After L&NE quit running in 1961, the car served as a restaurant annex near Philadelphia before trolley broker Ed Metka of Windber, Pa., bought it in 1993.
He stored it indoors in a former freight-car repair shop, but left it untouched from its days as an eating house, including two gaping doors torched into one side to provide patrons and waitstaff access to the main restaurant building.
Fast forward to 2023. With a now-flourishing tourist business and needing a premium-class car to augment coach seating, Maples last year — out of the blue — remembered the L&NE 100.
With its original exterior appearance of Pullman green with gold L&NE lettering, the 75-foot-long, 60-ton steel car is the only known example of passenger rolling-stock from that anthracite-region line. It was built by American Car & Foundry Co.’s former Jackson & Sharp works in Wilmington, Del., in September 1925. Although it’s a steel car, Maples noted that “it reflects wood-car methods because Jackson & Sharp was primarily a wooden passenger-car builder.”
Now that one project is done, another is in the works. A carnival train was closing out its final runs so Maples made arrangements to buy the former personal car used by the carnival owner and his family. Car No. 21, a former Chesapeake & Ohio heavyweight office car that started life in the same role for the Nickel Plate Road, traveled with the show for many years
When Strates, a Greek immigrant who founded the company in 1923, died in 1959, his son E. James Strates succeeded him. The son acquired the 1925 Pullman-built car from C&O and became, Maples said, “the last show owner to travel by train, and this was the last of the showman’s cars . . . The Strates family’s private car No. 21 was always kept spotless and was clearly the pride of the fleet.”
Maples, who bought the car from the show founder’s grandson, John Strates, intends to restore the car as a rolling tribute to the traveling circus-train and carnival-train era, with corresponding photos and displays. “If a railroad museum got this car, they‘d turn it back to what it was originally,” he said.
The Everett Railroad is a 23-mile Class III Common Carrier freight railroad servicing Blair County’s I-99 corridor, including the communities of Altoona, Hollidaysburg, Roaring Spring, Martinsburg, and Claysburg.
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