Clipping

[Derrick J Brashear]

--On Tuesday, February 27, 2001 10:43:04 AM -0800 Kenneth Josephson 
<kjosephson at sprintmail.com> wrote:

> Few people thought the automobile, perfected or not, would ever become
> widely available to the masses. Few planners envisioned suburbs beyond
> the final reach of the carlines. No one really imagined the "superfarms"
> we know of today. The distinction between rural and urban was still
> relatively black & white. So it was easy for outsiders and even a few
> insiders to imagine nothing displacing the streetcar or interurban at
> the turn of the century

Well, I dunno. Has it happened as much here as elsewhere? We have 
Monroeville, Cranberry, Peters Township, North Huntingdon, Hempfield, North 
Fayette. But of those... Cranberry was at least partially served by 
electric rail service, as were North Huntingdon, Peters and Hempfield 
(parts of it, anyhow). Only Monroeville and North Fayette had no service 
(actually, that's not strictly true, since the 62 Trafford served the 
portion of Patton Township along Turtle Creek, but most people forget 
that's Monroeville)

But one could also argue the development around Pittsburgh doesn't fit the 
national norm. And in fact most of the rail lines, electric and otherwise, 
served corridors along creek and river valleys, which also happened to be 
where people lived and worked at least early on.

There was a lot of private right of way in the more rural systems (Harmony 
and West Penn) and one wonders if those lines had survived longer if any of 
that could have been usefully adapted to still be a transportation 
corridor. Most of the West Penn was adequately built for what it did, and 
certainly no further expense was justified at the time, making most of it 
unlikely to be usefully reused. Likewise I suspect the corridor which ran 
to Cranberry would likewise be too underbuilt for today's standards. On the 
other hand, what if instead of the West Busway something could have been 
done with the extensive private right of way which existed from the West 
End services, and then perhaps tied into the former Panhandle right of way 
outbound of the tunnel?

It's all pointless speculation, since the way things evolved in this 
country basically precluded survival of the more rural systems and made the 
preservation of urban systems require great foresight and potentially 
greater expense. It's still annoying to me, though, that the system we're 
left with here isn't more useful than it is

-D