Sunday, January 21, 2018

Visit to New Orleans

We just returned from a quick trip to New Orleans.  Most of what we were doing would be off-topic, but of course we did most of our traveling around the city by streetcar.

The 900 series cars are still running on the St. Charles line, as seen here at Lee Circle.


Lee himself has been evicted, however.
2018
2015


The new line on Rampart Street is now in operation, so there are more routes.  Not all of my pictures turned out, for some reason, but it is not unusual to see four or five cars at once taking turns at the intersection of Rampart/Elk and Canal.  These are all the newest cars, in the 2000 series.




And the 400-series cars are still running on the riverfront line.




We spent most of a day at the WWII Museum.  Near the entrance, there is a railroad car which serves as a theater for some introductory videos.  Whether this was actually a UP car is anybody's guess.  It's no longer on trucks.





The museum is well worth a visit, and I took a lot of pictures.   There's a huge collection of interesting artifacts on display; for instance, in the picture below, the object at upper left is what's left of a prop from a kamikaze plane that struck a US carrier.  It's amazing how many things like that survived into preservation. 

2 comments:

Ted Miles said...

Randall,
They have been spending millions of dollars on that museum and it shows. Off site they have one of the few opeerational PT Boats from WWII.

I hope to go there nyself one of these days!

Ted Miles, IRM Member

Anonymous said...

The photo showing a passenger shelter between two of the red 2000-series cars is taken at the brand new Canal Boulevard terminal of the Canal line. Apparently you were there only a few days after this short extension officially opened. It provides far more convenient transfers between the streetcar and several bus routes and restores what was the routing of the Canal bus between 1964 and 2004. The project had been discussed for years but was held up, in part, by the fact that Canal Boulevard's neutral ground (that's Big Easy-speak for a median) was part of a "potters field" cemetery a century ago.

/s/ Larry
Lawrence G. Lovejoy, P.E.
Pennsylvania Trolley Museum