Car Life

[Fred W. Schneider III]

Ken Josephson is correct in stating, in his own words, that a fat and
sassy public agency has no need to fix anything.  

     1.  Private corporations had no money; they had to maintain as long
as possible in order to provide the service that brought in what
precious little money they had.  World War II provided the last cash
reserves for streetcars among the larger companies.  The smaller ones
generally ran out of money for new motor coaches by the early 1950s and
then had to rely on either fixing the ones they had or buying better
castoffs from some other company or agency.  

     2.  The public agencies all had the money for new buses,
streetcars, subway cars, or whatever, simply because you paid your
Federal taxes.  As John Swindler has pointed out so many times, "the
only real money is local money."  Federal and state money doesn't
count.  It is cheaper for the local agency to buy a new bus than
overhaul an old one ... $150,000 total bus cost ... 80% federal, 10%
state, 10% local ... the local tax payers only had to ante up $15,000. 
There is absolutely no reason to reengine and rebuild a transmission a
bus when you can buy a new one for $15,000. Furthermore, your local
elected officials can't put their names on a rebuild but they surely can
make friends by spending federal and state money on a new bus.  (To put
it another more familiar way ... wouldn't you buy a new Buick LaSabre if
it only cost $2,200 or a Cadillac for $3,000?)

I hate to take his name in vain, but when all this was developing in the
1970s, George Krambles was heard to utter, "What we need is a disposable
subway car." It was an obvious crack about buses being throwaways from
the agency perspective but subway cars were built ot last.  

     3.  Now that we've beat up the acquisition costs.  Consider the
repair shop you don't need.  Here in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, we have an
unusual transit authority.  Red Rose reengined all of the 1970 Fageol's
once before they finally put them out to pasture.  Conestoga
Transportation Company had NO money all through the 1960s to reengine a
bus but they did buy some nice used coaches.  Red Rose, on the other
hand, is very unique in its overhaul practices.  Capital Area Transit in
Harrisburg, which was run by ATA Management (the same people who had it
has a private company), is still running scads of fishbowl GMs in the
rush hour because they may be the only other public agency in
Pennsylvania to maintain buses.  For the most part, we don't need
overhaul shops anymore because we don't do much more than safety
maintenance, i.e. brakes, steering, light bulbs. We need a body shop to
rebuild those that are used for target practice.

     4.  I think the Market-Frankford Budd cars (the Almond Joys) make a
good example.  The bid specs gave preference to stainless steel because
it wouldn't have to be painted.  The last time I looked, 606 at Arden is
out in the weather, totally unprotected just as it was for 40 years in
the Frankford or 69th Street yards in Philly.  The body is tight.  The
neighbors can't break the Lexan windows. There are people out there like
Russ Jackson who could tell the real story about why they were retired,
but let's give him a chance to retire before we ask.  I suspect that
SEPTA didn't want to go through a truck and wiring overhaul.  One might
also suggest that non air-conditioned cars are a liability today.  I
think we are simply cutting to the bottom line, that being that the tax
payers in the SEPTA marketing area (Bucks, Chester, Delaware,
Montgomery, and Philadelphia counties) would spend less in local moneys
to buy new cars than to fix the old ones to last another 20 years.  

Kenneth Josephson wrote:
> 
> Derrick J Brashear wrote:
> 
> > But, just because it had longevity, don't assume it was necessarily "better" than
> > today.
> 
> True. You may have noticed several prominent coach manufacturers were left out of
> my little rant. A Boeing 757 is certainly "better" than a DC-3 though the latter is
> well known for its longevity. (This last statement is guaranteed to get a reaction
> from Bob Rathke or Ed Lybarger.) Anything can be made to last for decades if one
> throws enough money at it. But Marmon, Brill and postwar Pullman trolley coaches
> were noted for their longevity as well as providing generally trouble free service
> for over three decades when given the chance. While our favorite traction system is
> well known for being a predominently Westinghouse equipped system, most long term
> trolley coach operators seemed to prefer GE equipped trolley coaches over
> Westinghouse equipped units when all other things were equal. There were several
> notable cases where the Westinghouse equipped half of a GE/Westinghouse split order
> of identical trolley coaches were retired or sold off  before the GE units.
> 
> My point is that a guaranteed subsidy to a fat and sassy public agency will not
> inspire the same call for longevity and serviceability that the private transit
> industry and its suppliers needed when the PCC concept was born.
> 
> I heard a rumor that people living between Mattapan and Ashmont were more worried
> about the possibility of receiving hand-me-down Boeings from the Green line than
> losing their PCCs to bustitution or a Red Line heavy rail extension. Ken J.