Lerro Photography sponsored a 1940s-1950s trolley reenactment photo workshop at the Southern California Railway Museum in Perris, CA in May 2025. The museum boasts an amazing collection of all types of railroad equipment. For our photo workshop, we decided to focus strictly on their trolley collection so we could create human-interest scenes and keep the costs down in order to have a low number of photographers.
A lot of work and research went into choosing the trolleys we wanted. Not all of the dozons of trolleys they have historically ran together at the same time, so we decided to run pairs of trolleys that would have been together historically.
Our first two hours were spent shooting the 42” narrow gauge Los Angeles Railway “LARy” cars #525 Type B ‘Huntington Standard’ and the # 3001 Type P-1 PCC. The museum has a section of track that runs down Broadway St so it made for a great opportunity to incorporate historic automobiles and reenactors.
The second part of our photo shoot involved the standard gauge Pacific Electric “blimp” interurban cars #418 and #498. We went out on the mainline and performed several runbys with the signal towers and open fields. We then took the blimp cars south to an area where a private road follows along the track. A group photo of the reenactors and a couple of photos with the blimp cars and antique automobiles were taken.
The third part of the shoot had the Pacific Electric “Hollywood Car” #417 and the #1299, the executive inspection car. With a few minutes to space, we shot a few sunset photos with the autos and the trolleys before the sun went behind the mountain. From there, we brought the trolleys back to the depot and gave the photographers and reenactors time to eat dinner while we set up for the night session.
The first half of the night session featured the Pacific Electric Hollywood car at the station. Our reenactors posed in various positions both inside and outside the car. The second half of the night session featured the LARy #525, 3001, and #1201. The first LARy scene featured the PCC at a road crossing with working Acme signals. We then positioned the #525 and #1201 close to each other for more photos with the antique autos.
We would like to thank all the staff at the Southern California Railway Museum for allowing us to do the photo shoot and for all of their hospitality. We would also like to thank all the reenactors and antique automobile owners for coming out and posing for the photographers.
