough to identify - then it's listed under its legal owner with a disclaimer about its actual location (example).

Which is the long way of saying that the three Lackawanna MU cars were the only electrics actually owned by the Stourbridge Line, but Scranton Transit 505 has been in Honesdale, PA, for major body work. Without other electrics on site, I've switched its "owner" field from Stourbridge Line back to its actual legal owner, Electric City Trolley Museum, with a comment that it's located in Honesdale. So there you go.

The Electromobile goes to the Stourbridge Line

This photo is from a recent post on RyPN which relates that Scranton Transit 505, the last surviving Osgood-Bradley Electromobile, has been moved from its home at the Electric City Trolley Museum to the Stourbridge Line 30 miles away in Honesdale, PA. The latter operation will take point on some of the significant body repair and rebuilding work which (obviously) remains to be done. The scale of this project is impressive, given the totally disassembled kit that ECTM has started with, and it will be fascinating to see car 505 slowly regain its original appearance. On the PNAERC list the car's location has been changed to the Stourbridge Line, which is already included as an organization because they use a handful of Lackawanna MU cars in their excursion train. This is my standard practice to make it easier to track cars by physical location; other equipment like this snow sweeper in Baltimore are also stored at museums that do not own them. In my judgment it makes more sense to list them by physical location, at least in cases where the physical location already exists in PNAERC as an owner.