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<p>Jim Holland wrote:
<blockquote TYPE=CITE> It also makes sense for
<br>the Clark Bar . . . sorry, I mean Clark PCC CAR . . . to be saved from
<br>an historic perspective as well - it is the one and only Clark built
PCC
<br>and quite innovative for its time.</blockquote>
Please take these comments as opinions, but hopefully they show some thought.
<p>I'm really not certain that the Clark PCC could be classed as truly
innovative. It was the only PCC car with an aluminum body but quite
a few cars had been built previously with aluminum shells, including but
not limited to the P&W Bullets, the C&LE high speeds, and
an experimental center entrance car for Third Avenue Railway which made
great advertising copy for Alcoa.
<p>The Clark car was the first standee window PCC. I'm reminded of
a comment by the late Howard White, with whom I co-edited <i>Headlights</i>
magazine for the Electric Railroaders Association in the middle 1970s.
Howard remarked, and I really didn't question the source of his often profound
knowledge, that managers in a poorly run company make about 51 to 52 percent
of the decisions correctly while the top-end corporations make 55 to 56
percent of the decisions properly. Not much difference is there?
There is a hell of a hot of room out there for stupidity and grist for
comic strips. In my "unbiased" opinion (we all like to think we know
what is correct), the standee windows rank as one of the 40 some percent
of the decisions which could be classed as poor. The center of the
standee windows is 5'-3 9/16" above the floor which corresponds to a the
eyes on a person about 5'-8" ... too low for me and most men and
too high for most women. Those absurdly tiny windows forced you to lean
over the seated passengers ... to rudely try to become friends with someone
you don't know. But Bill Rossell had clout with the ERPCC and
Transit Research Corporation ... he had standee windows in New York, then
he had them in Saint Louis, and forced them on the rest of the cities.
And for some inane reason, General Motors tried them on buses. Imitation
is the best form of flattery, perhaps? Powell Groner may have been
the sensible person, realizing that you couldn't see out of them anyway.
Maybe it dawned on him that cutting steel and glass for 22 extra windows
has a price. We'll never know, will we.
<p>Mechanically, 1000 was just one more General Electric PCC ... it might
have had a little more get up and go because of the lighter body but that
may have been both irrelevant and irreverent on a crowded street.
<p>I shall not dream of condemning Everett White for saving the car.
I'll merely postulate that it was an evolutionary dead end and that the
reasons for saving such a car may be more emotional that deeply considered
historical. Considering the time when it was put aside, I would much
rather have seen a Brilliner from Atlantic City because it showed that
the mechanical technology was clearly adaptable and that political ties
between Brill and the Pennsylvania Railroad overshadowed what the local
AC&S management wanted to buy, and, lastly because people from all
over the east vacationed in Atlantic City in those days. And guess
what we're coming back to ... I was there, I rode them, I liked them, and
that makes me a poor person to make the choice too. And ultimately,
that is why most museum purchases happen.
<p>Maybe, when the trolley fans die off, some truly rational archival types
will be able to clearly decide what to keep and what to scrap? That's
dreaming too, isn't it?
<p>My final statement (and I hear someone out there saying AMEN) is that
perhaps we should be working toward the transfer of much of our museum
property to a paid cadre of government types. The nice thing about
government is, <b>death never happens</b>. Look at all the canals
in Britain that are still maintained because pleasure craft use them ...
about half the mileage that was ever built. And government runs trains
in the US for a small number of passengers outside of California and the
Northeast and at fares, exclusive of subsidy, that vastly exceed air fares.
I'm thoroughly convinced that, if the government had been in the telegraph
business, we'd still be using morse code to protect those who teach it.
Oh yes, we teach subjects in our schools because we have the teachers.
We teach cosmetology because girls like to learn how to set each others'
hair, not because there is a demand for those workers. So why shouldn't
we let government preserve our trolley cars? We might have enough
time to educate the bureaucrats before we all die off.
<p>We could also have a museum to the candy bar in the old CLARK plant
on the Norside?
<p>Now comes the AMEN.
<p>Have a great weekend, all y'uns.
<blockquote TYPE=CITE> </blockquote>
<blockquote TYPE=CITE>
<p> Pittsburgh Railways
Company (PRCo), 1930 -- 1950
<br> To e-mail privately, please click here: <a href="mailto:pghpcc@pacbell.net">mailto:pghpcc@pacbell.net</a>
<br>N.M.R.A. Life member #2190; <a href="http://www.mcs.net:80/~weyand/nmra/">http://www.mcs.net:80/~weyand/nmra/</a></blockquote>
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