Old Pueblo Trolley in Tucson, Arizona is in the process of vacating the leased shop facility at East Broadway Boulevard and North Park Avenue. The facility is being relocated to a new property purchased by OPT located at South 4th Avenue and W 36th Street. The move is necessitated by the pending widening of Broadway Boulevard, which will take all of the outside storage area and will require either partial or complete demolition of the building. The new shop is located in South Tucson, Arizona and will permit us to vacate the other storage facilities where our collection of vintage transit buses, trolleys and other objects are stored. The new facility provides us with inside storage for vehicles, interpretive displays, proper artifact storage, parts storage and training facilities for vocational training programs in partnership with Pima County and the local school districts.

The most recent item to move to the 36th Street shop is the Huntington car that OPT intends to restore. It is now stored inside the shop building on temporary track. Yesterday morning, the car was winched out of the Broadway shop into a tractor trailer provided by Frontier Towing and transported to the new shop. The car was unloaded and then push/pulled up a slight grade into the building with a heavy duty pickup truck and approximately ten people pushing from behind. The Toronto PCC, two refrigerated cars and some mine rail equipment remain at Broadway to be moved at a later date. Additional streetcar bodies and a boxcar remain at the 18th Street yard to be moved as well.

It's great seeing the collection moving indoors. I haven't kept up with OPT like I did at one time, so seeing this in a .pdf suprised me: "Ties, rail and overhead electric-line parts will be stored for future use on a new historic trolley line along S. 4th Ave. in Tucson, in our new facility. " Is this new line going to tie into the new streetcar line?

It's also great to hear that you're moving onto property that you've bought. Much better than having to lease or rent space where you're at the mercy of the owner. So will you be making this new property into a museum?

If built, it will not physically connect to Sun Link. Sun Link was built using TIGER funding, so any connection would require approval at the federal level. There is also the matter of the transmission voltage and outfitting the car. Our Porto car had to be fitted with a modern pantograph at our own expense and we are having to build a converter to step the 750 volts DC down to a usable 600 volts. All of our transformer gear is for 600 volt DC, so there would be significant financial investment in a transition to 750 volts DC.

It is possible that funding could be obtained to cover construction costs. Offhand, it is a bit unclear to me as to the extent that the City of Tucson would be involved as a good portion of the line would not be within City limits-it would be in the City of South Tucson.

As to the building, we do not own it outright at the moment. We have a mortgage through a title company with the primary lienholder being one of our major donors. We essentially have five years to either pay off the mortgage or refinance. In the end, we will own the building. We have made significant improvements to the building to make it better suited to our needs, including installation of drywall along the shop walls. It is our intent to have display areas, but the primary function of the facility will be a working shop to restore and maintain our fleet of historic vehicles. It is planned that the number of vehicles currently under restoration will be expanded and we hope to have several projects going simultaneously once our vocational training program is at full speed. Due to the educational components of the program, most of the restoration projects will be motor buses though we will use some of the labor on streetcars from time to time.

Owning your own property sounds like a good deal to me.

Is it really that hard to run 600v equipment on 750v? Seems to me some small adjustments would make it possible.

Sorry, it's not that easy. With AC all you would need would be a transformer, which has no moving parts and requires little or no maintenance. (That's why we generally use AC power!) There are a couple of different ways to convert DC voltages, but for a highly variable load a simple dropping resistor just won't do it. I'm sure the Pueblo guys are going about this the right way.

Running 600V equipment on 750V was recently tried on a big city rapid transit system, with generally bad results. It took a while to repair the damage.

Gomaco control systems are very variable in terms of what voltages they can be programmed to accept. I haven't been inside one, but my guess is solid state boards full of tiny things soldered together that tell big things what to do, like the huge UPS installations I deal with at work. Converting DC to AC, then chopping and reforming the waves before translating back to DC again or some such thing........ of course we can use 750 volt DC motors and compressors in old school trucks and carbodies. This is probably the easiest and most reversable process.

Yep. Especially considering that you have to be able to protect against spikes in voltage. We have probably on of the best EEs in the country working on the program for us. Bear in mind that with streetcars or other vehicles, the equipment has to be able to fit within existing spaces. Changing voltage is akin to open heart surgery-a lot of planning and low v testing because once you test at high v, a mistake at the very least can do extensive damage.