Williamsport City Council has approved an advertisement for the sale of a Pullman sleeper/lounger railroad car that is behind the Bureau of Police patrol division at the former Peter Herdic Transportation Museum at Nichols Place.

The resolution on the sale of the city property was presented by Mayor Derek Slaughter and it is not the sale of the railroad car, he said, but rather the advertisement or notification of sale.

The advertisement will be up for 10 days as people can submit their bids for the rail car. A city solicitor had recommended this was the best way of completing this business with the rail car that has been at the location for quite some time. The River Valley Transit Authority documentation obtained by the Sun-Gazette upon request noted it was put there in 2005.

In fact, the car was the first major exhibit of what was then going to be the future Peter Herdic Transportation Museum. It made a dramatic entrance to the museum site on Sept.1, 2005.

The exhibit, a Pullman sleeper/lounger was manufactured in 1949.

Originally numbered 8416, it was that year considered to be one of two remaining Pullman sleepers in the country.

It was originally located at the Newberry Yard and was transferred by Allison Crane and Rigging Co., a move that took roughly four hours.

After World War II, the shortage of restricted materials ended and the production of post-war replacement rail cars began in 1946. In that same year, the Pennsylvania Railroad ordered eight, three-bedroom, one-drawing room bar/lounge cars.

Built in May and June 1949, these eight cars were named in the “Colonial” series and used in general service as mid-train lounge cars.

Pullman completed Pennsylvania Railroad car 8416 named “Colonial Houses,” a class P513L lightweight sleeper/lounge, on June 11, 1949.

In August 1955, the car was renamed “The Nicholas Firestone” and remained in service with the Pennsylvania Railroad until May 1964 when it was transferred to the Penn Central Railroad, reclassified as a “parlor” car and renumbered 7153. It remained with Penn Central until 1971. At one time, this rail car serviced the area.

The City of Williamsport and former River Valley Transit, before it was an authority and known as City Bus, acquired this rail car from Jeff Pontius, who then went into the process of refurbishing the exterior of the car as part of the transportation museum and trolley hub project.

The building was formerly home to the Peter Herdic Transportation Museum. According to Lycoming County real estate records, the City of Williamsport bought the building May 15, 2003 for $390,000, and again for $1 in 2008 after the museum's grand opening.

The museum at one time had a fully restored 1949 Pullman Railcar on display, according to the now defunct museum website. Visitors were charged $5 to tour the museum ($4 for seniors and $3 for children) and could also buy a combination ticket for a trolley ride.

The City was forced to close the museum because it had allegedly been financed by River Valley Transit (RVT) using federal transit dollars.

"They were not permitted to use state and federal transit dollars to operate a museum," according to Williamsport Mayor Derek Slaughter, who said the city received a letter earlier this summer from PennDOT and the Federal Transit Authority requiring the museum to close.

An audit of RVT by RKL, the accounting and business consulting firm hired to perform an audit on River Valley Transit financials from July 1, 2019 through June 30, 2020, revealed numerous "inconsistencies" in spending.

"We found numbers we can't quite get comfortable with," said RKL's Mark Zettlemoyer in a presentation to the city's finance committee in October.

"When we look at capital assets, RVT was buying numerous capital assets and they appeared to be using funds that weren't transit-related," Zettlemoyer said.

Slaughter indicated this may have been one such expenditure.

"Most of the items on display were on loan from the Taber museum," said Slaughter. "The City did put some of it up for bid."

Questions still remain as to where all of the items were relocated.

If anyone's asking what happened to the former "transportation museum" located there, it's something of a local scandal--read down into this article:

https://www.northcentralpa.com/news/wil ... 87b84.html



Sounds like a heck of a lot of ISTEA and TEA-21 projects back in that time frame.......

There appears to be a partly uncovered streetcar in street view. There are no signs of tracks, where did it run?

Investigations
Date
May 5, 2025
Former Williamsport City Finance Director Pleads Guilty and Is Sentenced for Misusing Funds and Tampering With Public Records

On May 5, 2025, in the Pennsylvania Court of Common Pleas of Dauphin County, William “Bill” Nichols, Jr., pleaded guilty to one felony count of theft by failure to make required disposition of funds received and one felony count of tampering with public records. The court sentenced Nichols to 1 year of probation. Until his termination in January 2020, Nichols served as the City of Williamsport Finance Director and the General Manager for the Williamsport Bureau of Transportation, doing business as River Valley Transit. The investigation did not indicate that Nichols used any money for personal benefit or purchases.

According to the criminal complaint and State grand jury presentment, from 2012 to 2020, Nichols misused over $500,000 in city, State, and Federal funds. Nichols knew the funds had to be used for transit purposes but instead used them on unauthorized, non-transit expenses, projects, and payments. Nichols then provided false information on required grant expense reporting records to hide the unlawful use.

On April 11, 2025, the City of Williamsport and the Federal Transit Administration agreed to repayment of $1,483,707 in Federal grant funds that Nichols used on non-transit-related expenses and for lack of appropriate documentation to show how certain expenses were calculated and spent.

DOT-OIG conducted this investigation with the Pennsylvania Attorney General's Bureau of Criminal Investigations with substantial assistance from FTA.

I have no idea what you're looking at. The PRR car had a sheltered station-style platform built alongside it for viewing and access (and apparently additional event space); the River Valley Transit also engaged in operating tourist "trolley bus" people-movers offering tours of downtown Williamsport, with joint ticketing at/through the museum.

As it turns out, the car was put down on the (now thoroughly obliterated) former PRR right-of-way through downtown, running east from Newberry Yard (which was NYC/Reading), and now the site of the Student Station Apartments, the museum park, and Little League Boulevard.

The shape of the tarped object visible in the Google Streetview image resembles the Jersey Shore Electric Railway car that was discussed on this Board about a year ago.

/s/ Larry