Ken's question about Eastern European PCCs

[Fred W. Schneider III]

It's an OK subject, its PCCs.

Ken, I photographed Tatra cars in almost every city in East Germany
before the wall came down, and in several cities after reunification. I
also had a one-day dash through Czechoslovakia stopping briefly in
Prague, Brno, and one other city.(Understand I'm the typical American
tourist ... rent a car to drive and photograph public transit.)  I rode
and photographed the Konstal cars in Warsaw and Krakov, both in Poland.
(That was an all railroad trip, made possible because a one week
all-Poland unlimited rail pass was only about US$30 and western rental
car companies did not then and still refuse to allow their cars being
taken into the East.)  I've also ridden on Tatra cars in Sofia,
Bulgaria.

What were they like ... the standard gauge cars in Poland and East
Berlin rode on B3 trucks; the rode like any Pittsburgh low 1700. 
Nothing significantly different if maintained properly. 

The truth was that while per capita patronage in the Eastern Bloc
Countries was incredibly high by developed world standards, fares were
incredibly low (like subsidized housing, bread and milk), and therefore
on a limited budget maintenance was fair to middlin at best, and went
downward to deplorable, then awesome, and finally to you ain't gonna
believe it not matter what I say.  I remember one section of track
through an industrial sector in Magdeburg that looked like an applied
perturbation test track at Pueblo; the cars rocked and bounced through
it like an athlete on a surfboard.  Gearbox maintenance ranged from we
recently fixed it down to we got 500,000 more kilometers than the law
allows ... some cars were terribly noisy but it wasn't a manufacturing
defect.  Journal and motor bearings would squeal until they seized.  

The Bulgarians were the worse of all.  They seemed to have a policy of
not fixing anything until it quit altogether.  We landed at the airport
in Sofia to find half the light bulbs in the terminal were burnt out. 
Hotels were the same ... you'd go down the hall and 2 or 3 bulbs out of
5 would be out (in a random pattern suggesting bulb failure instead of
saving current). One of the group was given a hotel room in Sofia's
finest hotel that had a broken water faucet with hot water gushing out
like Old Faithful.  The room was like a sauna.  And they chose to make
no attempt to rectify the problem until the tour guide demand it in the
local tongue.  The country's one streetcar system ran on similar
principals, although most cars were nicely painted and maintenance was a
tad better than the Polish systems I visited.   

I made a statement in the PCC book series about performance matching of
PCCs in Poland into two-car trains and then permanently coupling them. 
I was told that but I had no proof when I wrote the PCC book.  I later
received a piece of hate mail from someone who thought I was taking an
undeserved poke at the Poles.  Guess what folks.  It was true.   The
cars were matched in permanent pairs according to performance. And then
all the excess hardware (headlights on the second cars, for example) was
removed.  In addition, the doors on the Konstal cars would not close if
opened all the way because the track and/or guide rollers were
improperly positioned.  The solution was to put a bolt through the floor
to permanently block all doors so they would not open all the way ...
prevented them from jamming.  And, if anyone wants proof, I'll dig out
the color slide. 

And was I picking on the Poles?  No.  I've found that people can be
incredibly nice no matter where I've gone.  Poland was no exception. 
Before I left, I spent a day in New York, as is often my custom,
wandering around all the national tourist offices.  I was thinking of
the "East" for that summer.  I met two absolutely lovely women from
Intourist but after interrogating them for a half hour, I concluded that
Russia would be postponed.  The Czechoslovakian tourist office had been
privatized; its goal was to sell rooms and tours and one received all
the services one expects from New Yorkers.  But the lady in the Polish
office was supreme.  She knew everything.  Even the main train schedule
was memorized.  And it wasn't even a tourist office, just the office of
their national hotel chain.  The Polish tourist office is in Chicago. 
Her answer to my compliment about her knowledge was, "This is the only
office in New York.  Someone should represent Poland.  People here
should not be referred to Chicago."  That convinced me.  I had a lovely
evening at a Chopin recital in Warsaw.  A very memorable time listening
to a guide in Auchwitz trying to tell an American tourist that "the
tourist's" about the Nazi camp were total incorrect ... a rather loud
argument ... until the man from New Jersey pointed out that he escaped
from Auschwitz in 1945.  Sadly, I don't speak Polish so I only met those
people whose business was tourism. Yet I do want to return.  I do much
better in Germany.  And France was great because my wife understands and
speaks French (I only read a little of it).     

Kenneth Josephson wrote:
> 
> "Fred W. Schneider III" wrote:
> 
> > The sad thing about the concocted story about the 1800s is that someone
> > out there no doubt won't realize the humor and it will circulate as
> > gospel for years and years and years.
> 
> Ah, but not as sad as being misquoted in print or being credited with an
> inaccurate writing. How do you recall five thousand books?
> 
> >  But it was funny.  Even at o'dark
> > 30 in the morning.
> 
> Thanks. I know of a guy who restored a '61 Impala convertible with a Bel Air
> trink lid (two less tail light openings), Bel Air trim & interior. No such
> beast as a '61 Bel Air convertible. He loves to park it at car shows and
> listen to the know-it-alls spout production figures for this non-existent
> Chevrolet model or who claim they once owned one. He always manages to keep
> a straight face, too.
> 
> > At any rate, I liked the tale about the 1800s.  Just what Pittsburgh
> > needed ... another batch of stinking hot cars with no opening windows in
> > the summer.
> 
> Regardless of humidity levels, moving hot air is won't really do much to
> cool people in a crowded streetcar. Here in the high desert, evaporative
> coolers can drop inside temperatures thirty degrees. And a dry eighty
> degrees feels much better than a dry one hundred ten. But a refrigerated
> seventy degrees feels best of all!
> 
> Remember those Dallas trolley coaches with the air conditioning? Those units
> were virtually indentical to the older rooftop A/C units still seen in older
> parts of Las Vegas. Of course, the trolley units carried direct current
> motors, but I wonder how well they worked?  How comfortable was DC's air
> conditoned PCC? Or Pittsburgh lone 4000 with A/C?
> 
> > The reality is, St. Louis was more than happy to build more PCC cars and
> > many companies did check out prices.  Pittsburgh did know into the
> > middle 1950s what they would have cost had they bought them.  It seemed
> > that $20,000 40 foot GM buses always won out over a $40,000 steetcar.
> > The argument was that those buses would not last long, but old look
> > buses managed to run 20 years or into the public agency era too.  Some
> > of the 1,000 coaches that Philly bought in 1955-57 were still around in
> > the early 1980s, I rode them that late.
> 
> Milwaukee's newest Old Looks (1958)  were estimated to have another five
> years of service life left when the County retired them in the early 1980s.
> LA gave serious consideration to buying the best ones. The County press
> release stated these "old friends" had plenty of miles left to offer, but no
> ridership appeal. As if the RTS (rattle trap s**t) coaches replacing them
> were any nicer. The Old Look was a tight, well built machine by the end of
> its production run.
> 
> One has to wonder how well an Eastern European PCC would have held up in
> Pittsburgh in comparison to PAT's current fleet. If Derrick allows, I'd love
> to have some of the list members who have ridden these cars in the former
> Soviet Union share their impressions. Ken J.