[PRCo] Re: OT:___1936--1937___PCC

[Fred Schneider]

It took a while to for the "everyone ...you such" to sink in.   Then I
chuckled.

Not all railfans have that posture against NCL.  I don't.  Ed doesn't.  George
Arnoux who worked for them didn't.  But a very disproportionate share feel
that NCL was bad because they were the ones in command when the trolleys left,
and they were partly owned by General Motors.

Certainly some managers were evil.  Others were not.  I really have no problem
with buying buses or tires from your owner.  Had Brill or Fitzjohn or Beaver
or Mack or White or Ford had the money to buy up trolley linees, they would
have no doubt expected the same allegiance.   And, of course, GM had a funding
arm to help out ... YCAC similar to GMAC which funded automobiles purchases.
GM ran their own bank.  (Not a whole lot different than your Sears charge card
in days of old.)

NCL was evil ... if you listen to the blabberings of Fred Schneider ...
because they got too good for their britches.  Other people didn't like being
put out of business by a top drawer competitor.  Kodak and Microsoft have had
similar problems.
Competition is the American way.  Penalizing a company for being too good is
also the American way.

The facts are simple.  Cars were more common than good roads in the early
years.  In 1890, or 1900, or 1910 we had roads of mud, which were impassable
in winter or spring.  Even plowing snow didn't start in Pennsylvania until
1918 when the federal government ordered that the National Pike and the
Lincoln Highway be kept open for defense purposes.  But as soon as the spring
rains started, even those roads turned back to mud and nothining moved on
them.  Once we had a critical mass of automobiles (I like the nuclear term),
we built "good roads".  In the 1920s we poured concrete as if it were coming
out of a bottomless cement mixer.  By 1930 most state-owned or maintained
roads were paved and most families had one car.  Think about that ... tens of
thousands of miles of concrete in ten years.  By 1949 the auto manufacturers
were trying to sell the wife a second car.  Today we expect every person in a
family age 16 and over to have their own car.   The trolley companies simply
were not going to compete.  Here in Lancaster, CTC was loosing money by 1923,
couldn't even borrow money for new trolleys in 1926 except from the local
natural gas purveyor which was its subsidiary, and was bankrupt in 1931.  Just
one example ... we can find all you want if you are interested in the wailings
of deprived widows whose husbands left them set for live with trolley stocks
and bonds.

In my "humble" opinion, I think the trolleys would have disappeared even
sooner had we not had a/ a Depression, and b/ a World War from 1942 to 1945.
I would have expected Baltimore and Pittsburgh to be all bus in the early
1950s.  Maybe not quite that soon because we had one other factor to consider
... in 1929 distribution of wages so greatly favored the wealthy that the so
called middle class had bought all the refrigerators and autos they could
afford.

Was NCL going to survive as a trolley operator?  Not in a free market economy.

OK guys, jump on me.   fws

Derrick J Brashear wrote:

> On Mon, 28 Oct 2002, Fred Schneider wrote:
>
> > Sad that the railfans are so determined that National City Lines was
> > bad.  They cannot understand that, no matter who owned Baltimore
> > Transit, the company would be running buses and probably not on a much
> > different timetable than NCL had.
>
> "Everyone sucks" is not a defense against "you suck".
>
-- Trailing quotes stripped by Listar --