NTT Box Motor Update

I have updated the ownership of Northern Texas Traction 332, a heavily modified box motor originally built in the NTT shops in 1912, to reflect that it is now in private hands and (evidently) on display in Denton. This car was found as a body in the mid-1980s and moved to McKinney Avenue Transit Authority in the early 1990s, where MATA started working to convert it into a parlor and dining car. But work stalled out at some point, and by 2014 the car was evicted from the tight quarters at the MATA barn and moved to the Museum of the American Railroad site in Frisco. There it sat on display for a number of years (the photo above was taken in 2015) but I realized at some point that it had disappeared, so I'd changed it's status to "unknown." I just learned that it's back in the hands of the man who originally found it back in the 1980s (I'll confess that I'm not sure whether he's retained ownership this whole time) and is supposedly on display next to a restaurant in Denton. Anyone have any photos, or even details on where in Denton it is?

Anyway, the MARR collection is now down to 11 pieces, all mainline railroad equipment: 10 ex-Illinois Central "Highliners" and a PRR GG-1.

New England News

A couple of pieces of interesting pieces of information have surfaced from New England. First, it seems SEPTA 618 is on its way to its new home at the Trolley Museum of New York. I've updated its ownership in the PNAERC roster because it's left Seashore, though it hasn't yet arrived in Kingston. The car should be a good match with TMNY, given that it comes with standard-gauge trucks originally off a PATH K-car, so it can be towed in operation at its new home.

And thanks go to Matthew Juergens from the Connecticut Trolley Museum, who passes along information about recent happenings there. The museum is currently in the process of repainting their two-axle Corbin steeplecab, E2. A photo of the recent progress is below, and I have updated the locomotive's status to "undergoing restoration." Thanks, Matthew!

Charlotte Trolleys

A huge thank you goes out to Nate Wells, who provided me with some updates on electric car preservation in North Carolina. The first update involves Carolina Power & Light 117, a longer-than-typical Birney built by Brill in 1927 for the Asheville system. This car was owned by Charlotte Trolley, and in fact was the last car on the PNAERC roster still listed under Charlotte Trolley ownership. But Nate reports that the car has, in fact, been acquired by the owner of the Savona Mill in northwest Charlotte. This is an historic mill complex that is being redeveloped as office and commercial space.

The more surprising update, at least for me, is that the two Charleston center-entrance car bodies have resurfaced! These are unusual cars built by Cincinnati in 1918 for wartime service in Charleston (there's a whole article about them in a July 1918 issue of Electric Railway Journal). There were two orders, one for trailers numbered 301-310 and one for motors numbered 311-316, and I believe both of these cars are trailers. One car is numbered 302 and the second is thought to be numbered 306 but I'm not positive of that.

Regardless, the cars were exhumed from a house back in 2006 and then spent a few years stored outdoors in Charleston before vanishing. I removed car 302 (at the time I hadn't included the second car on the list) from PNAERC back in 2021. Well, it turns out these two were bought by the Savona Mill owner and moved to Charlotte way back in 2013 as described here. They were briefly stored indoors but have been stored outside since 2015; the above photo is from this article. Google Street View shows them stored at the corner of Turner and Coxe, in steadily deteriorating condition, until about 2021 or 2022, when they were moved to (what I believe is) their current location behind a building at the southwest corner of Chamberlain and Gardner. Aerial photos suggest both cars' roofs have disintegrated, but the cars still exist and they've apparently been moved into a storage building within the last year, so they're back on the PNAERC list.

Just as a final note, I'll point out that it's a bit of a milestone to no longer have Charlotte Trolley on the PNAERC list as an owner, even though this is a bit overdue - from what I can tell, the organization was largely defunct by about 2017. But during the 1990s and early 2000s, it was quite a going concern, and played a big role in raising the profile of streetcars and light rail in Charlotte during that period. I recall visiting their barn in 2001, at which time they had car 85 in service (using a towed generator), Birney 25 on hand and purportedly under restoration, the aforementioned car 117 in storage, Red Arrow 13 being repainted, and a car from Greece on hand in good repair. But like Old Pueblo Trolley in Tucson, Charlotte Trolley was arguably a victim of its own success in publicizing electric traction, and they lost their right-of-way to a new light rail system. Unlike OPT, they disbanded as an organization, but fortunately their collection is faring well elsewhere.

Middletown Exodus

Following the move of two cars from the Middletown & Hummelstown to Rockhill last month, today another three streetcars were loaded onto flatbeds for a trip out of town. This time, the destination of all three cars was the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum. All photos below are from this Facebook page.

The first car, shown above, is Red Arrow 83. This car was built in 1932 and is of the same type as car 78, a longtime stalwart of the PTM operating fleet. Car 83 has been stored outside under a tarp for many years in Middletown, but my understanding is that it's in reasonably decent condition. I believe PTM plans to keep it. (Side note: the photo for this car in the PNAERC roster is incorrect and actually shows identical car 77, which is staying in Middletown, but I can't change or update images until our next big photo upload.)

The second car, shown above, is SEPTA 2725, a standard Philadelphia PCC built in 1947. PTM already has two Philadelphia PCCs of this general design, one of them restored and in service.

And the third car, shown here, is SEPTA 2095, another Philadelphia PCC, this time built in 1948. If the rumor mill is to be believed, neither 2095 nor 2725 will become part of the PTM historic collection. One may get scrapped for parts in Washington, but at least one is supposedly destined for a new home somewhere in the northeast. As always, information, corrections, and updates are appreciated! In the meantime, I've updated all three cars to show their new owner as PTM (although as I write this, they're technically in transit and haven't gotten to Washington yet). PTM's collection now stands at 53 pieces while the M&H is down to 19 cars listed on the PNAERC roster. EDIT: PTM posted on their Facebook page that car 2725 is, indeed, intended as a parts source. Its PNAERC record has been updated.

Holiday in Rockwood

Many thanks to Jordan Helzer, who alerted me to this blog post from last week, and to Gord McOuat of the Halton County Radial Railway, who filled me in on the details. Long story short, Hillcrest Shop in Toronto is going to be renovated, so the TTC is short of space. During the five years this work is expected to take, the historic fleet of six cars will be taking a vacation to HCRR out in Rockwood.

The first two cars to move out to HCRR were Peter Witt 2766, shown above in a photo dating to 2020, and PCC 4500. These were soon followed, between last week and this week, by PCC 4549, CLRV 4081, and CLRV 4001, which was due to be moved out to Rockwood earlier today. That leaves only ALRV 4207, which requires specialized trucking arrangements and is due to move in a couple of weeks.

I'm not certain whether the cars will see any revenue service during their time in Rockwood; they may at least get operated occasionally to keep them exercised. All are said to be operational except for 4081 and perhaps 4207, though even those are complete and in good shape. The long-term plan for the historic fleet is a bit uncertain because the TTC is no longer set up for trolley pole operation, only pantograph operation. The stated goal is to mount pantographs on these cars, or at least on some of them, once they return to Toronto.

In the meantime, I've updated their status to list HCRR as their location along with a notation that they're on loan from the TTC (the exception being 4207, since for the moment it's still in Toronto). For its part, HCRR is up to 59 cars on the PNAERC roster (including 10 CLRVs!), but that's a bit misleading; besides the five TTC cars now on the property, there are also two CLRVs being held for the American Industrial Mining Company Museum and a third that was owned by Seashore until it was given to HCRR a year ago.

Finally, on a totally different subject, this article showed up online about a streetcar body in a closed Old Spaghetti Factory restaurant in Columbus, Ohio. The car body is not on the PNAERC list (at least not yet!) because until very recently, I didn't have any information on it. It now appears that the car is a Dallas Railway & Terminal 111-115 series double-truck Birney, originally built for Texas Interurban Railway (their 100-104 series) by American in 1922. It arrived at the restaurant in Columbus in 1977. The car is due to be demolished within days or weeks if a buyer can't be found, so I'm holding off on adding it to PNAERC until it's apparent whether the car is really "preserved."

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.

Two Cars for Rockhill

Back in November, it was reported here that two cars from the Middletown & Hummelstown were headed to the Rockhill Trolley Museum. Those cars both headed to Rockhill Furnace today and were unloaded this afternoon. Thanks to Joel Salomon of RTM for the photos and update! The first car, shown above after being un-tarped, is Lewistown & Reedsville 23, a unique and historically significant center-entrance car that ran most of its service life very close to Rockhill Furnace. The second car, shown below on the Silk Road trailer, is York Railways 162. This is a Brill-built curve-sider identical to car 163, already restored and operational at RTM, and the museum evidently intends to preserve car 162 as a house to depict post-service uses of electric car bodies.

With this transfer, the collections of both RTM and M&H stand at 22 cars on the PNAERC list. The M&H collection will continue to shrink, though; a few of the basket cases are intended for scrapping, while some other cars will likely go to new homes at other trolley museums.

MU Cars West!

A Facebook page called Northwest Daylight Productions posted today that the three ex-Knox & Kane, ex-Lackawanna MU motor cars recently owned by the Heber Valley Railroad in Utah have been sold to the Roaring Camp tourist railroad operation in Felton, California. All three cars - 3568, 3571, and 3593 - have apparently been moved or are in transport. These cars are, frankly, in rough shape. They weren't maintained very well in their later years on the Knox & Kane and, as effectively backup equipment, have received only minimal service (and no paint) since arriving in Utah in 2005. They're definitely not up to the standards of Heber Valley's beautiful fleet of heavyweight cars they acquired from Canada a few years ago.

The above photo, from the aforementioned Facebook post, shows a common problem with the 1930 Lackawanna motor cars: the aluminum roof sheathing separating from the tops of the steel car sides. Thanks to Sean Bowen for alerting me to the cars' arrival in California and to David Wilkins for confirming the sale by HVRR.

Unless the Roaring Camp organization is planning to expand into a new market, these cars are presumably intended to go into service between the home base in Felton and the beachfront in Santa Cruz. I've had the chance to ride both the short, but mountainous, narrow-gauge railroad in Felton and the standard-gauge line down to the beach (see here) and both trips were very enjoyable. When I rode the standard-gauge line, the equipment in use was ex-Boston & Maine wood cars, which made for a very nice experience. Hopefully, these MU cars are being used to bolster, rather than replace, the wood fleet on this line.

Lackawanna MU Corrections

I stumbled upon a photo of a Lackawanna MU that I wasn't familiar with and that led down a rabbit hole that ended up with a trio of badly out-of-date PNAERC records being brought up to date.

The above photo showed up on Facebook and piqued my interest. This was taken in Madison, Indiana - but what is it doing there, and why is a Lackawanna MU car numbered 105? Fortunately, thanks to Google and whoever put together this roster on the Altoona Works website, I have my answer. This is Erie-Lackawanna 3501, heretofore listed on the PNAERC list under Horseshoe Curve Chapter NRHS ownership. I didn't have any photos of it because I knew the three Horseshoe Curve Chapter-owned MU cars had been renumbered 103-105, but I didn't know in what order. The Altoona Works roster not only confirmed that 3501 became 105, but that it was bought by the Everett Railroad in 2018 and resold to its current owner in 2023. I've now updated the car to being owned by "Private owner - Madison."

The Altoona Works roster also told me that the car shown here, Lackawanna 2537, was lettered 105 during its NRHS days. That's kind of a moot point now, because the Everett Railroad - its current owner - has repainted it in proper Pullman green and given it back its original number. I've updated its owner from the NRHS chapter to the Everett Railroad.

The last of the NRHS trio is this car, Erie-Lackawanna 3533, which became NRHS car 104 and still (for the moment, at least) wears that number. It, too, is in service on the Everett Railroad, so I've corrected its PNAERC record accordingly. The Everett Railroad has now gone from having zero cars on the PNAERC list to having two. So, congratulations to them, I guess.

Streetcars on the Move

It's not every day an old streetcar moves from one museum to another. And it's definitely not every day that two streetcars move from one museum to another in totally unrelated moves. But, that day was today!

First up, New Orleans Public Service 966 has ended a 21-year stint on loan from its owner, the Seashore Trolley Museum, to the Lowell Historical Park in Lowell, Massachusetts. Today it was transported back to Maine and unloaded at Seashore. The above photo is pretty impressive: the Silk Road truck carrying 966 threads its way between the Seashore visitor center and Tower C, complete with a ConnCo open car and even a rainbow visible in the background. Car 966 is believed to be operational, so it will be a welcome addition in Kennebunkport, where the regular operating fleet stands at just three cars thanks to motor failures and various other mechanical issues. Until now it was the only car on the PNAERC list in Lowell; the Gomaco-built replica cars are still there, but since they're replicas, they're not on the list. Thanks to Eric Gilman for posting the photo.

A few hundred miles away in western Pennsylvania, another streetcar was "touching down" in a new home. Philadelphia Rapid Transit 2282, a 1906 Brill product, is the oldest double-truck car from that city in existence and the only example of a really "standard" Philly car from before the Nearside era. It's been stored at Electric City Trolley Museum for some time, but they are short on space and needed to pare down their collection a bit. Fortunately, the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum had room, so PTM is the new home for this historic - albeit undoubtedly less-than-pristine - car. It was unloaded in PTM's storage building today. This leaves ECTM with 23 cars on the list, though two of those are stored off-site and not accessioned.

And in unrelated news, an anonymous photographer sent me some pictures of the accidental scrapping of the Waterville Birney described here. I think we all hope that Seashore's future car re-homing efforts will hew more toward the example of 2282 and less toward this.

Whiskey Island Car Pusher Finds New Home

A few weeks ago, we posted a story here about the last Hulett ore unloaders in existence - a pair of disassembled Huletts stored at Whiskey Island in Cleveland - being threatened, along with a trio of diminutive narrow-gauge electric car pushers, or shunters, that sat with them. While I don't believe any hopeful news has emerged on the Huletts themselves, one of the three car pushers has found a new home. The Port of Cleveland has posted here that Pennsylvania Railroad 1, one of the three car pushers at Whiskey Island, was loaded onto a truck and removed from the site for preservation. The locomotive is a 1912 Baldwin-Westinghouse, identical (I believe) to this one, which is preserved in Youngstown. The photo above is from the Port of Cleveland's Facebook post.

Its destination is apparently Buckeye Lake, Ohio, but it's not owned by Buckeye Lake Trolley. It's the first piece of equipment on the PNAERC list under the ownership of the American Industrial Mining Company Museum, or AIMCM, which is a geographically dispersed organization focused on mining and industrial equipment preservation. The group has its main workshop site at Buckeye Lake, on the same property as Buckeye Lake Trolley, and has a public exhibition site in Brownsville, Pennsylvania. AIMCM also owns a pair of Toronto CLRVs, 4024 and 4170, but those two cars are stored at the Halton County Radial Railway in Ontario and are currently listed with that organization's collection on PNAERC.

Two more PRR car pushers are still in the weeds at Whiskey Island awaiting possible salvation. One is reputedly numbered 2, but the third isn't on PNAERC because I don't have a fleet number or any other information on it. Interested in a very large and ungainly-looking lawn ornament?

ConnCo 1414 Returns Home

Thanks to Bill Wall for sending the above photo and the news that Connecticut Company 1414 has returned home from its 27-year stint at the Lake Compounce Amuseument Park. It was trucked back to East Haven today and will be unloaded at Branford in the morning. UPDATE: Video here

Car 1414 is a big 15-bench deck-roof open car built by Osgood-Bradley for ConnCo in 1911. Part of the Branford fleet from the earliest days in 1948, in 1997 it was loaned to an historic amusement park at Lake Compounce, where it ran back and forth on an 1800' route with a small shed at one end to protect the car. This fairly unique operation seems to have been quite successful for quite a long time, but the amusement park is redeveloping that area and so the car's time there is through. It's operational, so I would guess that it will be making regular appearances in service at Branford. It's one of three cars of this series preserved: sister car 1425 is currently under restoration at Branford, and may join its twin in operation one of these days, while car 1468 is stored in rough but complete condition at Seashore.

A Second CLRV Heads South

The Facebook page of the Seashore Trolley Museum confirms that the CLRV they purchased back in 2020, Toronto Transit Commission 4068, is en route from its three-year storage location at Halton County to Kennebunkport. The car is shown above being winched onto a flatbed truck earlier this week. Seashore has constructed a car-length piece of Toronto-gauge panel track in their bus display area on which to put this car. Car 4068 is the second CLRV to be preserved south of the border, joining car 4034, which moved to the Illinois Railway Museum in 2019 and has likewise been stored on a piece of Toronto-gauge panel track since.

I'm not certain what the long-term plan for car 4068 is. When it was acquired three years ago, a second car, 4133, was also moved to Halton County with the aim of scrapping it for parts for 4068. As far as I know, 4133 is still at Halton County, but I'm not certain whether Seashore still plans to strip it for parts or whether they've decided to make 4068 a permanently static display piece.

As an aside, of the 14 total CLRVs preserved, two more are stored at Halton County on behalf of their owner, the American Industrial Mining Museum aka Buckeye Lake Trolley, until they can be moved south to the States; two have been retained by the TTC; and one is in private ownership in Ontario. That leaves no fewer than six of the cars that have been acquired by Halton County.

Camp Out in an LRV

You may recall that back in January, I posted that one of the four surviving Boeing-Vertol LRVs, San Francisco Municipal Railway 1271, had been put up for sale. I finally got around to following up on this, and as weird as listing an LRV on Craigslist is, the tale gets weirder.

It appears that in March, car 1271 was sold to a couple from Geyserville, California, who moved it to their rural property there. Their plan is to open a campground centered around this piece of, er, history, which is unusual enough in itself. They're even naming the campground in honor of the car: the project has been dubbed Camp MUNI at Rancho Margarita, which I guess is the preexisting name of the property. And if that isn't unique enough, the whole project has even been the subject of a Kickstarter campaign - and if the numbers at the above link are to be believed, a successful one. Both images in this post are screen grabs from a video posted of the LRV being craned into place (above) and sitting serenely in its bucolic new surroundings (below).

So, car 1271's ownership has been updated. The Kickstarter link has a couple of quirky videos, including a tour through the (mostly tunneled) LRV taken before it was moved from its former site at a Richmond, California, junkyard. Equipment like this that ends up on private property is typically very difficult to track, but I'll do my best to keep tabs on this car. And if you go camping in car 1271, send me some photos and let me know how things went.

Boxcab Returns to Canada

The photo above was posted today on the Connecticut Trolley Museum's Facebook page and shows Canadian National 6714 being craned onto a flatbed truck for the trip back home north of the border. CN 6714 is a mainline electric boxcab built in 1917 by GE for the suburban electrification out of Montreal. Along with the rest of its class, plus some English Electric-built boxcabs built slightly later, it remained in service a a remarkable 78 years and wasn't retired until 1995. This is one of four identical examples preserved, and until now has been the only one in the United States.

CN 6714 never really fit in at CTM, though, as it dwarfed most of their other equipment and its 2,400V DC design meant it couldn't operate. It was deaccessed in 2018 and, as mentioned here last year, ended up being acquired by the Halton County Radial Railway, near its place of construction in Toronto. It's now en route to Ontario, so I've changed its PNAERC record to reflect its new place of residence.

That means that CTM has disposed of all but one of the six cars it deaccessed in 2018. Three have been scrapped and two sold. To my knowledge, only LIRR 4153 remains in East Windsor. The size of the museum's traction collection, at least as far as PNAERC is concerned, now stands at 47 cars.

Give Me an S, Give Me a T

Arguably the most significant - but almost certainly the most expensive - traction preservation project of recent years has been the Danbury Railway Museum's effort to save the two New York Central mainline electric locomotives marooned in Glenmont, New York. As shown in the above photo posted on Facebook by DRM today, they have conquered some truly remarkable hurdles and managed to save the two locomotives.

The two pieces of equipment in question are both very historically significant. The older of the two, New York Central 100, was the first "S-motor" ever built, emerging from Alco/GE in 1904. It was the prototype for one of the most successful of the early heavy electric locomotive designs and when it was retired in 1964, the cash-strapped NYC still found the wherewithal to preserve it. Unfortunately, it was given over to the nascent American Museum of Electricity in Niskayuna, near Schenectady, but the group ended up failing before it really got off the ground. Sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s the locomotive was transferred to the Mohawk & Hudson Chapter NRHS. It is one of three S-motors preserved.

The other piece is New York Central 278, the only surviving "T-motor" from the line. This boxcab, built in 1926 by GE, is a good showcase of the progress that had been made in the 20+ years since the S-motors were built. It remained in service into the late 1970s, and upon retirement ended up the the M&H Chapter mentioned above. Unfortunately for both locomotives, this group seemed to largely founder by the late 1980s, which is around when they shoved their collection - including 100, 278, and a few other pieces of non-electric equipment - into a siding on the grounds of a power plant in Glenmont. There the equipment sat moldering for some 35 years or so, as the NRHS chapter essentially dissolved and rail access to the siding was irretrievably cut.

Within the last year, the power plant site became the focus of a huge redevelopment effort, and the equipment had to go - intact or not. The other pieces of railroad equipment were cut up on-site, but DRM mounted a huge fundraising campaign to get the locomotives disassembled and moved. In the image above, L-R is half of 278's running gear; 100's running gear; 100's body; 278's body; and the other half of 278's running gear. What a project!

Until now the two locomotives have remained on the PNAERC roster listed under M&H Chapter ownership, since I make a practice of only changing ownership when a car is moved and not when it's sold on paper. But now that the locomotives have been extracted (even if they haven't yet quite made it all the way to Danbury), I've changed them to DRM ownership.

This acquisition elevates DRM into the same league as the Illinois Railway Museum and the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania in having a large and diverse collection of mainline electric equipment. They'll now have 10 pieces, including two very historic locomotives, a unique third rail-powered wrecker, and seven MU cars built between 1954 and 1975. Kudos to DRM for this notable achievement.

More New York Subway Cars in North Carolina

Craggy Mountain Line, the privately owned museum/tourist line in western North Carolina, announced on its Facebook page today that it has taken delivery of a pair of New York subway cars. R32-type cars 3432 and 3433. The cars, which make up a married pair, were built by Budd in 1964. They're the fifth and sixth R32 cars on the list but the first pair preserved off the New York subway system. They're not the first subway cars from the Big Apple at CML; the body of an R6 from 1934, car 983, resides there too as a display piece.

The CML roster now consists of a seven cars: beside the three New York subway cars, there's a pair of ex-Philadelphia, ex-Chicago "spam cans" and a pair of Asheville streetcar bodies. This strange mixture is entirely stationary, and as far as I know, there are no current plans to electrify.

On a totally different topic, I found out that SMS Rail Lines in New Jersey acquired a sixth Lackawanna MU car back in 2021. I knew about the first five they purchased that year - three from the Stourbridge Line in Pennsylvania and two that had been plinthed for decades next to the New York Central Hudson line at Croton-on-Hudson. But a sixth, car 3567, also made its way to the SMS yard in Bridgeport, NJ. This car, which is a typical 1930 Pullman-built motor car from the Lackawanna suburban electrification that has been de-electrified during its preservation career, has led a varied and unfortunate existence the last couple of decades. It was at the Maine Coast Railroad in the 1990s, after which it made its way to the Turner Island Railroad, which didn't last long. For the last 15 years or so it was stored, in steadily deteriorating condition, on the Southern Railroad of New Jersey at Winslow Junction.

When it arrived at SMS in summer 2021 it presented a sorry appearance, but after a tear-down in their shop it was apparently kicked out. Its appearance as of late 2022 is shown below (photo from here). This doesn't seem like an improvement, though it's hard to fault SMS for wanting to remove that aluminum roof, which is a source of problems for just about all the preserved Lackawanna motor cars. The future of this particular specimen is, at best, uncertain.

Brill Semi-Convertible Acquired by PTM

The Pennsylvania Trolley Museum is on a collecting spree. After acquiring the "Terrible Trolley" PCC car earlier this summer, on Friday they took delivery of a far more inherently historic car: Shamokin & Mt. Carmel Transit 33. S&MC 33 was built by Brill in 1905 and it's a surprisingly rare example of a Brill "rubber stamp" semi-convertible. Cars of this design ran on a huge number of streetcar lines, especially small-town lines, in the early years of the century. But most were long gone by the time the preservation movement rose up, so the truly "off-the-shelf" Brill semi-convertible is nearly extinct. In fact, this is arguably the last example of the classic type.

This car was built for the S&MC and ran on that system until it was retired in 1938 (in-service photo here). It was then acquired by the Knoebel's Amusement Park in Elysburg, Pennsylvania, where for many decades it sat underneath a large shed, largely out of sight for much of that time. The family elected to dispose of the car this year and, fortunately, elected to convey it to PTM as indicated by the museum's post here.

An Addition to the Northumberland Bunch

Using information from a couple of sources, I was able to bring the record for Erie-Lackawanna 3590 up to date - and only about 13 years late! The owner of the Everett Railroad, which was listed in PNAERC as the car's owner, posted online that he had actually sold the car sometime back. The buyer was the North Shore Railroad (not be confused with the North Shore Railroad, which is already featured in PNAERC, never mind the North Shore Line) in Northumberland, PA. Some searching around online led me to this photo by Kevin Painter (thumbnail shown above). It shows "North Shore Railroad 62540," a Lackawanna MU car said to have been purchased in 2010 from the Everett Railroad. That can only make it ex-Lackawanna 3590. Voila - mystery solved. Better late than never.

Car 3590 appears to be in tourist service, and in Northumberland it joins an odd concentration of other ex-Lackawanna MU motor cars. There's car 3549, which has been plinthed slightly below grade at a restaurant along the tracks and painted up as Pennsylvania Railroad 1910 for whatever reason. It's under a roof and looks to be in decent shape body-wise, though I believe it's effectively been "tunneled." Then there are cars 3523 and 4604, both privately owned and stored in deteriorated condition (the photos here and here make them look rough and that was nearly 15 years ago - I believe 3523 is the one that has kept its pans).

A Terrible Acquisition

Congratulations to the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum on their newest acquisition, shown above in a post from their Facebook page today. The new arrival is Port Authority Transit 1713, a typical 1700-series PCC built in 1949 by St. Louis. As evidenced by its rather modern paint job, this car ran very late: it was still in service into the late 1990s and wasn't sold into preservation until 1998. Since that time it's been in private hands in Ohio, part of a small collection of Pittsburgh PCCs known as Penn Ohio Electric Railway. It, and the other two PCCs in the collection, have been for sale for a while. So what makes this car special?

That's right - car 1713 is the famous, or perhaps infamous, "Terrible Trolley." Pittsburgh had a lot of PCC cars with one-off paint schemes, but this car got one of the better known ones. Sometime around 1980 it was painted up for the Steelers, with "Terrible Trolley" painted on the side among various other embellishments (above photo taken in 1986 by Peter Ehrlich). By 1987, the car's livery had changed again to original Pittsburgh Railway colors (shown here), but that didn't last too long either. It ended its days in modern LRV colors, painted up like the 4000-series rebuilds, though this car remained a relatively original 1949 PCC car until the end. From the sounds of it, PTM is indeed planning on restoring this as the "Terrible Trolley." It should be quite the attention getter!