The "State of the Art" car, a prototype built for the US Department of Transportation and Urban Mass Transportation Administration by Boeing/St. Louis Car Company in (I think) the 1970s.

Update: Mark Sylvester from the Seashore trolley Museum wrote to tell me that the main problems with these cars that kept them from being mass produced were that they were too high-tech for what most lines wanted. The high-tech for the time added cost, and many systems had all ready ordered new equipment, and the SOACs proved to be an interesting experiment, with components that became standard, but the overall design as a whole ended with these two cars. He's also heard that on the Red Line in Boston, they hit about 70mph.

At Seashore, the cars are "all there", complete. When testing was complete, they were left to bake in the desert out west somewhere, until the Seashore Trolley Museum acquired them. They cleaned the cars out, washed them down, and that's it. Most of the electronics are there, and to this day, with the oil-filled bearings, the cars roll extremely smoothly, with little effort to push them around.

Photographed by Jeff Morris, 2003.
Added to the photo archive by Jeff Morris, February 21, 2007.
Railroad: Seashore Trolley Museum.

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