Trolley Freaks on eBay: This One is Getting Good!

[Derrick J Brashear]

--On Tuesday, February 27, 2001 02:54:59 PM -0500 "Edward H. Lybarger" 
<twg at pulsenet.com> wrote:

> The airline stuff keeps some of us sane, John!  We're multifocused!

Not to pick on you personally, or anyone else here.... sanity is overrated. 
I lost mine years ago, and yet here I am;-) And that's part of the problem. 
Despite my use of EBay, it's one of my hot buttons.

> It's transportation, and that's what I like, not just the streetcars.  If
> there were a commercial aviation museum somewhere close, the trolley
> museum might never have heard of me!

I never found air travel to be that interesting, but that's just me. The 
people mover at the Pittsburgh Airport, on the other hand... I wonder why 
they didn't have it run straight under the old airport over to the old 
Airport Parkway, as a way to foster development on the old airport site. 
The current system doesn't begin to test as much stuff as the old Skybus 
demo system was used to test, even if it carries more people, more 
usefully. Skybus may have or have had a place in transit, but not, in my 
opinion formulated based on the Transit Expressway reports and newspaper 
accounts of the era, at the time it was proposed. Rebuilding the existing 
Beechview line and extending the service to South Hills Village certainly 
served a market but did little to improve running times. Sure, the trackage 
along Washington Road was buried, but Broadway is still in-street or 
in-reservation running, and being near your market also means you can't go 
fast, because verily, your market is dumb and will walk or drive in front 
of you, and their family will demand large sums of money because despite 
living there for 20 years they never knew those rail cars they rode every 
day ran at any time other than when they happened to be waiting for a car, 
if they used the service at all.

And then there are the crossings tucked in the streeets up there, next to 
the houses.

Someone posited in a paper I have buried somewhere downstairs, probably 
someone reading, that if you intend to have a fully-grade-separated rapid 
service, do it right, right from the start. I think this was in reference 
to Shaker, but this alignment was never that, and unless expensive and 
unlikely to be politically viable upgrades were done, it would never be 
that.

Have I gotten wildly off the initial subject of this enough yet?

-D