LATL PCCs: Then and Now by Gary Starre
LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION ! Traction Fan Garry Starre did this very photo interesting comparison of what happens to PCCs after they left Los Angeles. Cars #3001, #3072, #3100, & #3165 have done very well in retirement at OERM. However, the 133 LA PCCs that were sold to Cairo, wound up in “PCC Death Camps” and were turned into “Rolling Zombies”….
Steve Crise and Ralph Cantos Collections
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This just goes to attest that the quality of the cars. They went on to operate in Cairo for another 20 plus years with latterly no maintenance. They were 15 through 25 years old when sold. Buses there don’t even last 10 years. If they continued to operate in Los Angeles with the quality of maintenance they had, they would have lasted until at least the millennium to be replaced by the low floor cars of today. Los Angeles would be a better place if the rail service remained.
At Orange Empire, we have an LARy route map from about 1940 posted in Barn 1 (Ray Ballash Car House). Visitors will sometime comment on the dense network of streetcar lines in LA, and I will tell them, “There’s one place in the world where they have a ‘gridiron’ downtown street layout, and lots of streetcar lines. And they even speak English. The only catch is, it’s a 15 hour airplane flight from LA to Melbourne, Australia.”