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We have recently seen a number of photos of Pacific Electric red cars in service. Most of these have been of large cars with round porthole type windows on the ends. This is not surprising as these were the last and largest of “The Big Red Cars” to operate in Southern California. Car 409, originally posed by
ER and seen in the photo above carries Metropolitan Coach Lines in place of Pacific Electric on it’s letterboard, while Number 1543 seen in a black & white photo in Long Beach by John Bromley wears LAMTA two-tone green with a white roof. I though it might be beneficial to NLA viewers if I provided a bit of history of these cars.
Pacific Electric operated two styles of cars with porthole style end windows. Both were inherited from Southern Pacific Electric operations. The first style was numbered from 1252 to 1263 and were known on the PE as “Portland Twelves” The “Portland Twelves “came to Pacific Electric in 1928 from SP after that company had abandoned electric suburban runs out of Portland to Eugene via Forest Grove, Newberg, McMinnville and Corvallis. Known originally as "The Portland, Eugene & Eastern Railway," the company later was "The Oregon & California Railway" and finally was simply known as "The SP Red Electrics," the latter being a nickname, not the corporate title. Opened in 1913, the electric operation at its height was impressive, yet by 1927 was suffering severely from automobile competition. By July, 1928, buses had taken over some runs and eighteen of the big steel interurban cars were surplus; these were sold to Pacific Electric in July of that year.” (source Orange Empire Railway Museum).
In addition to their portholes, Portland Twelves can be distinguished by a destination sign on the roof at each end of the car. For a visual comparison with the two photos above, a picture of a Portland Twelve can be found at the bottom of this page:
http://www.pacificelectric.org/categ...strict/page/3/
The second style of Porthole end window cars came from Southern Pacific’s electric operations In the San Francisco Bay Area and these are important to Los Angeles transit history as they closed out the ‘Red Car” era.
One group came from Southern Pacific’s Northwestern Pacific operations in Marin County to a ferryboat terminus in Sausalito. This service was discontinued in 1941 with the completion of the Golden Gate Bridge.
A second and nearly identical group also came from the San Francisco Bay area. These were from SP”s East Bay Electric Lines, renamed the Interurban Electric Railway after 1938. The IER was also abandoned in 1941, and with America’s entry into WWII the United States Maritime Commission purchased sixty-one of the NWP and IER cars that year for its Cal Ship operations to the LA Harbor shipbuilding facilities. These cars were operated and Maintained by the PE and following the war PE purchased the majority of them for its Southern District operations. At 72 feet in length and weighing 64 tons, these were the largest cars in operation on the PE, and were known as “Blimps”. They would end their days on the Long Beach Line on April 9, 1961, having operated for two subsequent transit agencies – Los Angeles Metropolitan Coach Lines (MCL) and the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority (LAMTA), still, with one exception, in their PE Colors. These were the only P.E. cars not to carry roof top destination signs.
MCL retained the P.E. 300/400 series numbering, but LAMTA renumbered them into the 1500 series.
Rail transit systems throughout the U.S. entered a steep decline following WWII and LA was no exception. However, In the case of the LA-Long Beach line there were serious issues plaguing it’s continued operation at the start of the 1960’s. Track and overhead were deteriorating and expensive to maintain and the Blimps, some of which had been built as early as 1911 were approaching the half century mark, and the cost of replacement with new equipment would be considerable. The LAMTA put one car, No. 1543, a 1911 product of American Car and Foundry through it’s shops for a complete overhaul that included new bus style upholstery and repainting into the two-tone green with white roof livery worn by it’s busses. Unfortunately, the cost to upgrade the rail infrastructure and the entire fleet of blimps was deemed to be uneconomical, and no other cars were rebuilt to this appearance. This lone car became known as the “Green Blimp” and is now on display at Traveltown in Griffith Park. To its credit, the LAMTA also borrowed a set of standard gauge trucks from the San Francisco Municipal Railway to put under one of its 42-inch gauge ex-Los Angeles Transit Lines PCC cars and made a number of runs between LA and Long Beach to test the feasibility of using those cars as replacements for the Blimps. However, the track proved to be to rough for these lightweight vehicles and that idea was abandoned and the decision was made to convert the operation to buses.
If we look strictly at the automobiles in the black & white photo above one could almost be tricked into believing that Pacific Electric had a two tone color scheme in the early 1950’s, but in reality this is the famous “Green Blimp” turned out by the LAMTA in April of 1960.