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COMPANY STORE CAR 529 ON THE NEW MTS SILVER LINE DOWNTOWN LOOP. PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL ARMSTRONG
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IF YOU WEREN’T PAYING ATTENTION, you may have missed it. Quietly and modestly, Amer- ica’s newest transit line to use vintage Pres- ident’s Conference Committee (PCC) trol- leys in everyday service opened in San Diego, Calif., on August 27, 2011. Operated by San Diego’s Metropolitan Transit Sys- tem, the new Silver Line route utilizes pre- existing trolley tracks to make a clockwise “loop” through downtown. The service cur- rently runs every 30 minutes on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10:00 a.m. through 2:00 p.m. and Saturdays and Sundays from 11:00 a.m. through 3:30 p.m. as well as certain holidays. There are plans to extend the route up Park Boulevard to Balboa Park and the San Diego zoo. As more restored PCC’s become available, service along the route will be expanded.
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The San Diego operation joins the ranks of other public transit operations using vin- tage PCC’s along with Boston, Philadelphia, Kenosha, and San Francisco. The new streetcar loop is operated by MTS but it is owned by San Diego Vintage Trolley, a non- profit subsidiary of MTS that restored the car with the help of volunteers from the San Diego Electric Railway Association. This public-private partnership has also proven successful in San Francisco, where volun- teers from the Market Street Railway work as the nonprofit preservation partner of the San Francisco Municipal Railway (Muni). The car in the photo above, No. 529, is the first of six cars owned by SDVT to be completely restored and is the only one cur- rently running on the Silver Line. It came from a collector in Lake Tahoe who was planning on having a streetcar line up there, but never came to fruition. Built by the St Louis Car Company in 1946, it originally served the city of St. Louis before being sold
to San Francisco Muni, becoming No. 1122. SDVT acquired the car in 2005 and complet- ed its restoration in early 2011. It is cur- rently painted in the color scheme of the San Diego Electric Railway, which operated in San Diego from 1892 until 1949, at which point the system was replaced by buses. The car has been modified to comply with mod- ern standards, including a wheelchair lift. It has also been fitted with a pantograph style electrical pickup for compatibility with the MTS trolley wires. The number 529 pays tribute to the numbers of the original San Diego Electric Railway PCC’s, the last of which was numbered 528.
Two other former S.F. Muni cars are in storage pending restoration. Cars 1123 and 1170 were also acquired from the Lake Tahoe collector and will become 530 and 531, respectively. Two cars from Philadel- phia’s SEPTA are also waiting their turn to enter the shop. Car 2186 was acquired from the St. Louis Museum of Transportation, while 2785 was obtained directly from SEPTA. Car 2186 (future 532) rides on stan- dard gauge trucks from a Chicago car, while 2785 (future 533) will have to be converted. San Diego is often credited with sparking the “light rail revival” in the United States when they opened the San Diego Trolley (ac- tually a light rail line) in 1980, the first new surface rail transit system built since the last trolley entered the Adams Avenue car barn in 1949. The Silver Line is the fourth line of the growing MTS light rail system. You don’t have to be a transit fan to ap- preciate the sleek lines of a vintage PCC. If the attention to detail is any indication, this newest operation has a bright future. For more information, please visit their web site at
www.sdvintagetrolley.com. —OTTO M. VONDRAK ANDMICHAEL ARMSTRONG
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