Pittsburgh Guardrails Was: [Re: Johnstown PCC Scans & a Pittsburgh Fantasy]

[Jim Holland]

Greetings!

Charles Brown wrote:

> I appreciated the
> guard rail information, particularly on how trucks travel around curves.

	There are certainly other forces that enter into the picture - the 
faster a car goes around a curve the more everything is going to be pressed 
to the outside - centrifugal force.  But at typical streetcar speeds on 90 
degree turns in city streets, the basics are as I described it.  There will 
be more force sitting on top of the trucks pressing down than centrifugal 
force will be able to overcome at nominal speeds.

> You shamed me into getting off my butt and digging out the Baltimore
> book.

	Actually, you asked for it, right?!?!  Have learned much from 
*other* lists; got some good teachers and you know them, too!

> In regards to the origin of their gauge, here is what it says:
> An Ordinance was passed on March 28, 1859, which set "the provision that
> the gauge be 'the same as that of ordinary street carriages.'"  I don't
> quite know what they mean by that.  It is my understanding that
> Pittsburgh's gauge was so that wagons could travel inside the rails
> where it was smoother?  If that's the case, why did Baltimore have wider
> carriages (maybe they had bigger horses' rear ends there)?

	Maybe it was a Fraud - I mean, Ford, instead of a Cadillac like 
used in PA!  Doubt that many interstate sales of carriages took place in 
the 1800s unless the carriage dealer lived on a state line!  I even wonder 
how they got so many carriages in one city to have the same *gauge* on 
them!

-- 
James B. Holland
       PITTSBURGH RAILWAYS COMPANY (PRCo), June of 1949 -- June of 1953
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