Welcome to the online roster of preserved North American Electric Railway cars.
This roster contains over 2,000 preserved historic electric railway cars which operated on North American electric railways. Each roster entry contains known information about the car's configuration, equipment and ownership history. Brief histories are available for some cars, as well as photos.
The accuracy of this information is only as good as YOU make it! If you spot missing or inaccurate data, please let us know about it so it can be corrected online. The roster is updated almost daily as new information arrives.
If you would be willing to write brief historical narratives to help improve the educational value of this database, please contact us. Thank you to the many people who continue to provide updated information and car history narratives.
This online project is a collaboration between Frank Hicks of the Illinois Railway Museum and Jeff Hakner of the Branford Electric Railway Association / Shore Line Trolley Museum. The contents of this database are copyright by Frank Hicks. Query software copyright by Jeff Hakner.
Did you know that there are over 300 organizations that preserve North American electric railway vehicles? See the complete list here.
The accuracy of this roster is only as good as the sources on which it is
based. Please help to improve the roster by mailing any suggestions or
corrections to Frank Hicks: fhicks@irm.org.
Problems with the web interface should be reported to webmaster@bera.org.
The roster contains only preserved electric railway equipment with track gauge wider than 3' that was built for service in North America. It does not include steam or diesel engines or non-electric freight or work equipment. See here for more details on the criteria for inclusion and the meanings of the various fields.
The complete roster is very large (over 2,000 entries) and may take a long time to load and/or crash your browser. By default, 200 cars per page will be displayed to mitigate this. You can change it at the bottom of the search form.
By default, all cars will be displayed. You may limit your search
in various ways. First, you can limit based on who currently owns the
car. Second, you can look for all cars that were ever owned or operated
by a particular organization or railway. Planning a trip? You can find
all cars currently located in a given state, province or country.
You can also search for specific values in specific fields (e.g. find
all cars with DH-16 compressors). You can specifiy multiple limiting
criteria, either by matching a part of a field (e.g. an owner or
car number) or by matching a range (e.g. a range of build dates).
Finally, you can select how the results will be sorted
and presented. Use the NEW SEARCH button at the very bottom of the form
to reset everything for a fresh search.
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