Historical The operator listed is the original purchaser. A total of 683 cars were purchased in 1948. Ten years later all but one of the prewar cars had been scrapped, and most of the postwar cars had been stripped of parts. These were reused in 570 new
CTA 1-50 and
6200-series rapid transit cars. Two PCC streetcars are preserved at the
Illinois Railway Museum: one prewar car for display only, and one postwar car in operating condition. 666 in 1949; 609 in 1959 (11 lost to Homewood fire in May 1955;); 595 in 1960; 457 in 1961.. 30 additional ex-
Toronto/
Kansas City class A-14 PCCs purchased in 1976. All cars retired by 1992, with some retained for work service or charter runs. 18 rebuilt into
PCC II cars in 2003, and returned to revenue service. Built to a unique shorter-than-standard design. Only PCCs that used
conduit current collection. A single PCC in 1947 from St. Louis Car Company, plus later second-hand cars: 116 in 1947–48 from the United States and tramways in Aviación and Dolores; 91 in 1954 from Minneapolis; 183 in 1955 from Detroit. The
Green Line ran PCC streetcars from 1937 until their retirement in 1985. PCCs continue to operate along a section of the
Red line (see section below). 100 purchased in 1940; 100 in 1941; 100 in 1946. System abandoned in 1966. Originally planned to be 371 cars. First cars delivered in 1937. System abandoned in 1963. System abandoned in 1954. 140 cars purchased from Toronto in 1968, but 13 never entered service. Of the 127 cars in service, 85 were converted between 1972 and 1978 into two-car trains or double-ended three-car trains. The entire fleet was withdrawn by 1984 in favor of modern rolling stock. Five double-ended non-patent cars purchased in 1939. Ten cars in 1948 and another 25 in 1952. Muni number 1040 was the last new PCC built in the U.S. Replaced by
LRVs in 1980–1982. Revived along a former segment in 1995 (see section below). Second-hand from Washington DC. First cars delivered in 1936. The sole Clark-built PCC ran here. Withdrawal began in 1950, system abandoned in 1956. Second-hand cars purchased from Louisville in 1946. All cars sold to Toronto in 1952. Nine cars sent to Shaker Heights in 1978. 50 cars in 1958, followed by an additional 21 in 1962, all from Washington, D.C Delivered from Washington between 1958 and 1961. 14 were rebuilt into two-car articulated trams in 1964. Original Pullman cars were extra-wide and also had left-side doors. 20 cars purchased from Twin Cities Rapid Transit in 1953; 10 cars purchased from St. Louis in 1959; 2 former Illinois Terminal cars leased from museums in 1975; 2 cars purchased from NJ Transit in 1977; 9 ex-Cleveland cars purchased from Toronto in 1978. PCCs were used until 1981. One of three fleets in Canada, after Toronto and Montreal. System abandoned 1955. First cars purchased in 1937. System abandoned in 1949.
System reopened in 1981.
Historic PCC operation resumed in 2011. Double-ended. Longest PCCs built. PCC in 1965 Cars were purchased from
Twin City Rapid Transit in 1954. They were in operation until 2001. Double-enders. All sold to Boston in 1958–59. 17 purchased from San Diego in 1947, plus three more in 1952. System abandoned 1974. System reopened in 2019 with six restored cars. Delivered in 1944. System abandoned in 1959. Purchased 1971–1972 from Toronto. System abandoned on 13 December 1974. These cars were purchased by the
Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority in the 1980s, but were
never used. -->
Current Most PCC-based systems were dismantled in the
post-war period in favor of bus-based transit networks. Of the rail transit systems that survived this period, most had replaced their PCCs with modern
light rail vehicles (LRVs) by the early 1980s. Beginning in the late 1990s, several cities began to make use of historic PCCs to serve historic streetcar lines that combined aspects of tourist attractions and transit. This table lists the transit agencies that still employ PCCs in revenue service, as opposed to a short-run or intermittent heritage railway. The Mattapan Line in Boston is a light-rail extension of the
MBTA's heavy
Red Line. It runs from the Ashmont terminus of the Red Line to
Mattapan, and runs PCCs exclusively. The line was shut down for reconstruction from June 24, 2006, until December 22, 2007, but PCC cars have resumed operation since the line's stations cannot support larger
light rail vehicles (LRV) operated on the MBTA's
Green Line. Not considered historic equipment, the PCC cars in use on the Mattapan–Ashmont line represent the oldest cars still in revenue service, originally built between 1943 and 1946. These cars are also the only air-electric PCCs still in regular service in North America. Several retired PCCs from Boston are now at the
Seashore Trolley Museum. The McKinney Avenue Transit Authority in Dallas, Texas, owns three PCC cars, two from Toronto, one from the former Tandy Center Subway. One of the ex Toronto cars is currently in service. Officials in El Paso expressed their desire to preserve the history of the city by refurbishing the old PCC streetcars that once made their way through Downtown from 1949 to 1974. They operated on the international streetcar line that connected El Paso, Texas in the United States, with Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Originally, the line operated until 1973. Six cars in total have been restored, regular revenue operations began in late 2018 for the downtown loop. The Kenosha Electric Streetcar in
Kenosha, Wisconsin, has been operating six ex-
Toronto Transit Commission PCCs (five since 2000 and the sixth since 2009) and one ex-
SEPTA car since 2009. The Kenosha Electric is unique among modern PCC operations in that PCCs had not run in the city before 2000—the original rail system was shut down in 1932 before any PCC cars had been built. Two of its cars are still painted in their original
TTC colours, while the rest have been re-decorated in the liveries of several U.S. cities including Pittsburgh, Johnstown, Chicago and Cincinnati.
SEPTA restored trolley service to the Route 15 Girard Avenue line in Philadelphia in September 2005 after a 15-year "temporary" suspension of trolley service in favor of diesel buses. The line uses restored and modernized (by the Brookville Manufacturing Company) PCC cars, known as
PCC-IIs (now upgraded as PCC-IIIs), painted in their original green and cream Philadelphia Transit Company livery, rather than SEPTA's white with red and blue stripes. Modernization included all-new control systems, modern turn markers, HVAC system (which accounts for the noticeably larger roof enclosure), and
ADA compliant wheelchair lifts. The line runs from Haddington to Port Richmond down the median of Girard Avenue. It crosses both the
Broad Street Subway and the
Market–Frankford Line, and stops at the
Philadelphia Zoo, among other landmarks. SEPTA had originally planned to run modern
Kawasaki trolleys along the line once service was restored, but a combination of economics and a desire to help revive the Girard Avenue corridor with a more "romantic" vehicle led to the agency restoring the old vehicles for about half the cost of new cars. SEPTA uses Kawasaki vehicles on the rest of its trolley lines, including the
Subway-Surface Green Line linking
West Philadelphia with
Center City and its
69th Street Transportation Center with the western suburbs of
Media and
Sharon Hill via light rail
routes 101 and 102.
San Diego Trolley currently uses 2 PCCs and is in the process of determining viability of a third car as of 2016. They are in use on the Silver Line which opened in 2011 and runs in a clockwise loop around Downtown
San Diego. The F Market Line (historic streetcar service) in San Francisco, opened in 1995, runs along
Market Street from
The Castro to the
Ferry Building, then along the
Embarcadero north and west to
Fisherman's Wharf. This line is run by a mixture of PCC cars built between 1946 and 1952, and earlier pre-PCC cars. Due to its success, a second heritage line was inaugurated in 2015, the
E Embarcadero, which serves to facilitate a one-seat ride from the
Caltrain San Francisco station to Fisherman's Wharf. Although San Francisco had removed PCCs from revenue service when the city's light rail was transformed into the
Muni Metro system in 1980, they had made occasional festival trips in the ensuing years before being returned to full-time service. Car 1074 is painted in
Toronto Transit Commission livery, but was never owned by the TTC. The first PCC cars in Canada were operated by the
Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) in 1938. By 1954,
Toronto had the largest PCC fleet in the world, including many purchased second-hand from U.S. cities that abandoned streetcar service following the
Second World War. Although it acquired new
custom-designed streetcars in the late 1970s and 1980s (and which was replaced by modern LRVs by Dec. 2019), the TTC continued using PCCs in regular service until 1995, and retained two (numbers 4500 and 4549) for charter purposes. After the TTC was rebuilt for
pantograph-only, instead of trolley pole operation, 4500 and 4549 were loaned to the
Halton County Radial Railway in 2025, where they are currently operated. These cars may eventually be rebuilt with pantographs so they could return to the TTC. ==Models based on the PCC streetcar== The PCC license was used worldwide after World War II had ended which resulted in adaptations based on the American PCC design. Two such licensees were successful, namely the Belgian company
La Brugeoise et Nivelles (since 1988 a subsidiary of
Bombardier Transportation, itself since 2021 a subsidiary of the French
Alstom), who built both
standard-gauge and
meter-gauge cars based on the PCC license for many networks in Belgium, France and the Netherlands; and particularly the Czech
ČKD Tatra, who built the largest number of the PCC type in the world, supplying a number of Central and Eastern European countries. Trams such as the
Tatra T3 and its variant
Tatra T4, together the most numerous of any tram model ever produced, are still in service today in many of the regions where they were first introduced. Modern variants of the Tatra T3 are still produced today by some manufacturers, such as KOS Krnov. The Polish
Konstal 13N was not built under license. Only models with direct references to the original American PCC streetcar are included here. Later models of a particular series such as the
Tatra T5 were adapted and modernized further. Note that the country listed
only covers areas where the cars were initially delivered; references for these areas can be found in the text. The first PCC cars in
Brussels (series 7000–7100) were built in prevision of the
Expo 58: they were single-body non-reversible two-bogie cars. Articulated trams arrived since 1965: first two-body non-reversible trams (series 7500) then two-body (series 7700–7800) and three-body (series 7900) reversible ones, the last one delivered in 1978. The last single-body PCC tram in commercial service in Brussels ran in February 2010. All series 7500 trams were converted to series 7700 by addition of a second steering post except the 7500 prototype which was versed to the collection of the
Brussels Tram Museum. Two-body and three-body reversible PCC trams are still in regular service next to more modern low-floor trams. All these articulated PCC cars use
Jacobs bogies under the articulations (see example at right). Brussels tramways use
standard gauge (1.435 m);
metre-gauge PCC trams are in use in
Ghent and
Antwerp. The only PCC in West Germany was delivered from La Brugeoise to Hamburg in 1951. The car was sold to Brussels in 1957. Returned to Hamburg in 1995, where it was used as a historical tram in the VVM Schönberger Strand museum. In 1999, the tram was sold to the Danish tram museum of Skjoldenæsholm. and was withdrawn from service in 1971.
Z Class tram prototype car 1041 was built in 1972 using bogies salvaged from 980. Only two of the planned 300 of the PCC A28 type trams had been delivered to Stockholm by ASJ in 1953. This was probably due to the withdrawal of the Polish side of the contract in 1946, which primarily stated the delivery not only of the tram wagons, but also 8 locomotives and 44 electric passenger trains by the ASEA company. The only ones that were built, based on bogies and the electrical system delivered from the USA. They were the first PCCs in Europe equipped with
multiple-unit electrical systems and were only used in pairs (no more trams of this type were constructed) on tourist line number 700. In 1962, the routes were converted to buses. One of the two cars was scrapped, the other one (number 11) is preserved in the Tramway Museum of Malmkoping. ==See also==