Open Car Off the List

Thanks to Murphy Jenkins of the Fort Smith Trolley Museum for confirming that Veracruz single-truck open car 6, which had been listed as being in a state of disassembly, has been permanently disassembled and can be considered to be gone. Components from the car are going into identical car 9, which is expected to be made operational (I believe converted to double-end operation) at FSTM. I would guess that parts will also make it into other restoration projects at FSTM, which is a bit unusual in that nearly all of their (now nine-car) collection is single-truckers.

Car 6 was built in 1908 by Brill and retired in the mid-1960s, after which it spent a few decades under the ownership of the Texas Transportation Museum, where I believe its condition declined significantly before it went to FSTM in the mid-1990s. There are now three Veracruz single-truck open cars remaining: besides car 9, an ex-Trolleyville car acquired by FSTM in 2009, there's "car 001" (formerly car 8) on display under a very nice pavilion in its home city and car 19, another ex-Trolleyville resident which is in regular operation at the Illinois Railway Museum. Both of the other two cars were backdated by re-adding original-style deck roofs, so car 9 is the only one of the trio preserved in its later arch-roof guise.

...And One More

Thanks to Wesley Paulson for tracking down yet another removal from the PNAERC list. This time it's Toronto PCC 4427, shown above in 2016, which was confirmed to have recently been scrapped. This car was plinthed in Morriston, Ontario, for years, but was removed sometime in mid-2022. Rumors had it transported back home to Toronto, but it sounds like it has indeed been cut up.

Three More Off the List

Many thanks to Wesley Paulson, who continues to track down cars on the "status unknown" list and send me updated information. Of the latest batch, one car, Lackawanna 4322, is intact and undergoing restoration work in the Catskill Mountain Railroad's yard in Phoenicia, New York. But his other two updates are removals.

Lackawanna 3565, a standard 1930 Pullman-built motor car shown above in a 2015 photo, had been stored derelict on the St. Louis Iron Mountain & Southern for years and was formally deaccessed by the tourist railroad back in 2022. At some point later that year or in 2023 the car was indeed cut up. It's been removed from the list.

The second car to be removed is Worcester Consolidated Railway 038, a cab-on-flat locomotive homebuilt by the Worcester system in 1912. This car has always been on the Seashore Trolley Museum's roster - it was acquired by that museum way back in 1946 - but was listed as "disassembled," so I don't have any photos of it. I had increasingly suspected that Seashore may have written it off, and correspondence from their Executive Director, Katie Orlando, confirms that this is the case. This was the last Worcester Consolidated Railway car preserved in the US, though there are two arch-roof cars from the system known to still exist in Brazil. I've taken 038 off the list, which reduces the number of Seashore cars on the PNAERC list to 190.

The third car to be removed, shown above, is ConnCo box motor 2023. Our own webmaster, Jeff Hakner, confirms that this car was demolished by the Connecticut Trolley Museum at some point within the past few years. Car 2023 was homebuilt by ConnCo in 1910 and at the ends of its career was fitted with a diesel generator so that it could operate as a switcher after the wires came down. I recall seeing it in 2007 and taking the above photo, but the car may have been disposed of not long after that - I can't find any images more recent. With this, the CTM roster on PNAERC is now at 46 cars and the total number of cars on the list is 2,091.

As an aside, speaking of Worcester 038, "disassembled" cars on the PNAERC list are an odd little subset. I have a policy that any electric car that's at a museum goes on the list, even if the museum doesn't consider it accessioned, because of how common it is for something that's deaccessioned to hang around for a long time, and sometimes become "re-accessioned." And as for whether a car is "at" a museum, I generally rely on the museum itself to make that call. This means that there's a handful of cars on the list that you'll be hard pressed to recognize, or in some cases track down at all. With the loss of 038, I think the only car on the list that's "completely" disassembled may be Staten Island Midland 157, owned by Branford but stored off-site in an indeterminate number of pieces. There's also Veracruz 6 in Fort Smith; I'm honestly not sure how intact this car is, only that it's in some state of disassembly. There are a few cars that have been mostly reduced to a flat car, including Los Angeles Railway 59 at Travel Town, Rochester 0243 at the New York Museum of Transportation, and St. Louis Public Service 850 at the National Museum of Transportation, which is notable in that its disassembly occurred quite rapidly and unexpectedly due to a tunnel lining collapse at the museum decades ago. Finally, there are a couple of cars like Chicago Surface Lines 1467 at IRM and Des Moines 512 at Boone that have been reduced to a skeletal framework, but are at least generally recognizable as electric cars. How many of these cars will be reassembled again? Your guess is as good as mine.

Tracking Down MU Cars

Many thanks to our official researcher, Wesley Paulson, who has tracked down two more of our "mystery cars." In this case, it's Lackawanna MU motor cars 4602 and 4627, which were listed as belonging to Alberta Prairie Railway Excursions in Alberta, Canada. I say "were" because APRE helpfully confirmed that both cars have been scrapped. So, I've removed them from the list.

And then there's the car shown here, Lackawanna 3545, which until 2015 (give or take) was stored at the Mad River & NKP Railroad Museum in Bellevue, Ohio. Rumor has it that the car was moved from that site to somewhere near Avon Lake, OH, but its current whereabouts are unknown. Anyone have any leads?

EDIT: Thanks to Pete Jedlicka, who has confirmed that car 3545 is, in fact, still owned by Buckeye Lake Trolley and is safely stored in a railroad yard in northern Ohio. Its status and ownership have been updated.

Tex-Mex Removals

Today's update comes with a southwestern flavor. First, I've removed Texas Electric freight trailer 608 from the PNAERC list. This 1921 homebuilt interurban freight trailer has been on display in the middle of Van Alstyne, Texas, since 1996. For most of that time, it's been plinthed near TE box motor 501 and the two cars have been mostly ignored, which in the arid Texas climate isn't as fatal as it would be many other places. Recently, car 608 got some attention, and as of August 2023 it looked like this:

I have no idea what those boxes over the ends are. Anyway, thanks to Phil Randall, who sent me this link to a Patreon page for car 608. It appears that the Northern Texas Traction Club was raising money to fix up car 608, but instead the city has mostly scrapped and rebuilt the car. As near as I can tell, the only original pieces left above floor level are some of the end and bulkhead framing and the car lines, which look like they were removed and then reattached atop a newly built steel-tube frame. The city also subtracted the baggage door from one side and added bus doors.

With almost nothing of the car's original fabric left, I don't consider it preserved. It's been removed from the list, following box motor 501, which was cut up last year. Thus ends the City of Van Alstyne's presence on the PNAERC list.

The second piece of equipment to be removed is (or, rather, was) a bit more impressive. Ferrocarril Mexicano 1012 was a 155-ton six-axle boxcab locomotive built by GE in 1923. Since sometime in the 1970s, I believe, it was plinthed alongside the railroad in Ciudad Mendoza, near Veracruz in Mexico. It's shown here in a Google Street View image from 2012.

More recent Street View images had shown that the locomotive had disappeared from this spot, though, as described last fall. Thanks to our official researcher, Wesley Paulson, who tracked down this YouTube video that was made 10 years ago. The caption information is in Spanish, which may be why I didn't find it, but it appears to show locomotive 1012 being hauled away in large chunks in April 2013. So, that's unfortunate. At least there are three other locomotives of this series still preserved, and none of those seem to be in any particular danger. With these removals, the PNAERC roster is currently at 2,096 pieces of equipment.

Lake Shore Electric Car Scrapped

Thanks to Richmond Bates of the Seashore Trolley Museum for confirming that they have recently scrapped Lake Shore Electric 171, shown above in a 2016 photo.

Car 171 was a 1918 Jewett-built interurban coach and ran for the LSE until the end in 1938, after which it became a diner in Monroeville, Ohio (see here for a couple of 1979 photos of it as a diner). Seashore acquired the body in 1987 as part of their "Last Roundup" campaign of car body acquisition. Unfortunately, as you can probably tell from the above photo, car 171 was in wretched condition. The LSE Jewetts tended to suffer badly from body rot - I'm not sure whether this was the type of steel used or something else - and car 171 was badly deteriorated even before it arrived in Kennebunkport. It's hard to argue that the decision to dispose of the car wasn't a good one.

There are now 16 LSE cars still in preservation including two other cars from this same series, one of which has been cosmetically restored. As for Seashore, their roster on PNAERC now stands at 191 pieces of equipment. Car 171 is the second car scrapped since they started their collection rationalization effort.

Jersey Shore Streetcar Threatened

The Jersey Shore Historical Society of Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania, announced today on their Facebook page that contrary to previous plans, they are not going to acquire the body of Jersey Shore Street Railway 14. The car is currently stored at the Peter Herdic Transportation Museum in Williamsport, PA, but that museum has deaccessed it and wants it gone by August 2024. JSHS had come to an agreement in 2021 to acquire the car (see here) but they've decided that they need the funds elsewhere. If a new home is not found, the car will presumably be demolished.

Car 14 is a body, of course, and it's far from pristine but it looks to be in better shape than a lot of bodies out there. According to information I've received, it was built in 1894 as an open car but its builder is unknown. It originally ran in Philadelphia, first for the Electric Traction Company, then for Union Traction, then for Philadelphia Rapid Transit, where it was numbered 86. It's not clear when it went to Jersey Shore, but on JSSR it was first numbered 101 and was later rebuilt as a one-man car and renumbered 14. The photo above was taken in 2021.