[PRCo] Re: Sideways.......

[Fred Schneider]

Seating has always been a tradeoff between comfort and capacity.

Pittsburgh apparently believed in capacity over comfort.  The seating
capacity was not significantly altered with longitudinal seats in front
of the center door, but in vastly added to the number of standees you
could pack in during the rush hours.  Baltimore cars sat 56 in all cross
seats while a Pittsburgh car sat 54 ... only a loss of two seated
passengers.   But if I sat down with a floor plan of each, and little
cutouts of standing passengers, I'll bet I could squeeze twice as many
standees into the Pittsburgh car.

In the off peak we run as many cars as necessary to give every one a
seat.  No big deal, the cars are there waiting for the next rush hour.
There is no added amortization and depreciation expense.  .But remember
the name of the game was to maximize passenger loads during the rush
hour because many of those cars were only going to make two to four
trips a day and would sit idle in a car yard for 18 to 20 hours every
day earning nothing.   The entire cost of the cars had to be covered by
only 2 to 4 hours duty.    Only a fool spends $2 million (today's
dollars) for a car to run only in the rush hour and tries to give
everyone a seat.  (Some government types are fools.)   If this doesn't
make sense to you, look in a subway car on Lexington Avenue in New York
at 5:15 in the afternoon.   Simple numbers $2,000,000 divided by $600
from seated passengers in a day divided by 365 days in a year = 9 years
just to get the revenue needed to buy the car.  Oh, you say I forgot
power, labor, office expenses, taxes, repair parts?  Better change that
9 years to 75 years.   We forgot something else.  That is the idiotic
concept that people who ride in the rush hour deserve a reduced fare
(tickets, tokens, weekly passes) because they give us so much money
loosing business.   Remember that trolley companies did everything that
they could to maximize off peak riding ... movie theater adverts on
cars, company spawned amusement parks, Sunday Only car stops in
Pittsburgh to serve churches and cemeteries.  The real money came by
filling up a car for one more trip in the off peak.

And if you find this offensive, remember that there was only one reason
for building a trolley line.  To make money for the investors.  Hauling
passengers was not the reason for building the line ... it was only what
we thought we could make money doing.  (Again, government types have
distorted this concept to a scheme where they think we can get people
out of automobiles to haul them to a downtown which is becoming a non
destination.)

But you have forgotten that not all Pittsburgh PCBs had longitudinal
seats in front of the center doors..  Car 1600, and the entire 1700
series had only cross seats, which reduced the capacity to 50 (49 on the
interurban cars because of the luggage racks).  This allowed everyone to
face forward and minimized the discomfort to passengers in side seats
during acceleration and braking.  It may have increased the standee
capacity even more, because the clear floor width (not blocked by knees
and feet) was even wider.

I remember watching a man running a 5500 on Perrysville Avenue, who made
a stop inbound at Federal St. and North Avenue.  When it came time to
move, there were still so many people in the car that he had to lean out
the front door and look back along the outside  to see if it was safe to
close the center doors.  And you wondered why the center door switch was
on the above the right front window?  Now you know.

For Ken Josephson and others who might be interested:  It is my
understanding that the Chicago, North Shore and Milwaukee was hauling
tremendous loads when they went out of business in the 1960s ... perhaps
more people than they had since World War II.  So why did they go out of
business?  I was told that it had something to do with the simple fact
that declines in off peak riding had been more than replaced by gains in
rush hour riding.  While they never bought another passenger car after
the Electroliners in 1941, they still had the added cost of more and
more trainmen who had to be paid to work short days, greater substation
capacity,  possibly higher demand charges on power bills, and a need to
maintain cars that could have been scrapped if the passenger load had
not shift to the rush hour.  .

Jim Holland wrote:

> Good Morning!
>
> http://206.103.49.193/pitts/htm/pitt227.htm shows sidways seating
> on both sides of car common to  ALL  PRCo  PCC__Air--Cars as
> delivered from St.Louis Car Company.    First cross seats for
> both sides is just behind the center doors.
>
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>
> Jim
>
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