West Liberty

[John Swindler]

>John Swindler wrote:
>
> > Don't suppose there is any interest in short history of public 
>transportation in Pittsburgh written by Pitts. Ry. president for 1931 
>history????
>
>
>To which Jim Holland replied:
>
>	Welllllll, of course . . . NOT.  Why on earth would people on a PRCo mail 
>list be instrested in such?  It eludes me!!:>)
>	I assume this is coming under separate cover - extra postage, too!!


Follows is part 3 of 3.  This is from five volume set entitled "History of 
Pittsburgh", printed 1922.  Also spent a bit more time with spell checker. 
(never claimed to be a typist)

Of interest was the saving in running time through conversion from horsecar 
to cable on Fifth Avenue.  No wonder the tremendous investment in cable 
technology looked attractive.

John



History of Pittsburgh

Printed 1922

Pp 169:	 Pittsburgh’s street railway system is entirely the property of the 
Pittsburgh Railways Company, which in turn is a subsidiary of the 
Philadelphia Company, an organization formed more than forty years ago by 
George Westinghouse and his associated under the terms of a most inclusive 
charter.  This charter covers, among other corporations, the Duquesne Light 
Company, which controls the various companies lighting the City of 
Pittsburgh and many of its suburbs and furnishes power to the Pittsburgh 
Railways Company and very many big and little manufacturing concerns within 
and without the City of Pittsburgh and neighboring counties; also an 
extensive oil development in connection with the Equitable Gas Company; the 
Allegheny Heating Company, which has charge of the heating system in 
Pittsburgh.  At the present time the Pittsburgh Railways Company is without 
the jurisdiction of the Philadelphia Company, being in the hands of 
receivers appointed by the United States District Court of Western 
Pennsylvania for the purposes of reorganization.

	The street car transportation system of Pittsburgh and vicinity had its 
origin in 1859 when the Citizens’ railway was organized and was operated by 
horses over a “track which consisted of tram strap rails spiked to 
longitudinal wooden stringers.”

	This pioneer company was organized under an act of the Pennsylvania 
Legislature passed in March, 1859, which authorized this company to “start 
from the intersection of Market and Fifth Streets, to Liberty, to Cecil 
Alley, to Penn Avenue, thence to the Greensburg and Pittsburgh Turnpike Road 
and thence to the suburbs.”  The company was incorporated with two thousand 
shares of fifty dollars each, the incorporators being James Verner, 
Alexander Speer, Richard Kays, William Darlington, Joshua Rhodes, Nathaniel 
Holmes, and other local citizens.  This line was built along Penn Avenue to 
what is known as the “forks of the Road,” that is where Penn Avenue (at that 
time the Pittsburgh and Greensburg Turnpike) met Butler Street, the latter 
paralleling the Allegheny River to the farthest extension of the river 
residential district.  The street railway line followed the Butler Street 
route to the Allegheny Cemetery gate, where it remained for many years, or 
until an extension was built when the bridge across the Allegheny River to 
Sharpsburgh was completed and the extension carried the line to the north 
side of the river.  For many years passengers from the Pittsburgh and Butler 
Street districts were carried to East Liberty by stage coaches which 
connected with the street car line east and west.  East Liberty is the name 
of a populous suburb at that time, and now is the East End of the city.

	The Pittsburgh and East Liberty Passenger Railway Company was organized in 
1859 and operated for some time as a horse line to Oakland, now the Fourth 
Ward of Pittsburgh, then an insignificant suburb.  Later it was extended to 
East Liberty, under the title of the Pittsburgh, Oakland and East Liberty 
Passenger Railway Company.  It was the first company to try the “cable 
system” and one of the first to abandon it for electricity.  The terminals 
of this concern were later extended via Penn and Fifth Avenue and Shady and 
Highland Avenue to Wilkinsburg.

	The Pittsburgh & Birmingham Passenger Railroad Company was another 
corporation that was chartered in 1859.  Its line was built from Fifth 
Avenue and Smithfield Street, Pittsburgh, southwardly on Smithfield Street, 
across the Smithfield Street Bridge to Carson Street, and thence eastwardly 
to South Twenty-fourth street, and a few years later, to the extreme eastern 
southern limits of the southern boroughs.

The Pittsburgh, Allegheny & Manchester Passenger Railway Company was another 
corporate product of 1859.  It was originally constructed from Penn Avenue 
and Sixth Street, Pittsburgh, over Sixth Street bridge, across the Allegheny 
River to Federal Street to Allegheny and thence by successive streets to the 
borough of Manchester. This line during the years of its independent 
existence built several important extensions, notably the Troy Hill and Etna 
and Sharpsburg lines.

	The Federal Street & Pleasant Valley line was incorporated in 1868 and 
immediately built a line from Fifth Avenue and Smithfield Street Pittsburgh, 
via Smithfield Street, Seventh Avenue, Liberty Street and Ninth Street and 
the Ninth Street bridge, Pittsburgh, to Anderson Street, Church Street, 
Union Avenue, Gay Alley to East Diamond Street, Allegheny, and thence to the 
entrance of Hilldale Cemetery.  This corporation by purchase and 
consolidation subsequently took over all of the lines not in possession of 
the Pittsburgh, Allegheny & Manchester Company on the north side of the 
Allegheny River/

	The Central Passenger Railway Company was organized and chartered in 1868, 
by acquiring a charter originally issued to the Pittsburgh & East Liberty 
Passenger Railway Company.  This right to build over the Wylie and Center 
Avenue routes passed first to the Oakland Railway Company and then to the 
Pittsburgh & Minersville Passenger Railway Company and finally to the 
Central Passenger Company, which built the line. Several extensions have 
been made, the most important being from Herron Avenue to a junction with 
the Fort Pitt line at Liberty and Rebecca Street and thence to Penn Avenue, 
East Liberty.

	The Pittsburgh & Ormsby Passenger Railway Company, under its charter 
granted in 1870, constructed a line out Second Avenue, Pittsburgh to the 
Tenth Street Bridge and thence over the Monongahela River via this bridge to 
Washington, to South Seventeenth and Sarah streets, but later was sold to 
the Pittsburgh & Birmingham Passenger Railways Company.  These companies 
were the nuclei of the present great system forming the Pittsburgh Railways 
Company.  From time to time extensions and side lines have been built to 
populous sections, urban and suburban, until several counties have been 
ramified and the city itself cobwebbed with the lines of this great 
organization.

Late in the eighties the possibilities of profit in the operation of 
Pittsburgh railway lines under new methods of propulsion began to attract 
the attention of outside capital and Messrs. Elkins and Widener of 
Philadelphia (already in practical control of the Philadelphia system) 
acquired control of the horsecar line out Fifth Avenue and soon established 
the cable traction system.  The success of this method in the hilly 
districts of San Francisco encouraged the new company to hasten its 
installation here.  The line was opened for operation September 12, 1889, 
over Fifth and Shady Avenue, Pittsburgh to the heart of the East End 
district, a distance of five miles, immediately reducing the time of transit 
from and hour and three quarters to thirty minutes.  The Citizens’ line, 
operating in the Penn Avenue district, opened its cable road for business in 
1890 and with the Wylie line to Minersville was operating a month later.

In the meantime, electricity had been more or less successfully tried in 
various cities, and Pittsburgh was among the earliest to test the “Daft” 
system by constructing an electric road up the almost perpendicular hillside 
from Carson and South Thirteenth Streets to the borough of Knoxville.  These 
South Hills boroughs at this time were absolutely dependent upon the 
inclines that were built form the river levels to the South Hills summits 
and were wildly anxious for more dependable facilities, both as conveniences 
and as accessories to the quicker development of their splendid glades on 
the hilltops.

The line constructed was before the introduction of the present form of 
trolley pole and wheel, the contact with the wire overhead being made by 
means of a small carriage trailing behind the car and running on top of two 
trolley wires.  Because of the very steep hills, rack and wheel propulsion 
was used, but the line was soon proved to be unsuited to the kind of service 
re1quired.

	The electric traction tried by the Observatory Hill Passenger Railway 
Company came nearer to ideals when William H. Graham and D. F. Henry bought 
and installed their recently purchased system of propulsion.  These 
gentlemen also owned the Pleasant Valley lines and at once electrified these 
and thus established the first electric line in the cities of Pittsburgh and 
Allegheny, 1889-1890.

James D. Callery, later the first president of the Pittsburgh Railways 
Company, the most alert of the believers in the permanency of electricity as 
motive power, built the Second Avenue line from Fourth Avenue and Market 
Street, Pittsburgh, to Glenwood, then the Twenty-third Ward of the city, and 
was operating his cars electrically, March 1890. He later extended his lines 
to the suburban boroughs of Braddock, Homestead, Duquesne, McKeesport, 
Wilmerding, East Pittsburgh and other Monongahela valley boroughs.  
Immediately all other lines were changed to electrically operated lines.

The effect of installing rapid transit cars within and without the city was 
to increase traffic beyond even wildest conjecture of all of the projectors 
of the new system, and steam railroads lost largely of their urban and 
suburban travel almost immediately.  The value of this traffic, with its 
inevitable annual increase, was apparent to capitalists all over the country 
and at once lines were laid looking to consolidation.  Pittsburgh was a big 
and fertile field for this plan.  Lines, meanwhile, had been projected to 
remote parts of city and county as well as interurban connections upon large 
scales.  Mileage increased form 89 miles in 1891 to 337 miles five years 
later.

The panicky times of 1893-1894 measurably arrested general expansion but had 
little effect upon plans that were made to mature in near years.  The 
Forbes, Craig, Center and Negley street lines were built in these years by 
Pittsburgh enterprise headed by the late Christopher L. Magee and at once 
stirred the opposition of the Fifth Avenue lines, largely parallel and 
co-terminus, to a fierce cut in rates that subsisted for some time.  The 
Magee concern also built a line out Liberty Street to East Liberty at this 
time., called the Fort Pitt line, in competition with the Penn Avenue line 
of the Philadelphia combine.

Once the panic passed, however, common sense and the greed of gain under the 
quickest and most promising conditions that ever offered in Pittsburgh, 
asserted themselves and the trend was towards consolidation, at first of 
certain lines, soon of all of them.  This was gradually effected through a 
scheme of “re-immersion” that has not been of the most conspicuous benefit 
to stockholders and every day riders.  Loss of business during the panic and 
the recognition of the inefficiency of competitive systems, with separate 
managements but occupying the same field, bought about the consolidations.

The first, the Consolidated Traction Company, was charted July 24, 1895, and 
“by lease, purchase of stock or assumption of obligations, secured control 
of 187 miles of trackage.”

The United Traction Company was chartered July 27, 1896, and, similarly took 
over for operation about 157 miles of railway trackage.

Two years later the Philadelphia Company, which had sold its stock and 
charter to another list of stockholders, bought the holdings of the United 
Traction Company and later bought and otherwise acquired the stock of the 
Consolidated Traction Company of which C. L. Magee was president.

Next, the Southern Traction Company, of which T. Hartley Given, president of 
the Farmers’ Deposit National Bank, was head, was chartered in 1900 to 
absorb the lines of the West End Traction Company,  48.8 miles.  December 
30, 1901 the Southern Traction Company assumed the name of the Pittsburgh 
Railways Company and January 1, 1902 assumed control of all of the 
properties (street railway) operated by the Philadelphia Company, except 
those of the Beaver Valley Traction Company.  At this juncture the entire 
system embraced 400.2 miles of single track and the earnings were $6.7 
million a year.

For the first two years after the formation of the combination, results were 
all that could be expected.  Service was not bad, and net earnings were 
sufficient to pay guaranteed rentals and fixed charges for interest on the 
funded debt.  Then came the panic of 1903-1904.  Earnings fell off, but 
expenses and fixed charges did not decrease in proportion and the result was 
a deficit.

This process was repeated during the panic beginning in October 1907.  
Extensions had been made at the rate of about 20 miles of track yearly.  The 
result has been that, in the attempt to save for fixed charges as much as 
possible of the gross earnings, the service has deteriorated, maintenance 
has diminished and renewals have not been made.  Certain betterments in 
service have been made but with a corresponding accumulating increase in the 
deficit at the close of each of several years.,

The corporate history of the Philadelphia Company, in relation to its 
railway holding is, at least interesting, if not romantic, notwithstanding 
the abundance and startling features in the voluminous history of “high 
finance” interaction constriction and operating in the Untied States in a 
quarter of a century.  The prosperous ascent of the Pittsburgh Railways from 
a series of disconnected and quais-desoultory lines to a plexus of untied 
and definite railways was accomplished in quite an orderly manner, the 
accruing expenses, generously estimated and just as generously paid, no 
drastic demands being made for audits, the upward trend being macadamized 
smoothly and safely until the summit was reached, when those at interest 
began to note that the return was being made with rather more speed than was 
to be expected.  Those “at interest” began to take stock of the real 
situation.  Not all of them, because it was soon developed that they were 
not of those “most of interest”.  An investigation, that soon took in the 
nature of an autopsy, was begun and is continuing.  Thus far, reduced to its 
lowest terms, the situation is this, or was December 31, 1910, according to 
a summery of the expert who held this autopsy:  “This report is not intended 
to cover the history in detail of the many changes in ownership and 
operation of the 150 companies which have become part of the present system, 
but the results of this combination of interests may be recapitulated 
briefly.”

“The United Railways Investment Company was incorporated under the laws of 
the State of New Jersey February 17, 1902, a holding company for the purpose 
of dealing in the stocks and bonds of other corporations.  It owns (or 
rather did at that time) all of the common and all of the preferred stock of 
the Untied Railroads of San Francisco, and in 1908 bought all of the 
Stanislaus Electric Power Company of California.  In 1906 this company 
acquired $24.2 million or 72.8 percent of the outstanding common capital 
stock of the Philadelphia Company of Pittsburgh.

“The Philadelphia Company of Pittsburgh, which is not an operating company, 
conducts the street railway business in the cities of Greater Pittsburgh and 
McKeesport and the territory adjacent thereto, through the medium of the 
Pittsburgh Railways Company, whose stock, both common and preferred, is 
owned by the Philadelphia Company, while that in the vicinity of Beaver 
Falls is conducted through the medium of the Beaver Valley Traction Company, 
which the Philadelphia Company owns.  The Washington & Canonburgh Company 
was made part of the Pittsburgh Railways company, January 1, 1909.

“The Pittsburgh Railways Company was incorporated by special act of the 
assembly, approved May 25, 1871, as a “Surety Contract Company.”  On June 
15, 1892, all its property, rights and franchises were sold by the sheriff 
of Philadelphia County and the purchasers reorganized in accordance with the 
act of 1873.  Letters patent were issued October 16, 1894.  December 31, 
1901, the name of the Pittsburgh Railways was adopted.  It is one of the 
seven or eight corporations chartered by the legislature of 1870-71, which 
are known by the generic name of “Pennsylvania Companies,” all of which have 
very broad and comprehensive powers.

“All of the subsidiary companies were incorporated under the general act of 
March 22, 1887, and most of them were reincorporated under the general act 
of May 14, 1889.  This subsequent act provides that companies may be 
incorporated under its provisions for the purpose of construction, 
maintaining and operating street railways for public use in the conveyance 
of passengers by any power, other than locomotive, on any street or highway 
now laid out, upon which no track is laid or authorized to be laid under any 
existing charter.

“The Pittsburgh Railways company now operates as one system all of the 
eleven lines formerly operated by the various traction companies.  It also 
operates under agreements, the following named companies, whose stock is all 
owned by the Philadelphia Company:  Seventeenth Street Incline Plane 
Company; Pittsburgh Southern Street Railway Company; Tustin Street Railway 
Company; Rosslyn Street Railway Company.

“No rentals are paid to the companies owned by the Philadelphia Company, and 
the Pittsburgh Railways Company receives the earnings of the companies owned 
by it.  Therefore, with the exception of the rentals paid on account of the 
Consolidated and United systems, the Pittsburgh Railways Company pays 
rentals only to the Pittsburgh and Castle Shannon Railroad Company.

“The Pittsburgh Railways company, under leases and operating contracts, 
guarantees the payment of interest on a number of underlying mortgages upon 
property not belonging to the Consolidated or the Untied Traction Company 
systems.

“The Pittsburgh Railways Company operated the Untied and Consolidated 
traction companies under contracts that may be terminated at any time on 
three months notice by either party.  These contract obligate the Pittsburgh 
Railways Company to pay dividends upon the preferred and common stock of the 
Consolidated Traction Company at the respective rates of six percent and two 
percent, and upon the preferred and common stock of the Untied Traction 
Company at the respective rates of five percent and one percent.  The 
Philadelphia Company receives all of these dividends with the exception of 
small amount which goes to outsiders.  These contracts also obligate the 
Pittsburgh Railways Company to pay, in addition to all expenses of 
operation, ordinary maintenance and taxes, State, county and municipal, all 
interest and rentals which the Untied and Consolidated Traction companies 
ware obligated to pay on account of the companies formerly operated by them.

“The Consolidated Traction Company, formerly operated under lease or through 
stock ownership., some thirty-five companies.  On stock not owned by itself 
or its leased or owned subsidiary lines or companies it is required to pay 
rentals on the property of about nine companies, the stock of which is owned 
largely by outsiders.  It guarantees the payment of principal and interest 
on bonds and secured by about eleven mortgages through its leases or through 
the leases of the Fort Pitt Traction Company, of which it is the owner.  It 
guarantees payment, through its leases, of interest, but not principal, on 
the bonds secured by five mortgages.

“The Untied Traction Company formerly operated about 32 companies under 
lease though stock ownership.  On stock not owned by it, or its leased or 
owned companies, it is required to pay rentals on the property of about nine 
companies, the stock of which is owned largely by outsiders.  It guarantees 
the payment of the principal and interest on bonds secured by about fifteen 
mortgages, and it guarantees the payment of the interest, but not the 
principal on the bonds secured by about twelve mortgages.”

This history was written shortly before the Pittsburgh Railways Company went 
into the receivership appointed by the United States District Court.  This 
receivership has subsisted well into two years, the effects of the World War 
and other causes combining to make rapid resolution of the intricacies 
involving the necessity of the receivership very difficult.

The Pittsburgh Railways Company’s system consists of approximately 600 
single track miles of street and interurban railway of which about 300 miles 
while within the city limits of Pittsburgh.  Of the 300 miles within the 
city limits approximately 263 track miles are in constant operation, while 
over the remaining mileage a few cars run each day to maintain franchises.  
These tracks were built and are owned by a great number of separate 
corporations.  The majority of the stock of about ten separate groups of 
these corporations is owned by as many companies.  Seven of these are owned 
by the Philadelphia Company, either directly or indirectly.  The others are 
controlled by the Philadelphia company, direct or are independent.

Less than two years ago the physical possessions of the Pittsburgh Rrailways 
Company consisted of 1,861 cars, of which 1,630 were passenger, ten freight 
and express cars, 229 service cars.  Of the passenger cars, 993 were double 
truck – 758 motor and 195 trailers – of which total 628 have steel and 
semi-steel bodies.  The company has also in operation thirty-three car 
houses, nine shop buildings and fifty-three miscellaneous buildings.  The 
company owns 167 bridges.  The company owns the Mt. Washington tunnel, 3,500 
feet in length, which opens up the South Hills area to the people of 
Pittsburgh.  Electrical energy is bought from the Duquesne Light Company, 
delivered at fifteen stations owned by the company.  During 1918 the company 
operated 33,573,578 car miles; 4,209,989 car houses; carried 264,232,927 
passengers, plus 2,372,070 passengers in inclines and bought 173,500,078 
kilowatt hours from Duquesne Light Company.

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