[PRCo] Re: West Penn

[Fred W. Schneider III]

1.  It would be very difficult for a car with no air compressor to have
air brakes.  You were correct; 3197-3221 were all-electrics (and the
only ones in Boston).  The 1951 order of Picture Window cars had air
drums.  Whether or not they were air applied and spring released, or
spring applied and air released is something on which I never collected
any data.  Both designs were feasible and may have been built.  Air
application, however, might have made more sense because the pressure
could be increased to hold a car on steep hills ... something Boston
didn't have.  

2. There was a general recession in Fayette County and it began about
1910-1912, about the same time that West Penn quit building routes.  At
one time there were more miles of beehive coke ovens in that region than
West Penn had miles of track.  The largest enclave of ovens was probably
at Standard north of Mount Pleasant ... several rows of hives went on
for about a mile. The ovens were everywhere that West Penn went from
Calumet and Standard to Martin. This changed when U S Steel (maybe it
was Carnegie Steel or Carnegie-Illinois Steel in those days) opened the
by-product coke plant at Clairton; volatile liquids from benzene to tar
were captured sold instead of evaporating. Many of the beehive oven s
were H C Frick properties (also U S Steel) so there had to be some
economies in shutting them down and producing coke in Clairton.  The
Clairton plant was on the Monongahela River; after it opened the mines
that were economically feasible were those that had a tunnel mouth along
the river, from which coal could be barged to north to the Clairton
facility.  As mines gradually played out and the bee hive ovens next to
them shut down, the area gradually slumped deeper and deeper. 
Eventually virtually all of the Pittsburgh seam coal was mined out in
southwestern Pennsylvania.  There is another lower seam but it was much
easier to mine coal closer to the surface in West Virginia.  The point
is that the economic demise of Fayette and far southern Westmoreland
County was not a sudden recession but a long range decline over more
than 50 years, and similar in nature to towns all over the country that
had economies based on extractive industries.  Sooner or later the gold,
silver, copper, lumber or coal runs out.  To some degree
environmentalists have also put the lid on coal use.  By the 1970s there
were a lot of people from that area who commuted to Pittsburgh to work
in the steel mills, then in 1982 they went down for good.  I'll leave it
to Ed to jump in and amplify, clarify, or rebut.   Ed could also clarify
when Clairton opened; all I can say is "early."

I can remember driving around some of the mine patches in Fayette County
on summer evenings back in the 1980s.  Kids running around in bare feet
and underwear in front of unpainted shacks.  In other places the mine
patch homes, once all like peas in a pod, had been brightened with
colored aluminum siding and the insides improved with plumbing ... but
not all of them.  And then there was the filling station in Allison
which couldn't pump gasoline on a summer evening because of vapor lock
problem (the locals knew it and the owner wasn't inclined to spend any
money).  Then there is the leaning house in Lester Wismer's picture at
Hitchinson in 1950 ... it remains occupied and it still leans in 2002. 
Having spent 50+ years in Lancaster County, where we build hundreds of
houses from $100 to $500 every year on speculation that they will sell,
it is hard to put myself into the Fayette County economy.

Perhaps this malaise also helped West Penn.  Had the economy been
bustling, there would have been a lot more automobiles and a lot more
drivers.      

ROGER Jenkins wrote:
> 
> Well  Fred you are probably more right than I on all that you wrote . Of
> course the CERA also wrote that a general recession occured in Fayette
> County which also played heck with the West Penn ridership .
>        They did modernize their equipment by one-manning the cars and
> installing front right doors to make it work . The track locations did
> not help them in the cities but they could not afford to change anything
> . The video scenes of cars leaving and arriving at  Connellsville was an
> eye opener to me to see autos moving over to the opposite side of the
> street to let a car come out on the wrong side of it . Todays drivers
-- Trailing quotes stripped by Listar --