Carhouses, Dave's, Etc./Boeing Vertol and M11

[Fred W. Schneider III]

Jim Holland wrote:

>  It also makes sense for
> the Clark Bar . . . sorry, I mean Clark PCC CAR . . . to be saved from
> an historic perspective as well - it is the one and only Clark built PCC
> and quite innovative for its time.

Please take these comments as opinions, but hopefully they show some thought.

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.

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 Headlights 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.

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.

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.

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?

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, death never happens.  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.

We could also have a museum to the candy bar in the old CLARK plant on the Norside?

Now comes the AMEN.

Have a great weekend, all y'uns.

>

>
>
>         Pittsburgh  Railways  Company  (PRCo),   1930  --  1950
>     To e-mail privately, please click here: mailto:pghpcc at pacbell.net
> N.M.R.A.  Life member #2190; http://www.mcs.net:80/~weyand/nmra/
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