Philadelphia’s antique trolley cars will be making a return to Route 15 this fall. Six trolleys from the 1940s are expected to run along 8.2 miles of tracks on Girard Avenue after three years and $1.5 million in restoration.
The trolleys will be available beginning September 10. According to SEPTA, 12 more cars are expected over the coming months.
From SEPTA’s recent announcement:
In 2020, with major PennDOT construction scheduled for I-95 and I-76, SEPTA, temporarily suspended trolley service on the Route 15 trolley line and substituted it with bus service. During this time, SEPTA implemented a project to fully restore 18 of the 1947 PCC trolleys that service the Route 15. Repair work included full body and frame restoration of the trolleys, as well as trolley loop and track improvements on the eastern portion of the Route 15. All trolleys that service the Route 15 are ADA accessible and updated with new frames, floors, windows, wheelchair lifts and HVAC units.
“When they come in, they are ready for the scrap heap and when they leave here they’re museum-quality almost,” Brian Aaron, SEPTA’s director of rail vehicle maintenance, said in a recent interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer.
From The Inquirer’s article:
Six of the historic vehicles have been rehabbed at a cost of about $250,000 each, and SEPTA has been testing them along the route for the past several months. Excited trolley fans posted pictures all over social media nearly every time one was spotted.
For many in Philadelphia, the 76-year-old streetcars are like holy relics. They are a touchstone, a link to the city’s past – and when they disappeared in the early 1990s as financial problems forced SEPTA to close several trolley lines, the public clamored for more than a decade for their return.
SEPTA will eventually replace the vintage cars with a fleet of new light-rail vehicles.
For NBC10’s video coverage, you can watch this video:
For a Youtube slideshow of the trolleys from the 1960s, you can watch this video:
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Photo courtesy of Wikipedia