Charlie:
The Straffford car went to Electric City Trolley Museum in Scranton, PA. It will complete their collection of original P&W passenger equipment, from the only surviving original 1906 St.Louis car to a Bullet car.

Thanks for the update on the Dallas PCC. According to PNAERC, it would be DR&T 612, later MBTA 3334. I've heard that the McKinney group are having trouble with MATA 143 (also known as Winnie) the ex-Tandy PCC, so maybe a "native" streamliner build as double-ender will work out better.

Art, thanks for the info. Glad to hear that it's still around.

Ya know, the one person I feel sorry for in all this is Frank Hicks. It'll take him years to update his PNAERC site.

Charlie

folks,

I was also thinking about Frank's web site Preserved North American
Street Cars etc.

most of the data will not change except for the Names of the new owners.

There will also need to be a change to that Detroit Peter Witt that I mentioned the other day.

And perhaps if anyone else has changes to suggest this would be a good time as we know Frank Hicks reads this site.

Frank, Are you having fun yet? If we keep you busy enough here; then you will never have to back out to IRM!

Ted




Ted Miles

Art,
My intent was misread, a common enough thing online unfortunately.
I did not mean to suggest that any organization should continue to hold onto a given piece of equipment simply because person "X" had slaved away from years on it.

You sort of summed up the East Troy situation (from both sides of the argument) when you said "Meanwhile, the car is occupying valuable carbarn space, does not fit our current collection policy, and has not been used in years."

True, these cars were occupying barn space, but barn space only became a premium commodity over the summer as ET added several cabooses to their collection for upcoming "Caboose Trains"

Does not fit our current collection policy, see above,, as noted they are moving steadily and surely away from museum to tourist operation.

Not been used in years,, untrue, as least in this case. The CTA and P&W cars had been there less than 10 years in total, and had all been used extensively until the most recent regime change.

Again, let me point out,, I'm not saying East Troy is or isn't doing anything right or wrong. Clearly their focus has changed, and I personally believe they've taken the wrong direction, but again, personal opinion only.


As regards FRTM's "spam cans", 2 of the five you note are the 6000 series pair which has never, and probably never will, operate. These are third rail cars, never had overhead poles and the thinking (last time I heard) was that they shouldn't be given something they never had to begin with. As such the cars have always been display cars. As regards their two 1-50 series cars, and the recently added one from ET,, these are used pretty frequently. They're easy to operate and maintain, low current use, and as noted very handy for their electric heat at this time of the year. The ET car was gotten specifically for added capacity for their late season special events, for both Halloween and Christmas trains.

And an important thing to remember,, it's not that easy to simply add cars to a museum train, unless you're someone like IRM that has a large fleet of similar cars,, this gives a smaller place like FRTM a lot of capacity flexibility

I would have to disagree with that statement. A railroad museum, more specifically, an operating railroad museum is much different than a traditional static museum. There are very few museums (if any) that have a "third rail line". A modification to run the car with trolley poles, in my opinion, is just as long as the change does not detract from the look of the car (ie : the feed wire is run up the outside of the car and is blatantly obvious that it does not belong there), AND it is explained that the car never actually ran with trolley poles, but it ran using third rail (and what a third rail is).

If we have a car body that originally ran with Truck X but we only have Truck Y that could go under the car, do we put Truck Y under the car and make the car operable, or do we say that we cannot run the car because we do not have Truck X. I would rather get the car operable with Truck Y, and perhaps in the future be able to acquire Truck X.

If I belong to a standard gauge museum, and we have the opportunity to acquire a wide gauge or narrow gauge car to preserve, do we say no because it is not the right gauge, or do we mount it on a pair of trucks that are the right gauge?

Regardless of for what reason the modification was made, it MUST be documented, and should be noted to the public when presenting information about the car.

Tim
Valid points, and I think those same points might have more validation if, in this particular case, they didn't have the other operating CTA cars.

Also realize that for the vast majority of the time, the single cars provide more than enough operational capacity, to run a two car train, simply wouldn't make sense.

I was told that they're packing them in like sardines with these special end-of-the-season special events/trains, but the rest of the year, attendance and ridership was sporadic at best.