I researched these trolleys last winter. These were originally issued by Pittman in June 1949. It was one of the first trolley models available for the general market and found in hobby shops. The prototype were a small series of Laconia trolleys sold by Massachusetts Northestern Street Railway to the Reading Street Railway in the late 1920s. Several were rebuilt with a monitor roof, steel sheathing and retrucked and became #145-148. By 1934 all were scrapped after the closure of some long suburban trolley lines.
I believe it was mentioned in Trolley Talk that Al Pittman died in the early 1960s and the trolley went out of production sometime after that. According to the Bowser company history in the tooling for the Pittman electric motors Bowser found "we found we had acquired the dies for the Pittman O Gauge Brill trolley". Bowser had the Brill trolley back on the market by the first half of 1981. Bowser produced single and double truck versions. By 2011 reports surfaced that Bowser wanted to sell the dies for various product lines including the O gauge trolleys.
