[PRCo] Re: 44-KNOXVILLE

[Fred Schneider]

Paste from Boris:  PRR station wasn't closed in late 60s as Bob Rathke pointed
out but PRR, the
company itself dissolved in 1968. Thus no reason for PRCo streetcars to
carry PRR destination sign.
But the other question still remains unanswered - date when was the 44
downtown loop changed. And reason.  End of Paste from Boris.

The merger of the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central Railroad and
the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad to form the Penn Central
Transportation Co. in 1968 had nothing to do, Boris, with the dropping of the
PRR Station name from streetcar destination sign rolls.  The fact is the cars
were not run there because no one chose to ride them.   Pittsburgh Railways
Company was a privately-owned stockholder corporation that needed to make money
in order to attract capital.

The station facility was and still is there.  Trains stopped in Pittsburgh every
year.  The number of trains diminished year by year.  Pittsburgh had a very
extensive commuter service ... probably every half hour on the main line east
and perhaps hourly or less on the other routes.  The Pennsy ran east to
Greensburg and Derry, south to Brownsville, southwest to Washington, west to
some place on the St. Louis Line, west on the Chicago line, northeast on both
sides of the Allegheny River.  Without a complete stack of timetables, I cannot
trace it year to year.  However, I can with 100% assurance state that a
rudimentary service ... one in and out each day from Schenley and Kiski Jct.,
something down toward Emsworth, and some morning and afternoon mainline east
trains were running into early 1964 and they continued until the Pennsylvania
Railroad determined that PAT was lying about providing subsidies.  Those trains
quit late in 1964.  At that time the PRR still had a reasonably strong New York
- Chicago, New York St. Louis, New York - Cincinnati and New York or
Philadelphia to Pittsburgh service.  The PRR revenues were enhanced by a lot of
shipments on passenger trains in cars owned by the Railway Express Agency.
Example:  in the middle 1960s the St. Louisan (trains 32 and 33) was still
running ... but once Railway Express Agency was dissolved, that train went from
two coaches and 20 or so express cars to two dirty 40-year old coaches and no
headend cars.   By the time Penn Central came along, the service was largely
unused.  I think that, until Amtrak (1971), Penn Central was still running at
least two trains a day from New York to Chicago, the Spirit of St. Louis,
perhaps the Penn-Texas to and from St. Louis, and I think there was still one
New York and Pittsburgh day train.  I came out of Philly one night in 1969 on
the Pittsburgh Night Express, so I know it was still running that late.

With the formation of Amtrak, Pittsburgh (Union Station) still had one St. Louis
and New York train named the National Limited (the old B&O name) and a New York
and Chicago train named the Broadway Limited.  The St. Louis train disappeared
sometime in the middle 1970s ... it was a pitiful excuse for a train.  The line
across Indiana and Illinois was so woebegone that it was simply peppered with 10
mph slow orders.  In 1974 I drove to the west coast ... left Lancaster after
dinner one evening.  Got to Columbus and checked into a Holiday Inn.  Got up the
next morning, had breakfast, and got back on I-70.  Somewhere out near
Effingham, Illinois the next afternoon, I overtook the previous night's National
Limited lurching along at 20 mph across Illinois.  Remember, it ran all night
and I had eight hours sleep in a motel.  I think it was gone by 1975.  I think
that the day train from Pittsburgh to Philly may have been removed from the
schedules in 1971 but I know it was later restored.

There always was a train station of some sort at Liberty, 11th and Grant Sts. in
Pittsburgh and there still is. The question is simply, Boris, what is Union
Station.   The office building was turned into an apartment and a prefab
building (I've never seen it but it was described as a mobile home by one
person) was put up behind the old office / station building by Amtrash.  That
was mentioned in one of the e-mails I read today.

And what connection did the PRC 44 Knoxville - PRR Station  and 7 Charles St. -
PRR Station lines have to do with whether the station was open or not, and the
answer is none.   It also had nothing to do with who ran the trains.  Looping
those lines at the station, especially route 7 which went blocks out of its way,
had nothning to do with the presence of a station.  It had to do with the number
of passengers who cared to ride to the station.  This isn't Europe.  By the
1960s there was no longer any need to route certain trolley routes to the
station.  The precious few people who had to go there could transfer to an 87 or
88 car or a Butler Street bus or perhaps a Spring Hill bus.  The places people
went had become the US Steel Building, Gateway Center, the Koppers Building, the
PPG Tower more recently, but no one was going to the station to catch a train.
You don't run a trolley every 20 minutes to a train station to service four
trains a day.  And you don't waste money changing destination signs from PRR
STATION to PC STATION to AMTRAK STATION ... you do that when the signs rolls
become torn and need to be replaced.

If you have not had this next point explained to you yet, it is time.  European
cities are much more densely settled than American cities.  You folks started
out with horses or mules or feet.  The butcher, the baker, and the candlestick
maker had to all be within walking distance.  Cities with broad avenues such as
Karlsruhe, Germany are exceptions to the rule.  It is precisely the opposite
over here.  Only Boston's Hub and Lower Manhattan, New York City, resemble the
mold of old European cities.  (Boston goes back to the 1600s.)  The remainder
had much wider streets because the land was there and undeveloped.  Most of our
southern and western cities were developed from the beginning for use by
automobiles.  Our two largest western cities only go back 150 years.  Most of
the development in the Los Angeles area goes back only to 1942 ... the cities
around it were just rural towns before that.  Hollywood was absorbed into Los
Angeles only in 1918.  San Jose, California had about 60,000 people when the
trolley lines were abandoned before World War II and close to 1 million people
today.  We grew up with the motor car or machine and we loved it.  We built our
cities to accommodate it.  Or so we thought.  It is strangling us now but we are
unwilling to admit it.   The result is, a city of 50,000 people in the United
States takes as much space as a city of 100,000 or maybe even 125,000 in the
same space (same number of square kilometers) in Europe.  The City of Pittsburgh
maxed out at about 650,000 people and now has fewer than 400,000 residents.  If
it were in Germany, there would be 2 million people in the same space.  The
differences in population density does a lot to explain why transit works in
Europe and does not work the same way here.

Our term Union Station, meaning a united facility used by several
privately-owned railroads, bears no resemblance to the European concept of a
Hauptbahnhof or Gare Centrale.  It never did.  It is closer in concept to the
stations in London, where each railroad had its own station ... and now merge
two or three of them into one but leave the others. (Same thought works for
Berlin or Paris.)   Union simply means a facility for more than one railroad.
And in the case of Pittsburgh it means a union of the Pennsylvania Railroad and
two or three of its subsidiary companies.

It has been a long time since it mattered if public transport served our train
stations in the United States except for 4th and Townsend in San Francisco, Los
Angeles Union Passenger Terminal, Central and Union and Randolph St. stations in
Chicago, North and South stations in Boston, Washington Union Station, New
York's Grand Central and Penn Station station, and Philadelphia.  And since the
Center City Commuter Tunnel was built in Philadelphia, the railroad has become
its own distributor system, with every train serving three downtown stations so
there is now little relevance for the bus and subway connections.

This can be summed up with a simple point about how Americans get around.  City
buses are for the poor.  Buses are for those who have no money to buy a car.
They are for those people who have had their licenses suspended for drunken
driving (if they care about following the court's rules).  In some cases
teenagers may use them, but most demand that their mothers drive them around.
City streetcars (in Philadelphia) are also for the poor.  The subways are mostly
for the poor and lower-middle class, especially in older cities like Chicago,
Boston and Philadelphia.  We maintain this infrastructure largely for the poor
and elderly; the rest of us have steel boxes on rubber tires.  Suburban commuter
trains are middle and upper-middle class means of conveyance, but the jobs need
to be near the train stations.  If there is any distance to go after they get
off the train, then they drive into the city in their automobiles.  They do not
use buses to get from the station to work.  Most of the very wealthy probably
stay out of the trains and use their own cars ... if you can afford a Cadillac,
Lincoln, Mercedes or Rolls, you don't fret about paying to park it.  You will
have your own assigned parking space.  I would have to go back and research the
numbers (and you can do it too on www.census.gov), but I think the 2000 census
shows about 99 percent of the U. S. people using automobiles to commute to work
and 1 percent using public transportation.  Some of the newer light-rail and
subway projects are more like railroads in the sense that they reach into the
middle-class suburbs, and as a result they haul disproportionate rush hour
loads.

And this is not what railfans talk about.

Fred Schneider

Boris Cefer wrote:

> > > Jim Holland wrote:
> >
> >
> > From the latter URL above Boris had written to me asking if the
> > PRR loop was terminated and 44-line cars looped from inbound to
> > outbound by making a left from Smithfield onto Liberty.    I had
> > thought the same for same reasons  --  the station sign being
> > blanked out.
> > .......But, from responses, PRR-station was not closed but was
> > still operational.    So.......
>
> .......So, seems to me I have found an answer!
> PRR station wasn't closed in late 60s as Bob Rathke pointed out but PRR, the
> company itself dissolved in 1968. Thus no reason for PRCo streetcars to
> carry PRR destination sign.
> But the other question still remains unanswered - date when was the 44
> downtown loop changed. And reason.
>
> Boris