[PRCo] TROLLEYS - A CASE IN POOR FINANCES

[Fred Schneider]

I'm not quite sure how to title this ... perhaps "Trolleys, a Great
Financial Investment for the Future....?"

Some numbers in which a few of you might have a small interest,
Pennsylvania statewide data gleaned from the annual reports of the
Pennsylvania Department of Internal Affairs annual reports from 1900
through 1950.

Over those 51 years all of the companies in the state earned $3.862
billion and managed to flow $3.908 billion, a bottom line loss after
dividends of 1.2 percent.   Put that in todays dollars ... earnings
would be in the order of magnitude of $150 billion and the overall
51-year loss somewhere between $15 and $20 billion.  The operating
ratio, however, averaged a rather respectable .72 but ranged from a low
of .50 in 1901 up to a high of .93 in 1949.  (For the less
knowledgeable, the operating ratio is operating expenses divided by
operating income.

There were some things I found quite intriguing ... the industry as a
whole became much more efficient over time.  In the first ten years of
the 20th century each man contributed to moving between 35,000 and
40,000 people in a year (annual fares divided by annual passengers).
That number rose steadily, exceeding 40,000 in 1908, passing 50,000 in
1918, beating 60,000 in 1924 ... hell, why waste time enumerating... in
WW2 when the industry couldn't get help, the statewide average
passengers per employee reached 91,623.   There is an anomaly in the
early 1940s traceable to Philadelphia Rapid Transit which suggests
(until further clarification) that somebody might have discovered that
the Broad and Ridge and Camden subways were being overlooked.

What was the peak year?  For employees it was 30,827 in 1923.
Passengers carried ...  1.840 billion passengers in 1920, or about 5
million a day.  I'm not exactly sure where my census data is at this
moment, but it occurs to me that there were about 8 million people in
the state in 1920 (there are over 12 million today).    If so, 40% of
the people in the state made a trolley round trip every day in 1920.