Some of the other St. Louis PCCs that went to SF Muni came back to the St. Louis area to the New Town at St. Charles (a.k.a. Whittaker Builders). I've seen reports that plans for restoring the cars are either "on hold" or have been abandoned. The one drawback to "cannibalizing" these cars is that the parts needed may be just as worn out as the contactors on your car. More of these cars are in storage in SF at Muni storage facilities. In the latter years of PCC operation in San Francisco, it was said that if the Muni shop forces ever ran out of duct tape and baling wire it was all over.

I just checked and found that SF Muni has several GE equipped PCCs in their F-line fleet--maybe someone at Muni would know of a good source for GE parts.

Those cars were cut up over two years ago. The builder went bankrupt. The bankruptcy trustee sold them for scrap. I was able to arrange for permission to go on a one tine limited expedition to salvage parts. The contractors on those cars were either missing or in worse shape than what we had/thought we had.

Sad news about the St. Charles PCCs, but not unexpected. Thanks for the update.

I would try contacting the larger trolley museums and asking if they have any of these parts. Not all of the trolley museum people are active on this board. If you need contacts for any museum, PM me and I will see if I have any source. BTW, you can most likely skip Pennsylvania Trolley Museum and Halton County Radial Railway. These two museums have mostly Westinghouse equipment.

And if you don't turn off that damn auto-correct, that may not be your only "adult" experience!

Autocorrect is trained by real-world data that's accessable to the manufacturers, and that's web searches and texts. Since the data is anonymized (personal data blanked), it's heavily biased toward people who do those things a LOT. Who sends 20,000 texts? What do they text about?

I would look at GE road locomotive equipment as a possible source for similar items.

The designation CM (as in CM-43) implies a magnetic contactor of a certain ampacity. Perhaps a CM-55 or CM-53 (which are completely different from each other) might be a suitable replacement.

There are also a number of different families of interlocks, with each family sharing many of the wear parts (contact tips, etc.).

If someone could post an image of the equipment (from the GE renewal parts bulletin),
I might be able to zero in on a possible replacement.

Dave

Dave:

Please drop me a private message (email) on this topic. I've been working with one of your folks to provide what are looking for.

Matt Nawn