The Preserved North American Electric Railway Cars (PNAERC) website at http://www.bera.org/pnaerc.html has been updated and, for the first time since it was established approximately three years ago, has been expanded considerably.Webmaster Jeff Hakner has designed a new feature for the PNAERC website which allows us to publish brief historical descriptions of the preserved electric cars included in the site. These historical narratives allow much more information about their subjects to be communicated than was previously possible through the basic database listing, furthering our goal of disseminating as much information as possible about traction preservation.As of yet these historical narratives have only been written for about 130 cars out of the 2,000+ cars on the overall list. We are looking for authors to write more historical descriptions of preserved electric cars; if you are interested in contributing to this project, please contact Frank Hicks at fullparallel@wideopenwest.com. As always, we are also interested in any corrections or additions to the database listings that people can send us.Jeff Hakner, Branford Electric Railway AssociationFrank Hicks, Illinois Railway Museum

Frank and Jeff,Nice work!Wesley

Frank,I just spent some time on the site. Very nice!Two things I noticed:1. Monticello's #53 does not come up when searching for CRT equipment but IRM's #52 and FRTM's #5001 do come up.2. All the photos that link to http://donross.railspot.com/ need to be updated to link to http://donsdepot.donrossgroup.net/ The rest of the URL remains the same, so if you can do a find and replace function, all your image links for his site will work again.Regards,Erich

Speaking of CRT/CTA #53 (5003) at Monticello, does anyone have any more information about this unit ?Last time I was there (maybe 5-6 years ago) it was prominently displayed, although the roof top pantographs were fully extended and itlooked like some of the roofwalks had broken/snapped from age, weather and possibly the strain of the springs. Now I read somewhere semi-recently (maybe even here ?) that the unit has been moved to the "back" of the property as it has become a problem and eyesore. I had always wondered why Monticello would even have an electric car since they have no overhead operation, and a Chicago rapid transit car makes even less sense. Seeing as how the operation uses ex-Illinois Terminal r-o-w, a representative car would make much more sense, although obviously no one who has one is in a hurry to give it up.I had been told quite a while back the 53 was owned by a member of the Monticello group, it wasn't an official museum unit.Any info ?