Avon Lake Interurban Mystery Solved!

A few weeks ago I took a trip to Avon Lake to scope out an old, apparently abandoned Lake Shore Electric interurban car. You can check that post out here. Anyway, I got in touch with the foremost expert on the LSE Drew Penfield, and he seemed to know all about it. In fact it was right under my nose this whole time. Below is the email he wrote me back when I inquired about the car.

Hello Michael,

Thank you for the email. It is always good to hear from others who are interested in local history.


I am actually very familiar with the car in Avon Lake and have met the man who owns it. It was Lake Shore Electric 38, a freight car built by the railway in Sandusky. It spent many decades being used as a storage shed in Vermilion, but now it is slowly being restored.

He went on to tell me that he has more information about this exact car on the "Cleveland Freight Terminal" page of his LSE dedicated website which you can see here.

I was right about the car being a later model due to it being made of steel. These freight motors came about because of the necessity to transport goods to help with the war effort, World War I that is. Up until the war the Lake Shore Electric Company was solely interested in transporting people, but had to switch to freight as well to keep in line with competitors. It also gave the LSE a financial boost in a time where profits had been dropping off due to the increasing popularity of the automobile.

The picture above is the one I took of the freight motor behind the Avon Lake shopping center. Up until now I did not know it's origin or where it had come from.

Here is a picture of LSE 38 in its prime waiting to pick up freight in Cleveland. (Dennis Lamont)

Here is another photograph. The white flags means that the car was on a special, unscheduled run. (Tom Bailey)

It turns out that after the Lake Shore Electric went bankrupt car number 38 was bought by the Vermilion Hunt Club and used as storage shed for 70 years, until a man in Avon Lake named Thomas Patton bought it and began restoring it. Clearly it is still a work in progress, but as you can tell from the picture you are about to see a lot of effort has already gone into the process of bringing LSE 38 back to life.

This is Car 38 being removed from the Vermilion Hunt Club in 2008. Still with it's original LSE orange paint job. (Dennis Lamont)

It will be interesting to see when it is completed and where it will be located. I personally would loved to see it stay on the property of the old Beach Park station and car barn in Avon Lake. We shall see what Mr. Patton has in mind.


EDIT: Thanks to a helpful comment in a previous post I now know that the owner of this car, Thomas Patton wants to put a Lake Shore Electric museum in the old movie theater located at the center of the shopping center (the old Beach Park Station). I would love to see this happen. Hopefully that is still his intentions as the article is from 2011. If you want to read more about this you can do so in the North Ridgeville Press.

Thanks for reading!