[PRCo] Re: why is it so quiet?

[Fred Schneider]

The hardest thing for me to appreciate is that I rode those two interurban
lines 50 years ago.  And we all know what 13 year old kids are like.  My
mother demanded that I eat lunch before going to Washington.  So rather than
wait a day, I ate and then took off.  And it was a miserably cloudy day ...
March 30th.  If I'd had any brains I would have waited until the next day, but
kids of that age are seldom blessed with wisdom.   The next day was sunny and
I rode to Charleroi and back.  Then I had nothing to do the rest of the week
because I'd spent the money.  On both trips I found the luggage rack behind
the motorman the chair of choice even if my legs did dangle.  And the track
was a whole lot worse then than it is on PTM today (including County Home
Siding with its current slow order).  One motorman remarked that the railways
quit spending any money on maintenance out there as soon as they filed the
abandonment petition.   I guess for the motormen it was akin to having a Saint
Bernard breathing on their necks.    Even more difficult for me is recognizing
that I was nine when the 1700s came and now they are museum pieces.

And sadly there were all sorts of questions that I didn't have enough
perspective to ask in 1953. And back then there were people who could have
answered them.  There was one man still working in the Homewood engineering
office who remembered riding the Pittsburgh double-deck cars to school.   He
claimed the teenagers would ride on the upper deck ... the fellows would get
the cars swaying until a young lady would fall on top of one of them!  Ah.
Youth and hormones!  Or perhaps just vivid memories.

"Dennis F. Cramer" wrote: