I am sure many of us have made the pilgrimage to New Orleans to ride the Perley Thomas cars. Perley A. Thomas started his streetcar company in High Point, NC in 1916 to rebuild open cars as enclosed cars for Charlotte, NC. He built cars for many cities including Helena, MT as shown in this ad.



Nearly a dozen Perley Thomas cars are saved outside of New Orleans at museums and San Francisco. The new streetcar line just opened in New Orleans will use Perley Thomas cars. Here's my favorite shot of one of the cars:
http://railfan44.rrpicturearchives.net/ ... id=2114382

A car at the Trolley Museum in Charlotte looks like a Perley Thomas but the information on their web site says it was built in Charlotte. Here is a picture from their web site.



Your child or grandchild may have ridden a Perley Thomas to school this morning. Well sort of. Thomas Built Buses, Inc. is a descendant company building school and other specialty buses in High Point, NC. I could not see any buildings on their site that looked old enough to have been there during trolley building. Here is a picture of their main entrance.



A Perley Thomas trolley is under reconstruction here at the NC Transportation Museum. The work has nearly stopped because many of the volunteers working on it were Thomas Built employees and were laid off because of the recession.

Much on this subject is on the Internet. Just Google "Perley Thomas".

Charlotte car #85 was built in the carbarn at South Boulevard near where the old Episcopal Chapel was torn down to put in a South End parking lot - kind of near Park Avenue and Bland Street. 85 is a homegrown generic Birney 2 truck safety car.....many of which style were produced by Perley Thomas of course, along with other manufacturers.

We didn't know 85 was 85 when we started the restoration of "an old trolley car" back in the mid 1980s, or who built it. It had been used as a snack stand, then as part of a house after running the last trip when busses took over. I was stripping paint with a heat gun off the wood arches at the vestibule ends, and luckily on one end the number had been painted on before the varnish went on - so, the softened varnish protected the number from being peeled off with the many layers of paint. The exterior had no original paint to provide any identification. Duke Power's corporate archivist provcided the provenance for the history of car #85 as a home built Birney clone. When the number 85 showed up under layers of paint and crud.....real AHA! moment. Now we had a history, and a new story about how the last would be the new first.

The Spencer Shops PT car is a New Orleans double truck without the aluminum retrofits as were made to the cars still in new Orleans. It was recovered from sitting in front of the Thomas Bus building when Alan Paul was gathering the collection for NC Transportation Museum. I want over it ferequently to model the restoration of missing stuff from car 85, since there was pretty much nothing left in 85 other than (most of) the steel carbody and a bit of interior woodwork to start with. It was in pretty sad shap[e back then....somebody got the idea to regauge the trucks and run a trolley to Salisbury from Spencer Shops, which never happened, and a wheel was broken in the process, which was replaced with a used one from NOPSI. There were two single truck Salisbury bodies left, one at the depot and one at the Shops, and I have been told some Stone and Webster double truck turtleback bodies here and there....Salisbury / Spencer was a S&W system.

If I can provide assistance please let me know.

dave

My day job is in the school bus business, and my fleet is entirely Thomas. I've had the pleasure of a factory tour, and one of their older manufacturing buildings still has rails embedded in the floor that are said to have been there for streetcar production. The main fabrication plant sits behind the entrance pictured and while reworked on the outside, definitely dates back to the streetcar production period.

Thanks much for the comments above. Let me add a picture of a Thomas School Bus built in 1940. It sits in the corner of the Spencer Shops (NC Trans. Museum) Roundhouse (yes, roundhouses have corners!).