A friend sent me a text the other day with a picture of a trolley car he'd taken from his truck as he was driving past.
I recognized some of the background and asked him if it was in Webb City... which isn't too far from me.

Well, it was. I've driven past where they run it many times... and while the track is visible from the road, I thought it was some long abandoned industrial spur in this old lead/zinc mining town.

Well, a quick search on Youtube brought up exactly two videos of this road in operation. I searched on here and found nothing when searching "webb city". So, it may have flown under all you trolley aficionados radars all these years.

Quite ingenious how they're powering it.... Here are the youtube links.

https://youtu.be/uDzluDqDe0E

and

https://youtu.be/JdppU4euxQg

This car is fairly well known in the traction community. Frank Hicks' Roster of Preserved North American Railway Cars has the details on it.

http://www.bera.org/cgi-bin/pnaerc.pl?detail=1873

So that remote control or that a generator? Also if it's a generator shouldn't there be resistor grid under the car? Even if it is pushing it it would still be nice to have a resistor grate under the car just to make it look right.

I believe that's an industrial locomotive "b unit" that's doing the pushing now on the car. Before, the car had a gasoline engine from a Corvair under the floor that powered it. They apparently decided that the arrangement was unsafe at any speed.

They really made this thing so much more complicated than it needed to be was it really so hard to string up some wire?

It is if you are restoring a body that did not have electrical equipment in it. Sure, you could probably source 2-4 motors, controllers, etc from other museums, but at what effort? Who has knowledge these days in southwestern Missouri on how to remotor, rewire, and get running a streetcar?

So yes, in short it's far easier to type "wHy dOn'T tHeY jUsT sTrInG wIrE?" than actually do it.

Edmonton used a generator trailer behind streetcar #1 for special trips across our High Level Bridge in 1979 (it was still an active Canadian Pacific line at the time), and also at Fort Edmonton Park before the current streetcar line with overhead wire was built, this shot is on the separate steam train loop near the Fort station, it's the only photo I could find of #1 with the trailer.

https://storage.googleapis.com/hippostc ... 19-800.jpg

The Fraser Valley Heritage Rail Society uses a much prettier generator trailer, they also operate on active freight trackage (Southern Railway of British Columbia).

http://www.trainweb.org/chris/17fvhs.html

I'm reminded of the saying 'it's not stupid if it works'.........

The trolley car in Astoria, Oregon also uses a generator car tucked onto one end. I'm assuming that the generator feeds the traction motor of the streetcar rather than being a straight power unit, but I might be wrong.

The trolley at Webb City has an unusual set of trucks that I don't recognize. Might these be the original trucks for the car? If so, I wonder if the traction motors are still in place.

Les

Savannah Georgia had a former Melbourne streetcar operating on old freight railroad tracks on the riverfront. It was a hybrid vehicle with a on-board diesel engine using gasahol blend with restaurant leftover cooking oil. It ran from 2009 to 2015 then went away.

That 25 ton 'b' unit is the greatest thing ever!!!

The power car appears to be a 25 ton GE hood.

My question is, does the power car generate a steady 600 V with the trolley having trolley controls, resistance, transition etc. or does the trolley have diesel throttles to develop variable voltage from the power car and the traction motors use the voltage they get?

Phil Mulligan

It's not just stringing up wire, which is a skill that an all volunteer operation might not have in its personnel, it's the cost of materials, buying and wiring up a rectifier, AND paying for the actual power. Setting up a functional overhead is quite the undertaking. If anything, they made the situation easier for them considering the circumstances by using an external power unit.

In the linked video, the fellow being interviewed describes the critter behind the trolley as a "pushing unit". There may not be any traction motors under the trolley car at all.

/s/ Larry

If you look closely...zoom in if you can....in the video with the pusher unit, there are no visible traction motors....that interestingly modified 25 tonner? is doing all the work.
In the other video, which might be the older one, there are also no visible traction motors...but, under the rear of the car there's a box which presumably contains the gas engine set up they supposedly tried.....

As to stringing wire.... You're probably looking at at least 3 times the cost of a pretty elaborate conversion to do the proper catenary and associated power supply....
I've seen several done similar to this...some terrible, some ok....if it's reasonably well thought out it can be a very nice choice....or not....

I worked on one....many times...that was a hellish bastardized arrangement of a Chevy big block and Turbo 400 trans driving a Fairmont A5 reversing box with a dual chain drive to one axle.....
Unfortunately, the car didn't need quite that much HP....the Gearbox was very poorly mounted and constantly worked itself loose, it regularly broke engine mounts and had various other irritating maladies.....
Over about 4 years of operation it killed at least 4 transmissions, 6+ rebuilds of the gear box, New engine, several "improvements" to the various mounts, etc. ...
But, it did move the car, on an average of 3-5 1 hour trips a day, 5 days a week for those 4 years and carried somewhere between 50-100K passengers....
And...it supposedly topped out around 50-60 mph.....
So, it wasn't all bad....

I think these guys have done alright....lol!

I laughed far harder at this than I thought I would! Well done!