Safety Fenders

[Fred W. Schneider III]

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.

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 if they are on the vehicle ... 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.

Kenneth Josephson wrote:

> Frederick J Sauerburger MD wrote:
>
> > They are listed as 1725-1799 prototypes, and have the city "thing" (safety
> > grate, people catcher?) in front where the interurbans have the pilots.
>
> In either case, depending on how well they carried out their designed task, I'd
> like to think of them as gene pool cleansers. Come to think of it, perhaps that's
> why SEPTA eliminated theirs. ;-)  Ken J.
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