ebtmikado wrote: That combine doesn't look like any steel car I've seen on the DL&W. I would guess B&M.
Lee Carlson
B&M purchased a batch of DL&W coaches in the early 1940s and converted some of them to combines 3625-3641, as shown in the photo. These were very early steel cars built by Barney & Smith about 1910, and were characterized by completely open platforms (i.e., no crash posts as seen on the somewhat later DL&W "Boonton" coaches, some of which you may be familiar with at the Valley Railroad), prominent diamond-shaped toilet windows (removed during the combine conversion work on the B&M), and transom sash over each pair of windows (later plated over, perhaps also by B&M). "CVRA7" is correct - this particular combine was displayed for years at Edaville behind 1455, along with a coach of the same ex-DL&W origin (B&M 900-925). The Edaville coach wound up at a scrapyard in the Sunapee, New Hampshire area and apparently still exists, in very poor condition (the Edaville enginehouse roof funneled water directly onto one side of it for decades).
B&M purchased numerous second-hand steel commuter cars over the years from many northeastern railroads, as its famous wooden open-platform fleet gradually wore out, before eventually replacing its remaining locomotive-hauled passenger trains with Budd RDCs in the 1950s. I'm not aware that any of these second-hand steel cars still exist, other than the two ex-DL&W examples mentioned above.
However, several of this same series of coaches had been converted to M.U. subscription club cars by the DL&W in the 1930s, with full vestibules, M.U. appuratus, and wicker furniture, and can be prominently seen in photographs of the last runs of the DL&W M.U. fleet about 1984. A couple of these club car variants still exist in New Jersey, heavily vandalized, within the U.R.H.S. collection.
