Safety Fenders

[Jim Holland]

Greetings!

	Fascinating bit of information, Fred; thanks for sharing!  It is nice
to know the reasoning behind something like this!  This particular part
really gets to me::

> 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.

	Theoretically, you could have a free-wheeling trolleycar which would
pass the safety inspection - even though it couldn't stop!!  A real
hee-haw in retrospect!

	The fenders do work - used to drop all the time going into hills here. 
And one motorman had someone run out in front of him, get scooped up by
the lifeguard, and when the car stopped  --  he got out and ran down the
street never to be heard from again.  The operator was bananas  --  even
when telling the story many years later!

Fred W. Schneider III wrote:

> 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.

James B. Holland

        Pittsburgh  Railways  Company  (PRCo),   1930  --  1950
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