South Shore trailer moves

No sooner does the South Shore Line Museum Project announce itself, than it expands its collection. Notice was posted online that South Shore 203, the last surviving coach trailer from that interurban line, left East Troy's site near Mukwonago, WI, today en route to the SSLMP. The photo above, by Joe Stupar, dates to 2010 and shows the car's current condition. This car, built by Pullman in 1927, was part of the National Park Service collection that was conveyed to East Troy back in 2010. It had been stored at a steel plant in East Chicago, IN, (and before then in Beech Grove, IN) along with three coaches and a combine - all from the South Shore - but when the NPS decided to finally give up on plans to create a heritage interurban railway, these cars went to East Troy, the only museum to regularly operate South Shore cars. The only restored car of the lot was backdated car 33, which has since entered service at East Troy. The others, including car 203, were in various states of "rough" and have been kept indoors but unserviceable.

Car 203 is the last South Shore trailer; this particular variety has fared particularly poorly in preservation. After the railroad was abandoned and the cars sold off, there were five or six 200-series trailers saved. But one by one they ended up scrapped, with car 205 the most recent to go, a victim of the IMOTAC dissolution debacle. Interurban coach trailers as a category are rare, and by my count car 203 is one of only five complete examples in existence. SSLMP may not have a place to display or operate the car yet, but it seems a given that this last surviving example of its type will have a secure spot in its new home.

New Museum in Indiana

There's a new museum in town! Well, "museum" may be a bit premature, given that there's currently no site that's open to the public and it calls itself a "museum project" (emphasis mine). But the newly-minted South Shore Line Museum Project, or SSLMP, has indeed announced itself, and I've dutifully updated the PNAERC roster accordingly.

The SSLMP website has an admirable amount of information about its collection of rolling stock (and various other topics, too). A total of 12 cars are listed: a wood combine, six steel coaches, a dining car, a parlor-observation-buffet car, a Birney, a steeplecab, and a line car. This comprises the collection of Bob Harris, and for the past few years has been listed on the PNAERC roster under "Private owner - Michigan City" since most of the equipment is stored in Michigan City, Indiana.

Most of these cars are now listed on the PNAERC list under SSLMP, though there are a couple of changes. The dining car owned by SSLMP is a steam road car that stands in for similar cars once borrowed by the Chicago South Shore & South Bend interurban line, so it doesn't qualify. Two of the coaches are stored at the Hoosier Valley Railroad Museum, and are listed under that name on PNAERC. And a Chicago 'L' car apparently owned by the Chicago Transit Authority is stored at the SSLMP site in Michigan City, so is listed under SSLMP on my roster even though it's (understandably) not included by the organization among its collection. Confusing enough? Good.

I've now designated the organization as an historical group (see update below), given that it is a nonprofit, although I believe that Mr. Harris retains an ownership stake in the equipment. Several of the South Shore cars in the collection have gone through a few different owners "in theory" even though they may not have technically changed hands - previous names under which Mr. Harris has operated include the Overhead & Third Rail Museum Group in the 1980s and the RAIL Foundation, which evidently existed from the 1980s until about 2015. These organizations have evidently involved various principals in leadership, but their equipment collections have always been Mr. Harris' own collection of interurban cars. And so it is with SSLMP.

UPDATE: Mr. Harris has written and pointed out that SSLMP is a nonprofit (official tax-exempt status is in the works) organization that is the brainchild of Dave Rearick of Chesterton. The purpose of the organization is to complete the work envisioned by the National Park Service back in the 1980s, of preserving and interpreting the history of the South Shore. Mr. Haris is certainly supporting this effort strongly, and is currently serving as legal counsel for SSLMP, but is hoping to gradually draw down his involvement over time as circumstances permit. Thanks to Bob for the information!

Philly Six epilogue

So admittedly this doesn't affect the PNAERC list directly, but it was kind of interesting (and a little bizarre) so here it goes. The "Philly Six" were a half dozen ex-SEPTA PCC cars that were stored in increasingly derelict condition in North Philadelphia for many years. Then about a year ago, the cars were sliced up in various strange and interesting ways and scrapped, as outlined here and here. But now one of them has popped back up!

Well, not really. The above photo, posted on Facebook by E. Marquise Sanders, shows the front end of car 2141 mounted to a wall at a bar called Kensington Pub located in North Philadelphia. The owners were considerate enough to put the car's original number back on it and even painted the thing in what appear to be largely correct colors (not strictly appropriate to its post-GOH condition, but certainly directionally correct). Now this car is definitely not going back onto the PNAERC list - there are a handful of "pieces of cars" like this around the country, and unless it's a complete car that's just been shortened a bit and put back together (like this one, for instance), I exclude them from being considered "preserved." But it's still kind of interesting. Now you know where to stop for refreshments the next time you're in North Philly.

StLIM&S MU car on the chopping block

A post here on the Ahead of the Torch Facebook page (no log-in required) relates that Erie-Lackawanna 3565, a typical Lackawanna MU motor car, is set to be cut up for scrap sometime soon. It's owned by the St. Louis Iron Mountain & Southern, a tourist railroad near Cape Girardeau, MO whose regular operating consist includes a pair of Illinois Central MU trailers, one of which - car 1345 - is the last surviving IC MU car with air-operated doors that was likely pulled by steam for a brief period. Anyway, car 3565 is one of a large (though steadily decreasing) number of Lack MU motor cars in existence - not including 3565, there are 33 cars of this series on the PNAERC list. And for quite some time this car has been essentially derelict, so its impending loss is neither surprising nor particularly lamentable. I'm not certain of its precise history, but it came to the StLIM&S from the late Indiana Museum of Transportation & Communication, probably in the 1980s or early 1990s, and may never have been used at all in Missouri. Above photo by Shawn Friedrich.

Pittsburgh PCC off list

Well, apparently it's Pittsburgh PCC Week. The latest update following the updated information on Pittsburgh 4006 is that a different PCC car from that city, car 1705, has been scrapped. This was another one of the 1700-series cars built by St. Louis in 1949. It was sold in 1996 to Power Superconductor Applications in New Castle, PA, where it joined several other Pittsburgh PCC cars. In 2013, as PSA was getting rid of its last PCCs, this car was acquired by the Midwest Electric Railway Museum in Mt. Pleasant, IA. The photo above is a screen grab from this video of the car shortly after acquisition. MERM had hoped to add an all-electric, and therefore all-weather, car to their fleet, but the car's attractive appearance belied its true condition and it turned out to have been extensively stripped of parts. A proposed sale to an ill-fated start-up railway museum in California in 2018 fell through and car 1705 was sold to a scrapyard in 2019. It has been removed from the list.

The Pittsburgh 1700s, while still not exactly uncommon in preservation, are certainly seeing their ranks thinned. Not counting cars rebuilt as 4000s, and excluding six cars in deplorable condition at VESCO, there are now only six 1700s left.

Pittsburgh 4000 goes missing

Thanks to Nicholas Katz for pointing out that Port Authority Transit 4006, which has been sitting for around 15 years in a parking lot at the west end of the truncated Superior Viaduct in Cleveland, has gone missing. The car - shown above in a 2019 photo from here - is one of the PCC cars heavily remanufactured by PAT in the 1980s and renumbered into the 4000-series. This car was rebuilt in 1987 using 1949-vintage PCC car 1767 as a core and was retired in 1998. For a few years it was stored in Columbus behind a semi-derelict industrial facility on West Nationwide Boulevard (I recall seeing it there in 2002) but then that facility got renovated and sometime in the mid-2000s it showed up in the parking lot at 2401 West Superior Viaduct in Cleveland.

UPDATE: Many thanks to Wesley Paulson and Dave Hamley for getting to the bottom of this one. Car 4006 was indeed moved back to Buckeye Lake, Ohio, where its owner is based, in August 2021. There it joins fellow 4000-series cars 4011 and 4012 along with a collection of other miscellaneous cars.

BCER streetcar placed on display

Within the last few weeks a new history museum has opened in North Vancouver, BC, and one of its headline exhibits is a restored streetcar body. British Columbia Electric Railway 153, a double-truck semi-convertible built by Stephenson in 1908 (and, incidentally, the newest Stephenson product in existence), is on prominent display at the new Museum of North Vancouver. MONOVA, as it has dubbed itself, is described in this article that's also the source of the above photo.

The streetcar, which was retired in 1946, was a cottage at Ryder Lake for four decades before being acquired by the City of North Vancouver in 1986. From 1991 until 2021 it was stored at Fen Burdett Stadium and was the subject of a lengthy restoration project that wrapped up fairly recently. It's nice to see the car placed on display in such a visible location. Its ownership has been updated from the city to MONOVA and its status changed to "displayed inoperable."