RailKing Brill Trolley 30-5107-1

RailKing Brill Trolley 30-5107-1

Details of the mechanism. The RailKing model has a single motor and includes Proto-Sound 2 boards which are mounted in the center of the car along with the speaker which is facing down. Two incandescent bulbs are provided for interior lighting. The directional headlights and number boards are separately lighted.

RailKing Brill Trolley 30-5107-1

Modifications to the model.

1. I will remove the incandescent lamps and use LEDs to light only the front cab area.

2. Remove the "silhouette" window material and replace with "tinted" window "glass".

Note: I have already removed the window material from the model.

3. Add window glass to the front and detail the front "cab" area. (The battery is installed on the other end.)

Can't wait to see how this turns out. I really love the Railking trolleys, but the dark spot in the center of the car (where the motor sticks up) has always annoyed me

That is a model of The Pay Within Car made around the 1900 turn of the century. Many companies had the same or similar cars. I have the Red Arrow and PTC cars even thos Red Arrow or it's earlier name: Philadelphia & Wect Chester Traction Co.  never had that type of car but PRT the predcessor of PTC did have them but were all scrapped when PTC took over in 1940. 

RailKing Brill Trolley 30-5107-1

Here is a prototype trolley which is similar to the RailKing model.

The car above is a 1923 Pearly Thomas built car. I thook the attached photo of New Orleans 453 which is the only survivor of a group of 25 cars purchaced from Brill in 1906 and scrapped 1935. I think Atlas decorated there IR Trolleys in New Orleans scheme not sure.

Similar trucks maybe, but not the rest of the body.

I have the Western Hobbycraft version, which has the rounded roof (but is still a model of a Johnstown, PA car). A New Orleans Perley Thomas car would be an ideal body style for the RailKing chassis, though. Certainly much more recognition than the Brill body.

---PCJ

The Brill company holds a soft spot in my heart. I grew-up in SW Philadelphia, our house was at 6140 Grays Ave. There was one street between us and the PA RR North East corridore, Glenmore. From there was short walk over the 62end street bridge and you came up on the old wooden fence to the Brill factory. It sat between the tracks on the East and Woodland avenue on the west.

Down Woodland ran the 11 trolley car, PCC in my day. I can remember my friends grand mother telling us about horse drawn cars on Woodland avenue fifty years prior.

On the North end was 57th street and the south end was 62end street as stated above.

I was born in 1948 so I can barely remember them in production. Most of my memories of the factory came from stories the older generation told me about men standing at the main gate trying to get a days work during the depression.

I do remember when they brought down the old brick smoke stack. I guess it was well over a hundred and fifty feet tall because you could see it towering over the roofs of the homes on Glenmore street when you looked out of the front bed room window of our house on Grays.

That was in the late fifties or early sixties. There was also an old water tower that stood into the late eighties when Septa ran the R1 Airport train line through the property.

We use to play sand lot baseball in the filed on the other side of the PA RR tracks. The wooden fence that I mentioned above also ran along the tracks and they had a life side picture of a PTC Trolly that was to be built there.

That was painted in the late thirties, or early fourties from what the old timers told me. It was part of a Brills advertising campaign trying to get the Philadelphia Transprotation Companies (PTC), contract for new street cars. Needless to say the PCC designe won out and thus Brills started it's downward slide.

In any case the old plant did not die a quick death. It was a slow and ignoble passing from the Philadelphia landscape, much like most of the manufacturing since the early fifties.