PCCs return to San Diego

[jwhite07]

I was very surprised to stumble upon mention in the September 2011 Railway Age magazine that there is a restored PCC now running on San Diego's MTS. Possibly more will join the fleet as well - they reportedly own five or six of San Francisco, Newark, and Philadelphia heritage.

More info here:

http://www.sdmts.com/vintagetrolley.asp
http://www.sdvintagetrolley.com/

The first one looks very classy in San Diego Electric Railway livery. Might this be the first PCC in the US (or perhaps anywhere) to be equipped with LED destination signs?!

[mtuandrew]

Very cool! The Newark (probably ex-Twin Cities) cars sure have gotten around.

It still looks bizarre to see a pan sticking out of a PCC's roof though!

[ExCon90]

I've been wondering since the operation was announced: as the car will apparently spend its service life making right turns, something that doesn't normally happen with transit equipment, do they anticipate problems with unequal wheel wear, and what is the best way of dealing with it?

[Patrick Boylan]

It still looks bizarre to see a pan sticking out of a PCC's roof though!

Pittsburgh ran PCC's for several years with pantographs

[jwhite07]

Very cool! The Newark (probably ex-Twin Cities) cars sure have gotten around.

Yes, many of them did find good homes, and a number of those did indeed end up in California. I will note that the first restored San Diego car (#529) bears enough distinctive features to make me pretty sure it was ex-San Francisco, and not Newark.

It still looks bizarre to see a pan sticking out of a PCC's roof though!

Always has been to me... it was common practice in Europe for many years before North America, but I remember when they put a pantograph on Boston Elevated Railway #3295 in the early 1990s. Even though they did (IMHO) an excellent job trying to minimize the visual impact, and the pantograph style used in Boston is fairly small in scale anyhow, it always looked so out of place to me. Then there were Pittsburgh and Newark, with what seemed to me like hugely oversized pans in both cases, and Newark's were doubly ugly being mounted "backwards" ("elbow" facing rearward) and also located closer to the front end of the car roof. Ugh!

The pan on the San Diego car looks pretty okay, despite it being as tall as the rest of the car and also being a front-mount. Somehow it doesn't look freakish to me. Then again, maybe to me it sort of hearkens back to the original cars and their trolley poles mounted on extension towers. ;-P

[lensovet]

just out of curiosity, what go you guys think of this pantograph style?
http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Файл:Kaztm99.jpg

[TCRT612]

Very cool! The Newark (probably ex-Twin Cities) cars sure have gotten around.

Yes, many of them did find good homes, and a number of those did indeed end up in California. I will note that the first restored San Diego car (#529) bears enough distinctive features to make me pretty sure it was ex-San Francisco, and not Newark.

That is indeed an ex-San Francisco car, but it was originally built new for Saint Louis, hence the more steeply sloped windshield that St. Louis specified for all of its PCCs (to reduce glare at night). I am fairly certain only Saint Louis bought this design post-war, with Pittsburgh having bought it pre-war also.

As for the Newark cars (all of which are ex-Twin Cities), I think San Diego only has one (along with two more ex-MUNI and two ex-Philadelphia, I think), with MUNI having another 11 for a total of 12 in California. These cars were built with a high percentage of stainless steel specifically for Minnesota winter conditions, making them very durable and long-lasting and helping to explain their rather broad distribution at this point.

[jwhite07]

just out of curiosity, what go you guys think of this pantograph style?
http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Файл:Kaztm99.jpg

Paul, that is known as a bow collector. Very rare in the United States, but it was fairly common in Europe.

I mentioned previously the installation of a pantograph on BERy PCC 3295; this was done to facilitate operation of the car on the MBTA Green Line after the overhead was converted from simple trolley wire to constant tension catenary. For historically aesthetic reasons, there was for a short time consideration of installing a bow collector on Boston's other historic streetcar, 1924-vintage Type 5 #5734. Nothing ever came of it, however. On the few outings 5734 made after the changeover to constant tension catenary, operating through wire junctions was accomplished with an Inspector (operations supervisor) reaching out the rear vestibule window, yanking on the retreiver rope to pull the trolley pole down, coasting until clear of the wire junction, then aiming carefully to raise the pole back up onto the wire. Good Inspectors could do it without the car even stopping!

[lensovet]

that's great.

interestingly enough, this is actually a novelty in Russia, where that picture is from - most streetcars/trams just use regular triangular pans. the catenary there, though, is quite abysmal in some places.

[Disney Guy]

On most streetcar lines, modern or traditional, with pantograph compatible or pantograph only overhead, a bow collector would have to mounted towards the front of the car so the shoe would be in the correct position for the wire. On curves the wire is almost always over the middle of the track or to the inside of the track center line on curves. The middle of the car is also to the inside of the curve while the end of the car is to the outside of the curve, so the bow collector shoe must be near the middle of the car.

For those familiar with the Boston center entrance cars, a workable position of a bow collector would be approximately the same as the trolley pole location for that car style, over the front of the car with the wheel near the middle. It was said that the overhead back then was such (perhaps with some last minute tweakings) that the conductor, standing inside, could reset the trolley pole via a transverse slot in the car roof on any curve or straightaway or junction.

Therefore in most cases the esthetics are not that much improved with a bow collector compared with a pantograph.

[Tadman]

Don't forget they ran the last few years of Cleveland PCC service with pans. A handful of the best remaining PCCs were rebuilt, repainted, and equipped with pans until the Breda LRVs arrived. I believe the pole-equipped cars had power trainlined as the poles could no longer operate on the catenary system.

From Dave's Railpix:

[lensovet]

my apologies to the purists but that just looks SO COOL imho.

[Tadman]

I agree, Paul. My favorite era in the history of the Cleveland/Shaker rapid was the pan-equipped PCC. I don't know that any exist anymore, although the city does keep a Kuhlman car (edwardian era) with a new pantograph, too.

[jwhite07]

Don't forget they ran the last few years of Cleveland PCC service with pans.

I had indeed forgotten about that! Thanks for the reminder.

I believe the pole-equipped cars had power trainlined as the poles could no longer operate on the catenary system.

That would seem to be the case, judging from the picture you included. That second car has no pantograph and the pole appears to be down.