Restored 1947 trolleys will return to Girard Avenue’s Route 15 next week. SEPTA says it’s not a rumor this time.
Buses will continue to provide some service along the Girard Avenue route to meet passenger demand as eight green-and-cream '40s trolleys return to work Sunday.
Next week, restored 1947 trolleys will once again rumble and squeal on the Route 15 tracks along Girard Avenue after more than four years in the shop, where SEPTA workers stripped the corroded cars to their frames and rebuilt them from scratch.
Eight as-new PCC II trolleys will begin service on Sunday, SEPTA says — nine months later than promised. Buses, which have been running the route, will be needed to meet rider demand while 10 more trolleys in various stages of undress are finished at the Woodland Avenue shop.
“We’re finally getting the PCC trolleys back,” SEPTA spokesperson Andrew Busch said.
The old cream-and-green streetcars have a rabid — perhaps even a cult — following in the city. Over the past year, as restored cars were tested on the tracks, social media accounts occasionally lit up with hopeful pictures and posts heralding the return of the vehicles. Those reports proved premature.
Last summer, the transit agency said the vehicles would be back that September.
But that timeline was also pushed back because SEPTA needed time for rigorous inspection and road-testing of the eight finished vehicles, plus training for trolley operators who had not worked with the PCC IIs before, in order to build out a large enough crew to operate a full schedule with them.
“It takes a lot of work to get them ready,” Busch said. “Each trolley has had 200 miles on the road already, during the ‘burn-in’ period,” an industry term for breaking in a new vehicle.
» READ MORE: Take a tour of SEPTA’s newly refurbished trolleys before they hit the streets.
In early 2020, the trolleys were pulled off the line for evaluation and maintenance. They’d last been overhauled in 2002 at a factory in Western Pennsylvania. SEPTA announced the trolleys would be back the next year, but the pandemic, and then supply-chain issues, lengthened their absence. And it turned out the vehicles needed extensive work.
The trolleys are scheduled to start rolling early Sunday morning, Busch said.
For the first time in about 12 years, trolleys will be able to run the full route, from the Westmoreland Loop on Richmond Street in the east to Girard Avenue and 63rd Street in the west. Buses had been ferrying people from Girard and Front Street to the eastern loop since 2012, because of PennDot’s massive I-95 reconstruction, Busch said.
PennDot installed new tracks and overhead wires in that area, he said.
The PCC IIs came to Philadelphia in 1947, the last time trolleys were widespread in the city.
In the 1930s, chief executives of private streetcar companies operating in the U.S. and Canada had joined together to develop a standard design with interchangeable parts. They called themselves the Presidents Conference Committee, or PCC.
SEPTA inherited the PCC II’s in 1968 from the defunct Philadelphia Transportation Co., which had run city transit since 1940.