[PRCo] Re: M1276

[Edward H. Lybarger]

The last I heard, trolley poles hovered around the $100 mark.  Is there a
later quote?  We (PTM) recently had some line poles fabricated from steel
that cost around $600 apiece, and I would expect that trolley(bus) poles,
still in production at OB, might be a lot less than a large, custom job.

-----Original Message-----
From: pittsburgh-railways-bounce at lists.dementia.org
[mailto:pittsburgh-railways-bounce at lists.dementia.org]On Behalf Of Fred
Schneider
Sent: Tuesday, December 10, 2002 6:14 PM
To: pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org
Subject: [PRCo] Re: M1276



Just thoughts ... no facts.

Streetcar and bus company shop people were parts replacers.  They buy parts
from suppliers.  At some point in time parts become very scare ...
lparticularly when you are the last company using them.  Example: trolley
poles cost $800 these days.  Museums fabricate parts because they have no
choice.

Parts were available for PCCs.  Parts were probably becoming scarce for
Jones cars by 1956.  At that time New Orleans was down to 88 cars, Boston
had a small number of type 5s left at Waverly (maybe 20), Philly was rapidly
replacing 200+ DE cars and 535 80-hundreds.  The last of the Nearsides and
5000s were gone in 1955.  Los Angeles had one route left with K control
cars.  Milwaukee still had an small old car fleet (see, Ken, I didn't forget
you).  Muni's fleet was still heavily dominated by Iron Monsters but that
would change to none in 2 years.  Washington had one car (766).  But most of
the North American PCCs were still running.

The wooden bodied sweepers were probably in pretty bad shape.  I had a
letter from Norm Vutz -- I think it's downstairs in the darkroom -- written
in 1964 that descirbed PRC and its last snow storm early in 1964 ... he had
sent a color print of a sweeper gloriously throwing snow in Oakland but he
remarked that the system wide performance was dismal, that almost every
sweeper broke down.

The 4100s were probably pretty decent structurally but aging fast.  The
4000s that remained in Pittsburgh were crap ... they were semi steel with
wooden platform corner posts and end framing ... easy to replace after an
accident.   Someone probably theorized that a 1200 might be better than the
plowing good money into rebuilding a 4100.  And it probably didn't cost a
whole lot to transfer the scraper blade from a high floor to 1276.

That was probably a one man decision made by an equipment superintendent
after looking at what cars he had and which options would cost the least
money in the long term.  Long term might have only been five years in his
mind because the county was talking takeover.

Finally, not all decisions are good ones.  In most companies, only 52 to 58
percent of the decisions are reasonable. The rest are bad.   Pittsburgh, in
retrospect, made a bad one with 1276.



Charles Brown wrote:

> Just out of curiousity, does anyone know why M1276 was converted into a
> plow in the first place when so many of the McGuire-Cummings (hope I got
> that right) were still around?  Wouldn't it have made more sense to
> convert an old Jones car into a plow if one was really needed?
>
> Charlie
>
> Charlesebrown at webtv.net

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