STEAM BOXCABS!
ODDER BOXCABS
SBK #4 ELECTRIC BOXCAB SURVIVOR
South Brooklyn Railway (SBK) #4 (map symbol 4)
Of the four (4) box motors noted on the preceding page as on the roster of the Shore
Line Trolley Museum of the BERA (Branford Electric
Railway Association) in East Haven, Connecticut, three appear to be most likely
"only" trolley car locos, but one turns out to be the South Brooklyn Railway (SBK) box
motor #4 (map index 4), built by the Brooklyn Heights Railway Company in 1907 on
two ALCo 2-axle trucks. She is shown in color on page 16 of Bendersky, is 31'
long, and weighs in at 114,000 lbs. This is the loco I mistakenly listed as an
internal combustion loco when I started all this, but she is very much an original early
electric box motor, not merely an old trolley car converted or purpose-built for freight
service. #4 has ALCo Z-380 trucks, Westinghouse electricals, and a steel body
and clearly deserves a place in the electric survivor boxcabs list.
In my excitement over finding her, I had originally overlooked both the trolley pole and third-rail shoes that all show so clearly in the Malcolm Young color photo (ca. 1957) on page 6 in Jay Bendersky's "Brooklyn's Waterfront Railways" (see Boxcab Bibliography) and classifed it as one of the earliest AGEIR boxcabs. Realizing my mistake and thinking her gone, I revised my list. Now that I find to my amazement that she's still around, and even in the greater NY Metropolitan area, I reassigned deleted map index number 4 to her and restored her to her rightful place in the sun (well, on my site, anyway). She served some 50 or more years and exemplifies the type of electric loco that preceeded the Dan Patch #100 and the first AGEIR units.
I see that "in my excitement over finding her", I missed the fact that I used to picture
her here, somewhere, in a crop of the unprovenanced photo on Bill Russell's
Penny Bridge site (by permission); here it is again,
uncropped showing (according to Bill) the #4 towing a dead Whitcomb at 36th Street.
Either she's running on willpower or on third rail shoes on invisible third rail, because
BOTH poles are DOWN:
(31 Dec 02)
(Penny Bridge image courtesy Bill Russell, by permission)
Speaking of Mynheer Russell, he also has this shot of SBK #4 posted on his site:
(31 Dec 02)
SBK Loco #4 (as TA #20001) at Coney Island Yard (undated); photographer: Unknown
From the Collection of Gerald H. Landau
{from blurred, dirty slide; cropped and cleaned by SB,III}
(Penny Bridge images courtesy Bill Russell, by permission)
Dave Pirman's great
nycsubway site has these three pix, from Joe Testagrose's open Web postings:
(31 Dec 02)
SBK #4 on 03 Apr 1959. Collection of Joe Testagrose. (150k)
SBK #4 at 38th St. & 3rd Av., Brooklyn. Collection of Joe Testagrose. (143k)
SBK #4 at Coney Island/Stillwell Avenue in photo by Doug Grotjahn, 27 Aug 1964.
Collection of Joe Testagrose. (130k)
Note that she's running on third rail and has no poles left in the last picture.
I'll have to run up to East Haven one of these days and take some pictures of this
relic.
So, when is an electric boxcab merely a transit (trolley) box motor and when is it a
boxcab locomotive? On my site, it's when I say so!
There are now more than forty (40) BOXCAB pages;
see the main Boxcabs page and the Boxcabs INDEX.
THUMBS UP!
THUMBS UP! - Support your local police, fire, and emergency personnel!
S. Berliner, III
To contact S. Berliner, III, please click here.
To tour the Boxcabs pages in sequence, the arrows take you from the previous page, to the Boxcabs index, to the first boxcabs page, and on to continuation pages 3 and up, then 100-tonner LIRR #401 and her sisters, survivor boxcabs (with map) and survivor notes, survivor CNJ #1000 (the very first), Ingersoll-Rand boxcabs (with instruction manual), other (non-ALCo/GE/I-R) boxcabs, Baldwin-Westinghouse boxcabs, odd boxcabs, and finally model boxcabs.
© Copyright S. Berliner, III - 1999, 2001, 2002 - All rights reserved.
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