What a perfect Valentine’s Day gift to San Francisco. The return of a PCC whose livery has stolen a lot of hearts with its appropriate-for-the-day red coloring. Car 1061 is painted in tribute to Pacific Electric, the legendary Southern California system that once stretched from San Bernardino to Santa Monica, and from the San Fernando Valley to Newport Beach. P-E only had a handful of streamlined PCCs in its enormous fleet, and they were unique: double-ended, with front and center doors on each side, like no other PCCs built. They had no standee windows. They ran almost exclusively on the Glendale-Burbank line. When P-E was closing its operations, they were sold to Argentina. None survives today.
Despite the body differences between the P-E prototype and its San Francisco cousin, the spectacular red, orange, and silver livery, similar to that worn by the famed “Daylight” steam trains operated by P-E parent Southern Pacific between LA and San Francisco, was an obvious choice to be included in the initial group of 14 single-end PCCs restored by Muni for the F-line in the early 1990s. One hitch, though: only a limited palette of colors was approved, so the orange came out more as a red-orange, offering limited contrast to the red body of the car.
When the car went to Brookville Equipment Company for its rebuilding, Market Street Railway worked with Muni to get the orange corrected, and you see the result, in the great first-day-of-service photo above by Traci Cox. For comparison, here’s a shot of a P-E prototype back in the day. Note that the P-E livery was assigned to Car 1061 in the initial restoration contract of the early 1990s before Muni exercised an option to add three of its own-double-end PCCs to that contract. There have been endless rail fan debates about whether a single-end car is appropriate for the P-E livery, but with front and center doors, like the prototype, the livery was easier to replicate than it would have been on one of Muni’s double-end cars, with doors at each end, and no center door.
Word is that the next car to return from Brookville, Car 1057, painted in tribute to Cincinnati, could pull into town next week, followed in a couple of months by the final single-end PCC, Car 1058, painted in the Chicago Green Hornet Livery. That would leave only those three original Muni double-end cars we mentioned above still at Brookville, undergoing their complete rebuilding just like the 1061 and the other PCCs in the 16-car contract. Car 1015, painted to honor Illinois Terminal, could be back in June, with the other two, Cars 1010 and 1007, scheduled to arrive by October. We’ll keep you updated on those schedules.
For now, enjoy the glory of the Daylight colors, sparkling even in this rainy weather.
