@ Jon: I understand what you're saying about Brookville Equipment Company and their rebuild of the Septa PCC's. These were among the first PCCs that that Pennsylvania mining-equipment company was contracted to rebuild. I think it is fair to say that, since the Philadelphia job, Brookville has rightly earned itself a fine reputation rebuilding PCCs - including at least twenty for San Francisco, which are now running on Market Street and the Embarcadero. They also rebuilt Muni Car No.1, dating from 1912, doing a beautiful job. Adding to Brookville's reputation is their venture into building new streetcars for Dallas, Detroit and, I believe, Oklahoma City.
At the end of 2015, Brookville was awarded a contract to rebuild seven 1937-era ex-San Diego PCCs, even older than Boston's, which from the time El Paso abandoned its streetcar line to the Mexican border in the late 1970s, have forlornly sat outdoors in the desert near the El Paso Airport. Brookville is preserving the cars' original bodies while giving them brand-new wiring, lighting, flooring, seating, interior appointments - and a completely rebuilt set of trucks and motors. A state-of-the-art control and communications system, wheelchair lifts and air conditioning are also to be included. The contract specifies that these rebuilt cars are expected to reliably serve the public on a daily basis for at least twenty years.
Therefore, the "T" could do far worse than give Brookville the opportunity to bid on rebuilding these PCCs, instead of scrapping them and converting the line to buses. The T's rebuild of these ten cars, which was done in the late '90s at the Blue Line Shops in Orient Heights. gave the Mattapan-Ashmont PCCs a new lease on life, but the work done on them was very rudimentary compared to the PCC rebuilding work Brookville is doing now. If Brookville is given the go-ahead to do a full rebuild, these cars will end up far nicer and more reliable than they've been in decades.
