Snapshots of distant times
Template(s) drawn by Joshua Moldover, via The Railroad Paint Shop
This box motor (PV&T 278, ex LW&C 1) – an ~500hp 600vdc boxcab that last saw service in spring 1937 before the LW&C was powered off and updated to 3000vdc – only techically still exists as a workshop in a backyard in Lincoln, approximately 75 feet away from the rail line it once ran on. The vivid paint scheme shown here is only a memory; the LW&C, as befitting a marginal-to-failing interurban line, had a spectacular huge logo and a vivid blue paint scheme to represent health and efficiency (neither of which were much in evidence during its existence, but a scrappy garbage rat logo was, for some odd reason, not chosen) though the pilots (still attached!) still have some flakes of the old red/black paint on them.
The drawing here shows some of the unhappiness that the LW&C train crews had about the whole business of the LW&C failing, being grabbed by that other railroad, and being stripped for parts. The PV&T renumbered the LW&C Brills into the PV&T numbering scheme, wired the LW&C shop to put on the new numbers and paint over the old ones, and so they got this; a thin wash of blue over the big #1 on the sides, 278s under the cab windows, the #1 still on the headlight (trolley line, so removable headlight, but the LW&C had the vanity that each freight unit should have its own headline with road numbers on it) instead of being painted over, and of course the LW&C ELECTRIC FREIGHT logo stayed on the unit until the very end. There were no markings showing that this was a PV&T engine, and that’s the way the crews liked it!