This streetcar is painted to honor Dallas, which ran PCCs from 1945 to 1956.
Dallas Railway & Terminal Company’s 25 double-enders were built by Pullman-Standard and had narrower rear doors and a narrower body than Muni’s torpedoes, built by St. Louis Car Company. As Dallas’ first (and last) modern streetcars, their PCCs were dubbed “Gliding Beauties,” and ran on a variety of routes around “Big D” during their short lives there, often alongside conventional older streetcars.
Like other southern streetcar systems of that era, Dallas PCCs were segregated, with moveable signs to separate the black and white sections, blacks in the rear. (The irony, of course, was that on a double-end car, seats occupied by blacks would be occupied by whites on the return trip and vice versa.)
Dallas’ PCCs arrived from the factory in a predominantly red livery with cream and silver trim. Dallas Railway & Terminal picked the colors but apparently didn’t tell the builder how to apply them, so Pullman-Standard used the diagrams for its earlier Pacific Electric PCCs (a livery modeled on Muni No. 1061) as a guide. The original livery lasted a little less than half the life of the cars’ tenure in Dallas, replaced by a mostly cream livery with red trim, featuring three bars across the ends instead of the wings motif of the earlier scheme. No. 1009 wears the first Dallas livery.
When Dallas retired its PCCs, they tried to sell them to other streetcar operators. New Orleans Public Service apparently considered them for its Canal and St. Charles lines, but ultimately rejected them because the narrow rear doors of the Pullman design would slow passenger flow too much.
Dallas also approached the San Francisco Municipal Railway to buy the cars, but Muni had no money for purchases at the time. (Muni ended up leasing 70 used streetcars from St. Louis Public Service in 1957 to get around this cash crunch). After also striking out with Mexico City, Seoul, and Toronto, Dallas finally sold its PCCs to Boston in 1958-59, where they became known to fans as the “Texas Rangers,” soldiering on until 1981 when they were retired from passenger service. Six ended up at Seashore Railway Museum, Kennebunkport, Maine, but their frames and other metalwork are so badly rusted, mostly from the road salt in Boston, they are not high priority candidates for restoration by the museum, which has offered to sell them, with no takers to date.
While No. 1009 now wears the Dallas Railway & Terminal livery, this streetcar has actually been a San Francisco Muni streetcar all its life. It ran from 1948 until 1982 on Muni’s J, K, L, M, and N lines, and was then retired and stored. Badly vandalized while in storage, its restoration returns it to like-new condition, painted to honor “Big D.”

Originally built for
San Francisco Municipal Railway, San Francisco CA, 1948
Builder
St. Louis Car Co.
Modified/upgraded
2010-11
Contractor
Brookville Equipment Company, Pennsylvania
Seats
60
Weight
40,140 lbs.
Length
50′ 5″
Width
9′ 0″
Height
10′ 1″
Motors
4 General Electric 1220E1
Control
General Electric
Trucks
St. Louis B-3
Brakes
Westinghouse Electric