| •
| Built
as a single-ended PCC (President's Conference Car) streetcar by St. Louis Car
Company in 1945 for (Washington) DC Transit. |
| •
| Operated
by DC Transit as car 1506 until abandonment of that system in February 1962.
|
| •
| Bought
by Fort Worth's Marvin and Obediah Leonard for their proposed rail shuttle line
from their vast parking lot to their downtown department store's basement station
via a 1,400-foot subway that opened February 15, 1963. |
| •
| Rebuilt
as a double-ended car and given a more "modernized" appearance in Fort
Worth, it became M&O # 4. |
| •
| Tandy
Corporation bought the Leonard Brothers out in 1967 and began rebuilding the M&O
carbodies. |
| •
| No.
4 served Tandy as a subway car until the line was abandoned on August 30, 2002. |
| •
| Thanks
to a grant from the Uptown Public Improvement District, MATA was able to purchase
Winnie at a bargain price and thereby attain a ready-to-run double-ended PCC car
for our fleet. |
| •
| In
February 2003, #4 was trucked to Dallas and touched down on M-Line tracks at the
end of Cityplace Blvd. |
| •
| The
shop crew quickly named her "Winnie," as they thought she resembled
a Winnebago. We assigned her the arbitrary number 143. |
| •
| We
made modifications to transform Winnie from a subway car back to a streetcar. |
| •
| Unfortunately,
because of numerous ongoing mechanical failures, as of 2010, 143 has been out
of service forseveral years. |
| •
| To
free up space in our cramped carbarn, on July 21, 2010 Winnie was moved to storage
at the DART yars and shops. She will become a test bed for new technologies that
may be applied to our ex-Toronto and ex-Dallas PCCs. |
| •
| We hope
to someday return Winnie to active service. |
