DUNCANSVILLE, Pa. – A rare steel office car from the Anthracite Region has been rescued by the Everett Railroad, which intends to restore it for first-class service on its excursion trains.
The only known surviving passenger car of the Lehigh & New England Railroad, car 1No. 00 was built by American Car & Foundry Co. in September 1925, serving the L&NE until the road was abandoned in 1961, after which the car was used by a track-breaking contractor.
The 75-foot-long, 60-ton car was sold in 1964 to become part of the “Paoli Local” restaurant in Strafford, Pa., on the historic main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad, route of the Philadelphia commuter train fleet from PRR. same name The owner painted and lettered it Pennsylvania Railroad and gave it the number 605. Several photographs of the car being moved to the restaurant site are in the Radnor Historical Society’s online archive.
Both the interior and exterior were heavily modified, according to Everett Railroad President Alan Maples, with the interior and two holes cut into one side to provide access to and from the main building of the restaurant The business changed names and owners several times, he said. Finally, in 1993, the owner no longer needed the car and sold it to Ed Metka, owner of the Vintage Electric Streetcar Co. in Windber, Pa., south of Johnstown. Metka stored the car in a building that was once a freight car repair shop for the Berwind-White Coal Mining Co., a loader that once deployed a fleet of hundreds of privately owned hoppers.
Most of Metka’s inventory consisted of retired streetcars that it hoped to market to cities or agencies contemplating a revival of streetcar service. It found some buyers, but there were many pieces of rolling stock left, including the L&NE 100.
Maples met Metka through a mutual friend, Keith Burkey. “At the time, Ed didn’t want to sell the car and we hadn’t started our road trip program,” Maples said. “It was serendipitous timing that I thought of the L&NE 100 earlier this year and contacted Ed just as the property was coming up. I appreciate [him] for saving this car in 1993 and making it available for restoration and running.”
The car, he said, will be taken to the Everett Railroad headquarters and shop in Duncansville, near Altoona, for evaluation and repair.
History of the car
Car no. 100 took L&NE officials on their first inspection tour of that road on October 21, 1925, according to the Allentown (Pa.) morning call.
It will not be possible to restore the car’s original interior layout and furnishings, in part because floor plans have not been located. But Maples has unearthed some of its secrets from a cache of AC&F builder photos in the Delaware Public Archives.
“It didn’t have a traditional floor plan,” he said. “It appears that the car was configured with four or five small compartments, each equipped with an upper and a lower bunk. There was a small kitchen, a toilet and an observation room that could have served as a dining room. The car originally had stained glass panels on the esplanade (they are intact), a carpeted floor and walnut panels.
Shortly after the car arrived on the L&NE, Reading Co. offered to buy and merge the entire railroad. “As part of its plans to integrate the L&NE into its own operations, Reading proposed to take the L&NE’s new 100 car and reconfigure it to a more conventional design, including two cabins,” Maples said. “Bobb Losse located the proposed floor plan among the documents of the Reading Co. Technical and Historical Society. i [Pennsylvania state archivist] Kurt Bell provided me with a copy. The Interstate Commerce Commission rejected the acquisition, Maples noted, adding that “the car retained its original floor plan for the remainder of its railroad life.”
With a standard appearance of the heavyweight era and an open platform observation section, the L&NE No. 100 should fit in well with Everett’s fleet of 1920s passenger cars, most of them old Jersey Central Interurbans and Interurbans, along with a mix of steel. (now a bar car) of a western Pennsylvania, Bessemer and Lake Erie ore haulage road.
The Everett Railroad, which operates 22 miles of branch lines of the former Pennsylvania Railroad, operates diesel freight trains and seasonal steam passenger trains. It owns two steamships, an Alco-Cooke 2-6-0 engine built in 1920 burning used motor oil as fuel, and a Baldwin 2-8-0 engine built in 1927 (under restoration) for the corporate predecessor of the carrier, the Huntingdon. & Broad Top Mountain Railroad, which was abandoned in 1954.
