Bridges (Was Article from the old Pittsburgh Sun Telegraph)

[HRBran99 at aol.com]

In a message dated 9/28/00 12:25:10 AM Eastern Daylight Time, 
kjosephson at sprintmail.com writes:

<< Imagine the bottleneck if a rumor started that the Smithfield
 Street Bridge was so unsafe, PAT decided to reopen a section of closed 
trolley
 trackage to avoid it. >>

One afternoon, during the 1970s reconstruction of the Smithfield St. Bridge 
(SSB) I was operating a car inbound and noticed one of the construction 
supervisors (I always saw him giving instructions to other workers each day) 
was in a very, very excited frenzy. He was actually running back and forth 
shouting to other workmen and generally acting crazy. I entered downtown via 
Ft. Pitt and Grant on a Library trip and began picking up passengers. I made 
the city loop and returned to SSB where there was a line of PCCs extending 
down Ft Pitt to Wood Street. Nothing, however, was moving across the bridge 
toward the tunnel. After a few minutes I made the car safe and went to the 
car ahead. That operator knew nothing about what was going on. Soon another 
operator came back from the front of the line and said they had spotting a 
large crack in a steel beam on the underside of the SSB. Hence, the running 
and shouting I had witnessed earlier. After a while they decided to send one 
car at a time across the bridge. We were told to keep a steady slow speed and 
to keep moving. I had visions of my car helping to recreate the Silver Bridge 
disaster! We all made it across and trolley service was curtailed at Carson 
Street, with cars operating inbound through the tunnel to right Carson, right 
Arlington and the hill route back to SHJct. Buses were used from downtown via 
10th Street bridge to Carson/Smithfield. I always had an errie feeling after 
that each time I crossed the SSB. However, SSB is still standing and the PCCs 
are gone!

<<Now back to sorting these trolley coach images for Herb's calendar 
project.>>
Excellent!!!

HrB