[PRCo] Re: To PCC or Not to PCC?.......That is the Question.

[Fred W. Schneider III]

And more often than body style, the public spoke of red cars, green
cars, yellow cars.  That may have been why so many companies changed
colors when going from two to one man, or as a way of publicizing their
new cars.  

Brooklyn, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Los Angeles, San
Francisco, Chicago, Washington, Dallas, San Diego (?), maybe Birmingham,
and possibly St. Louis came up with new color schemes to introduce the
PCC cars.  And this was not the first time this was done on some of
those properties.  

Often these new colors had nothing to do with visibility, but at least
the original yellow and blue on the Muni cars was easier to see in a fog
than the old gray.  I'm not a believer that there were enough
automobiles on the streets then to make colors a safety issue.
This was long before Pittsburgh's Port Authority was dumb enough to
paint a car that ran through the woods in army camouflage paint.  Sorry
Harold ... I hope that advertising contract was after your time.  

And, a number of them also dreamed up new colors for one-man cars.  The
shift from Green and Cream to red and cream in Montreal, or red to cream
in Baltimore, or the addition of a white stripe in Chicago, or a red
stripe in Cleveland are examples.  



Kenneth Josephson wrote:
> 
> I forgot to mention this, too. Chicago's Red Pullman surface cars were designed and
> built as P.A.Y.E. (Pay As You Enter) cars. Both the North Shore Line and Milwaukee
> Electric ordered similiar cars, also designated "P.A.Y.E." cars. The latter two
> properties rebuilt theirs as one man units later the cars' lives. Few riders or
> fans, if anybody, referred to them as "Pay As You Enter" cars after their
> conversion. Some referred to them as "former two man cars." That could even be
> applied to some Philly and all Chicago PCC streetcars, since they entered service
> with two man crews.
> 
> John Q. Public associates the body style as being what defines a streetcar as a
> "PCC." We know better. After all, we traction fans don't refer to horse cars as
> "horse drawn trolleys", nor do we call Muni's cable cars "trolleys."
> 
> Ken J.