Built by The Pennsylvania Railroad, Altoona, PA; 1886

Originally a Class PF coach (PRR's first with steam-heat piping), this open-platform car has yellow poplar exterior panels with edges covered by molding, and richly detailed white or golden oak interior wood. Its clerestory windows have green opaque glass with 3-dimensional rosette designs. It originally had a water cooler, five Adams & Westlake single- center silver-plated oil lamps, two restrooms, and 15 windows per side. The car has red plush rollover seats, wood underframe & 4-wheel trucks. It weighs about 53,000 lbs.(26.5 tons), and is 46' 10" long (53' 6" with platforms), 9' 4"wide (9' 10" at eaves), & 10' 5 5/8" high. Including two bench seats in alcoves designed for stoves, it seated 58 passengers as built. It's a sister of restored Tuscan red PRR coach #3556 (built in August 1886), at the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania in Strasburg, PA.

This car's PRR number and history are unknown. In May 1916 it was sold by car broker E. H. Wilson & Company, and sent from Birmingham, AL to the Dardanelle & Russellville Railroad, a five-mile Arkansas shortline opened in 1883 and still in business. Numbered DR #10, it had a "Jim Crow" racial segregation divider installed to comply with state laws, with eight windows per side in the "white" section, and seven in the "colored" section. On March 5, 1924, a fire that began in the depot at North Dardanelle burned one of the car's sides so badly that it needed $972.16 worth of new siding, windows, curtains, and upholstery.

DR #10 was retired October 31,1936 and sold to the six-mile Rockdale, Sandow & Southern Railroad in Texas, which like the D&R was then owned by the McAlester Fuel Company of McAlester, OK, for $125 plus $625 to rebuild it into a combine at the D&R North Dardanelle shops. A baggage room/coach wall replaced the racial divider, and a new one was added, with eight-seat "colored" section next to the baggage room and 22-seat "white" section. Sliding baggage room doors were installed, five more baggage room windows on each side paneled over, and the front restroom removed. Numbered RSS #3,it was sent to Marjorie, TX in November 1936.

In February 1945 RSS #3 (with its lettering removed) was sold to 20th Century-Fox and sent from Rockdale, TX to the West Los Angeles (Century City) studio, arriving July 24th with DR #14. It was mis-identified as DR #13, a number D&R never had. Appropriately relettered "Pennsylvania Railroad" for its first role, it was used from 1946-72 in many films, including Centennial Summer, The Raid, Love Me Tender, The True Story of Jesse James, The Second Time Around, Walls of Jericho, Powderkeg, and the Nichols and Bearcats TV series. Fox removed the ceiling lamps and later sold them. Moved to a Malibu canyon ranch in the late 1950s, it was sold to Short Line Enterprises for tourist railway use in 1972.

RSS #3 (listed as DR #13) and DR #14 were traded in April 1976 to the PSRMA, trucked to Poway, CA June 7-8, and displayed for seven years at Old Poway Village, where roof and other repairs were made. Trucked to Campo February 10, 1983 and placed in the carbarn on the 12th, they were the first museum passenger cars there. Identified as RSS #3 in March 1988, the car is being preserved "as is". When time & funds permit, it will be repaired, refurbished, and displayed as a historic artifact.

1993 Pacific Southwest Railway Museum Association. W. Schneider