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.
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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.
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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.
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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".