Fairmont A-3 Motor Car
The Fairmont A-3 Motor Car was used by the WCTU Railway [it was known as White City Terminal & Utility Railway back then] but I don't know if they acquired it new or secondhand. Most likely it came secondhand. I videotaped it in 1995 being used to spray weeds in White City. Sometime in the late 1990s someone at WCTU thought the wheels of the A-3 would make an old Datsun pickup truck into a great hi-rail truck, so they took the wheels and axles off and made one. The rest of the A-3 they stored on a pallet. Unfortunately, the railway soon found out the pickup truck was too powerful and the wheels slipped a lot.
In early 2005 our chapter acquired what was left of the A-3 frame, handrails, and so on. It sat on a pallet until later that year when WCTU scrapped the Datsun pickup truck and donated the wheels and axles they used off the A-3.
The A-3's axles after removed from under the Datsun pickup.
Don Pettit, Jerry Hellinga, and John Powell admire Jerry's repair work on the frame.
Here is the newly restored motor car with the single riding car departing the old station in 2008.
Copyright 2023 by the Southern Oregon Railway Historical Society
Southern Oregon Railway Historical Society
A Chapter of the National Railway Historical Society
Photo: Rick Aubin
