Passenger Trains > Fun with 1001 (San Diego Trolley, CA)

San Diego Trolley's #1001 is a Siemens-Duewag U2, in service from 1981 to 2015. Restored in 2019 to run on the Silver Line, the Downtown Loop, for select holidays.

My previous attempt at documenting the restored #1001 was a failure, due to electro-mechanical issues that allowed the U2 to complete only one loop before being put away for repairs (from 2024):

https://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?4,5954433

This time, I was able to do what I wanted to do more than a year ago - document #1001 at several locations, and ride it around.

 

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Those who are familiar with San Diego will know I picked the riding clips to match my "foaming" video above.
 

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That's it for the report.

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I sure miss those cars. They had great character and personality to them.
And they sure looked great in that red paint scheme.
I wish San Diego didn't have to retire them.

Jerry Martin
Los Angeles, CA
Central Coast Railroad Festival

Nice stuff, glad the kept one.

Posted from iPhone

GP25 Wrote:
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> I sure miss those cars. They had great character
> and personality to them.
> And they sure looked great in that red paint
> scheme.
> I wish San Diego didn't have to retire them.

If you ever find yourself in Mendoza, Argentina,  their light rail line is populated with these cars.  Same red,  different logo.

Great videos and story, Charles.

You can also stop by the Southern California Railway Museum (formerly Orange Empire) in Perris, CA and see their 2 sets of the cars.  Here they are in October, 2021, not sure how often they've run there.

Rich

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PasadenaSub Wrote:
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> You can also stop by the Southern California
> Railway Museum (formerly Orange Empire) in Perris,
> CA and see their 2 sets of the cars.  Here they
> are in October, 2021, not sure how often they've
> run there.

Thanks for those photos Rich.

I was digging around after your reply as a curiosity to see where 1001 (Silver Line), 1002 (National City), and 1003 (Perris) were. The other set at Perris seems to be 1008.

GP25 Wrote:
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> I sure miss those cars. They had great character
> and personality to them. And they sure looked great
> in that red paint scheme. I wish San Diego didn't have
> to retire them.

I've been visiting San Diego for decades and have good memories riding the U2s and the S-100s. It's nice to hear from masterphot's reply that many are still active in Argentina.

The notion that something from 1981 is vintage is a wakeup call to this way past vintage old timer. Yikes!

Bob Phelps
Micanopy, FL

Calgary, Alberta, Canada still operates about 40 of the U2 cars in daily service on their light rail system, along with over 170 newer Siemens cars.

When San diego was building their trolley system there were various other cities considering building transit systems. There was a free government subsidized high quality magazine that arrived about every two months documenting all the new transit activity, I believe it was "New Electric Rail Journal". I had a collection of several years of them but I believe they got caught in a basement flood and I no longer have them.
The San Diego Red cars were the primary content in the first several issues.
Gonut