Ex-Manhattan Railway 2nd Avenue 'EL" Cars ------ Oldest restored and preserved in the United States.

There was a sister car to these on rail next to the Gettysburg Pa. train station 40 years ago.

Superb video so the restored Ex Manhattan el cars. The couplers are  called Van Dorn's. They were quite common  and used on all the elevated and original subway cars of the Manattan Elevated Railway later the  Inerborough Rapid Transit Company. They were also used by many other traction and rapid transit company's.                     

The oldest cars however survive and are located in the Shore  line trolley museum in  East Haven, Connecticut. One car Money car G, ex passenger car 41 was built in 1878 and  the other, Instruction Car 824 an ex passenger car built 1881. This car is the same as the  two cars in the Rio Vista Museum.

The Rio Vista museum deserves the highes praise for the magnificent restoration of these two elevated  cars

Kudos. Nate

To my knowledge, G has never been a motor car, always a trailer.

Not sure whether 41 was ever powered.

Lee

"G" is a control trailer. It has controls and marker lights on one end and a compressor and with  other equipment. Similar cars were sold to small railroads all over the country. Some were converted to electric cars for trolley service. G has a long and interesting history. If you go to the Shore line museum's web site you can see photos of it.

Here is a photo of 626 which looks to be a very similar car. Think this was running on the second ave line running to queens.

Here is an O Scale model of the same type Manhattan elevated car in the Golden Rod color used in the 1920s to promote riding the els rather than the subway.

The ERA in issue Number 25, dated December 1956, published a roster of the steam locomotives and cars of the Manhattan Railway and its predecessors. Car 626 pictured above was built by Pullman in June 1879 for the Metropolitan (Sixth Avenue) as No. 126 but re-numbered when the Met was acquired by the Manhattan. It was electrified around 1902-3, and scrapped May 20, 1946.

keyrouteken posted:

To all my Traction friends on my favorite forum...   TWO of the original Manhattan Railway 2nd Avenue 'EL' Cars, which were built by the Gilbert Car Company in Troy, NY in 1887---  look like NEW and are running in regular service at the Western Railway Museum, Rio Vista Junction, CA--about 45 miles South of Sacramento.   Cars 561 and 563 are   129-years old and are the oldest electric cars in any rail museum in the United States.  The Museum is owned by the Bay Area Electric Railroad Association of which I have been a member since 1965.   Do any of you New Yorkers know the official type of COUPLER that you will see in the photos on these cars ???

Anyway,  check out the following LINKS and enjoy these original New York Elevated Cars !!

Note:  I understand these used to be pulled by Steam Engines until Frank Sprague and his MU Control changed the history on the "EL" s  ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5W13NWa3NM

http://www.flickriver.com/phot...s/72157631030882104/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/...snell707/5059959829/

Cheers !!

 Ken Shattock  (KRK)

 

 

Ken -- Do you (or anyone at the Museum) know what these cars' original numbers were? The ERA roster shows 561 and 563 were built by Pullman in 1878 for the Metropolitan (Sixth Ave.) as 61 and 63, and renumbered by the Manhattan; but the roster also shows them as being scrapped in 1940, two years before a bunch of cars were dispatched to Oakland. (A lot of them went all over the country to places like Bayonne and Pine Bluff as well.) I assume they were re-numbered in California.

Here's a piece about the cars that went to Arkansas.  http://www.arkansasrailroadhis...r/roadside-diner.htm

The cars at the Western Railway Museum were numbered 844 and 889 in New York.  

David Johnston posted:

The cars at the Western Railway Museum were numbered 844 and 889 in New York.  

Thanks! -- that explains it! I guessed that the Key System renumbered them to put them all in the same class, separate from their own equipment. Those two cars were part of a large batch -- 826-919 -- built by Gilbert & Bush in October 1887. Fifty-one of that group went to Key; several went to Hunts Point Shipyard in San Francisco.

On the Key System the 800 and 900 series were streetcars that were not retired until after the war. The 500 series were wooden transbay cars that were stripped for parts that were reapplied the the Bridge Units.  The Units were in series 100 to 187.  The 500 series cars were all gone by 1939.  So when the New York cars showed up during the war the 500 series of numbers was available.  

There were only a few cars that went to Hunters Point and they were stripped of electrical equipment and locomotive hauled. That operation was not associated with the Key.  I do not who operated it.

The cars were built by the Gilbert Car Company. Bush was out of the business by 1880 and Gilbert renamed the company. The cars were actually built in Green Island. Gilbert ran the business out of his home in Troy and used that address.  The house is still there and is still a private residence. The factory is still in Green Island. It has been built into a milk processing company. The lumber sheds, and probably the mill are gone and have been replaced with housing.

I had read that about Gilbert. Interesting the stuff that survives from so long ago. 

Those old cars -- not just the Gilbert ones -- went all over during WWII, including Bayonne, Ohio, Delaware, Virginia and Indiana. Prior to the First World War, a number of the older cars were sold to interurban lines all over the country, even in Canada. And dozens were trucked up to Holmes, New York, for cabins in a summer camp run by the New York Department of Sanitation -- Camp Sanita. I had a friend who was in a Boy Scout troop in The Bronx who remembered them still being used there in the Fifties and early Sixties. 

When the Shipyard railway closed, I think it ran less than two years, the cars were trucked to a field where the iron and copper was stripped off and the car bodies were sold.  They were all over Northern California. But that was seventy years ago and I do not know of any that still exist, except for the two at WRM.