[PRCo] Orange Empire Railway Museum

[Fred Schneider]

Here are three other picture taken at OERM in Perris, CA two weeks ago during their antique car show event.   They all came from the camera of John Smatlak and were forwarded by Alan Fishel through Jack May   One thing hat does not appear here is the stage with the Elvis Presley and Beatles impersonators.   They had a really fine event.  I suspect the attendance ... counting the admissions plus the antique car members ... could have exceeded a 1,000 that Saturday.  
The museum has multiple track gauges ...

There is standard gauge under wire for Pacific Electric and for steam and diesel trains.  The middle picture show one of the four Hollywood center door cars built in the 1920s.   That's four in their collection.   The original numbers were in the 600 and 700 series.   After rebuilding to one-man, they were renumbered into the 5050 series.   

There is 42 inch gauge track under wire for the Los Angeles city streetcars.   The photo of 665 may be when it came out or when the compressor governor failed and it was brought back into the stable for Dave Garcia's attention.   (Dave told me he used to peddle his bike over to Watts when he was a kid and ask the PE people what was in the cases under the streetcars.  Over the years, Dave became one of the nation's experts on streetcar air brake technology.    In the picture of LA 665, the white automobile to its right is a factory-built replicar by Merces Benz of the car Eva Braun owned when she was Adolf Hitler's girl friend.  

Finally, there is 36 inch gauge track and a separate building to house the Grizzly Flats Railroad which had once run in the San Gabriel back yard of Disney Studio's animator Ward Kimball.    Either when Ward died (by will) or when we was about to die, he transferred his equipment to OERM. 

I guess in my heart I have a warm spot for publicizing Orange Empire for all that Dave and those guys tried to do to help me when I was working on the PCC books.   I wasn't involved in the museum industry then.   My memberships at BSM and PTM came later.   But the earliest cars I ran in museums were the Westinghouse VA controlled car at Perris (LA 2601), one of the LA PCCs, a San Diego PCC, a Blimp, and a Hollywood car, all thanks to Dave.   

So I'm willing to spread the news around that they've come a long way in the last 30 years.    

The first
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