Saving Broken Trolley Cars

Remind me after Labor Day, once I'm finally free of the hospital-industrial complex.  I'm reasonably sure I have bits and pieces lurking...

Mitch

Bobby,

I’m glad to hear there are others out there who like Connecticut trolleys.  Here is an Industrial Rail trolley that I converted into an express car, just as the prototype was converted.

Mitch, I pray all will be well with you. Bruce, nice job converting the Industrial Rail Brill to a Connecticut Car. Did you scribe the wood sheathing into the body or is it add-on stock?

I now have 3 Industrial Rail Brills that are not in running condition. I hope to get one running by cannibalizing two of them for parts. The non-running cars will become flat car loads. I want to repaint & decal all three cars in Connecticut livery.

I’ve found that the electronics on the Industrial Rail trolleys sometimes go before the motors and gearing, so some of mine have been rewired as forward only.  That’s OK for me because I run them on our club layout, the trolley portion of which is a loop.

This is kind of nerdy, but I like projects where I can mimic what actually happened with the prototype.  In the case of the photo I posted earlier, in 1908 the Connecticut Company had Wason rebuild a pre-1900 closed car for express service.  I used styrene car siding to go over the sides and most of the windows.

 If you look at the photos in HARTFORD TROLLEYS and HARTFORD COUNTY TROLLEYS, you can see that before rebuilding, the car was very much like the IR model except it had 12 side windows.  There’s a photo on Google Books’ preview of HARTFORD COUNTY TROLLEYS, p. 40:

https://books.google.com/books...html?id=6x7bFurFv1YC

I look forward to following your project.  Good luck with it.