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Apparently they do work. The late Charles Richard (Dick) Lloyd, who
was our Superintendent of Transportation at the Baltimore Streetcar Museum,
recalled an incident where a young lady on her way to parochial school
walked in front of a streetcar, was knocked down, and scooped up by the
HB Lifeguard. She had no injuries. Dick said her only comment
involved the fear of what the nuns would do to her because her school uniform
was dirty.
<p>SEPTA removed the lifeguards and hand brakes from cars because the agency
would have to make them work to comply with the state's motor vehicle inspection
law. To back up a little bit, railway cars owned and operated by
private corporations were under the scrutiny of the state Public Utility
Commission. But the PUC had no authority over public agencies.
Therefore the state legislators rewrote the motor vehicle inspection law,
expanding it to cover streetcars and subway-elevated cars ... happened
sometime in the late 1970s. From that point on, streetcars carried
state inspection stickers just like my automobile. But the catch
in the law is that safety appliances must work <i>if they are on the vehicle</i>
... lights, brakes, even life guards. Missing apparatus doesn't count.
So, remove defective hand brakes and non-functioning life guards and you
automatically are in compliance with the law. PennDOT was responsible
for insuring that inspections were done properly but, to the best of my
knowledge, no one at that agency had any idea how a PCC car even worked.
Therefore, if you don't know and if no one tells you that it is part of
the braking system, even the master and braking controllers were never
inspected. The whole safety inspection was a farce. So much
for the gene pool. You decide where it needed purging.
<p>Kenneth Josephson wrote:
<blockquote TYPE=CITE>Frederick J Sauerburger MD wrote:
<p>> They are listed as 1725-1799 prototypes, and have the city "thing"
(safety
<br>> grate, people catcher?) in front where the interurbans have the pilots.
<p>In either case, depending on how well they carried out their designed
task, I'd
<br>like to think of them as gene pool cleansers. Come to think of it,
perhaps that's
<br>why SEPTA eliminated theirs. ;-) Ken J.</blockquote>
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