Car Life

[Fred W. Schneider III]

Again, the issue isn't how long they will last but for how long the
agency wishes to maintain them.
Johnstown Traction was a private company that counted pennies.  

I think we often, as enthusiasts, spend too much time looking at one
aspect of our quarry (in this case longevity) without looking at all of
those factors which the transit manager had to consider.  And if he
failed to consider them, there was always the unemployment line.  

Trolley coaches are a very unique hybrid vehicle that has incredibly
high fixed operating costs.  The fixed costs relate ownership,
replacement costs, and maintenance of the power distribution system. 
The actual propulsion energy costs were generally lower than liquid
fuels.   General Electric put out a brochure in the late 1940s touting
their PCC hardware.  It contained a chart explaining how often one had
to run a vehicle to make it profitable.
     Streetcars worked well on a headway of 7 minutes or less
     The Trolley Bus could be profitable if the headways were in a 5 to
10 minute range
     The Diesel bus had utility if you ran it every 8 minutes or less
often, and
     The Gasoline bus was ideal for intermittent operations such as
school buses.
These numbers are from my memory, and, in this case precision is
irrelevant because the numbers changed from city to city according to
local power costs, age of physical plant, prices of motor fuels, and so
forth.

They significant point is that the trolley coach had a very small window
of opportunity.  In some cities, it may have even been cheaper to go
directly from streetcars to diesels.  But most cities that went to
trolley buses in 1945 found out, within five years, that they had made a
mistake and that the headways had spread out so much that diesels were
now cheaper.  In some smaller TC cities, removing one coach from a route
doubled the headway and made the operation unprofitable! 

Does it really matter what the longevity of a trolley coach is, when you
made a mistake in the fist place?  If you bought the TC fleet, and are
now stuck with $1.00 taxes on poles all over the city, property taxes on
a substation, a need to replace the aging rotary convertor with a new
solid state machine, and 100 miles of copper left over from the trolley
days that needs replacement... Who cares if you've got this fleet of
electrics with 20 years left in them?  If the diesels are that much
cheaper, you sell the electrics to Mexico or the junk yard and buy
diesels.

Derrick J Brashear wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 26 Dec 2000, Kenneth Josephson wrote:
> 
> > And things haven't changed in the motor coach era. Will anything built in the
> > last twenty years ever last as long as a GMC Old Look or even a Fishbowl?  On
> > Dr. DeArmond's trolley coach discussion lists, a number of us frequently
> > lament how nothing built in North America today for service under twin wires
> > (and on pavement) will ever touch the Marmon-Herringtons, Pullman-Standards
> > or CCF/ACF-Brills for longevity. It is amazing what a struggling private
> > sector industry can demand quality wise as compared to today's taxpayer
> > supported systems with their "use it or lose it" funding mentality. Ken J.
> 
> And in an odd twist to "on-topic", I remember Johnstown picked up some
> used TCs (They bought St. Louis TCs for Horner St. line conversion, I
> think in 1951, and then supplemented the fleet later with used
> Marmon-Herringtons and others, but all the details are filed away
> somewhere now) and I know that at least one manufacturer made trolley
> coaches which were apparently difficult enough to operate in Johnstown
> (where the lines were actually pretty flat compared to somewhere like San
> Francisco, because by and large they served the river valleys, the notable
> exceptions being the Southmont carline, and the trolley coach loop in East
> Conemaugh) that they were parked at the earliest convenient date. I'll
> have to find out which. But, just because it had longevity, don't assume
> it was necessarily "better" than today. I won't argue that the Boeings
> were better than the PCCs, though. Not by any stretch.
> 
> -D