[PRCo] Re: TROLLEYS - A CASE IN POOR FINANCES

[Edward H. Lybarger]

It would be good if we all substituted "grossed" for "earned" here. Today,
"earnings" refers to profits, not gross receipts as the transit companies
used it.



[Edward H. Lybarger] -----Original Message-----
From: Fred Schneider [mailto:fschnei at supernet.com]
Sent: Wednesday, November 06, 2002 9:49 PM
To: PITTSBURGH-RAILWAYS at DEMENTIA.ORG; J_SWINDLER at HOTMAIL.COM;
TWG at pulsenet.com; Vigrass, Bill; sbecker at patrolley.org; Russell E Jackson
Subject: TROLLEYS - A CASE IN POOR FINANCES




  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.