Nostalgia & History > mundo: Railcars at Broadway station, Camden, NJ, 1957

"Mundo" in the subject line means the following photos were taken by Trainorders user mundo.

Ed spent the morning of October 24, 1957 at the Broadway station in Camden, NJ.  Below are some of his photos.

1) A rear view of Pennsylvania 4659, a Brill car built in 1928 and re-engined in 1943 with a pair of Cummins diesels.  The 4650-series cars were bi-directional, with a control cab at the vestibule end.  According to the PRR doodlebug roster on the Altoona Works site, the 4659 was scrapped in 1963.  Sister 4662, however, survives on the Wilmington & Western, and two examples of a later class of PRR Brill cars also still exist: 4666 on the Allentown & Auburn and 4668 which is supposedly keeping company with the two RF-16's in the Escanaba & Lake Superior enginehouse.

http://prr.railfan.net/diagrams/PRRdiagrams.html?diag=OEG350_fp-E87498d.gif&sel=gaselectric&sz=sm&fr=
http://www.altoonaworks.info/rosters/prr-doodlebugs.pdf
https://www.wwrr.com/ride/equipment/doodlebug.aspx
https://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?2,4115601

2-3) Fore-and-aft views of car 4661, another 1928 Brill.  This car would be scrapped in 1959.

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4) Pennsylvania-Reading Seashore Lines RDC-1 M-412 and a sister pause at Broadway.  Built 23 years after the Brills, the M-412 wasn't destined to outlast them.  Along with car M-404, it was destroyed in a shop fire at Camden just five months after this photo.

http://www.sjrail.com/wiki/index.php/Pennsylvania-Reading_Seashore_Lines#Budd_Rail_Diesel_Cars_-_Numbering_System

The elevated platforms at Broadway in Camden saw their last trains in January 1966.  The second photo in this old thread shows them near the end in September 1965:

https://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?11,3996784

Today the site is occupied by the Walter Rand Transportation Center:

https://goo.gl/maps/cEK6bN9tRAhcjz8a8

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Thanks to Evan and Ed for these great pictures.  Did Ed take the ferry from the foot of Market Street in Philadelphia to get to Camden?  I did that several times with my father just for the ride, but only once with my family, then we took a train to Atlantic City.  Gerry

Fine photos. PRSL still looked like a going concern in 1957. Its condition had worsened severely by 1970 when I remember first seeing it.

The ferry to/from Camden/Philadelphia was long out of service in 1957.  The PRR car probably had a schedule to/from Moorestown/Mt Holly/ Pemberton NJ (and a year earlier) to/from Bordentown and Trenton NJ  In the summer of '56 they provided some Friday night and Saturday service to Millville so the normal RDC's could operate on shore bound trains. 
Reference to elevated platforms was 'above street level' as opposed to 'high level platforms'.
 



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/31/20 07:33 by boejoe.

Thanks for sharing these treasures. Doodlebugs certainly were a one car passenger train.
Bob

Great doodlebug pics. If I'd  seen them at that time, I would have peed my pants. 

But I had just turned 3 months old a few days earlier, so peeing my pants was not that big a deal.