In one of those tragedies that just leaves you feeling so hollow, a young man — and friend of the vintage streetcars — has been taken from us. His name was Pippin Seales. He was playing with two friends in a cave at Natural Bridges State Park in Santa Cruz on October 11 when it collapsed on them. One friend got out, one was injured, and Pippin was killed. He had just turned 11.

He was a boy with an amazing range of interests according to the remembrance published in the Santa Cruz Sentinel. One of those interests was rail transportation:

More than one family vacation was centered around trains: steam railways in Britain, rail travel in California, streetcars in San Francisco. He was passionately interested in public transit, and in the hours he spent planning & working on his model train layout with his father – drawing wiring diagrams, solving design issues, perusing catalogs – he always kept alive the connection between the imaginary world he was creating and the real world of trolleys, buses, streetcars, and trains. He would have made an excellent civil engineer.

Pippin’s family named Market Street Railway as one of the two causes to which donations could be sent in his memory. We have already received a number of them. If you’d like to join in honoring Pippin, you may donate to our acquisition and restoration fund, as Pippin’s family designated.

The Los Angeles Times ran a troubling story saying that many large transit agencies, Muni among them, could face big-time financial problems because of rail car lease deals gone sour in the current economic meltdown. The Times noted that between 1980 and 2003, many transit properties sold their rail cars and leased them back, reaping a one-time cash infusion. But in the case of the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority, at least, the leases — with the troubled financial services giant AIG — may have to be paid back suddenly, which would require drastic service cuts.

The Times story offered no details on Muni’s situation, and we haven’t seen any specifics on it in local coverage. We do know that Muni sold, then leased back, its LRV fleet around 2003. We also know that at the time some Muni staffers wanted to include the vintage streetcar fleet in the lease, but Market Street Railway objected and the idea never went anywhere.

So, at least the F-line cars won’t be making any unscheduled stops on Wall Street.