[PRCo] Re: The LVT Accident

[Fred Schneider]

Look for interspersed comments:

Harold Geissenheimer wrote:

> Fred and others
>
> Not Pittsburgh if you wish to delete
>
> I rode the LVT several times at the end of the war leaving Allentown in
> the late afternoon.  There was always a large crowd waiting at the Allentown station for
> the
> car to come  back from the barn.  The reason was jobs and sevicemen going back
> to Phila.  Like Wilkes Barre, Scranton and Hazleton, there was a large
> outward migration on Sunday evening.  I remember the Edwards Bus having
> to double head Sunday evening from Hazleton back to NY jobs.

Lester Wismer's comment applied to all hours, not just late afternoon.  And he was
comparing 1945 with 1950.   He grew up in Souderton, about one block from the car line.
His father Henry worked for the LVT before he opened an auto upholstery business in
Souderton.

>
>
>  The C&LE cars werefast  but I dont believe that they had good
> brakes for the speeds operated.  We frequently had to back up at stops!.

I remember a comment by Russ Jackson after he read a report on an Illinois Terminal
accident in which the brakes checked out OK but the motorman claimed the failed to work.
Russ remarked.  "Yes, the brakes failed to work .....  in the distance allocated for them
to work."

>
>
>   Lancaster was not well maintained and had a strike at the end of the war.

Not well maintained because about 1938 (and I've not read enough to find the exact date)
Conestoga Transportation Co.  announced a plan to convert the entire remaining rail system
to buses by 1942.  At that time they gave up on all unessential rail car and
infrastructure maintenance.  In 1938 the equipment look quite good.  Every car had been
painted in the last few years.  By 1942 the fleet was rather down in the mouth.  Almost
all of the new buses had been delivered and only three city routes and one suburban route
were running.  Then the ODT announced its authority.  CTC was forced to put two abandoned
lines back into service and keep all six until the end of the war..  When the shutdown
early in 1947 there was more rust than paint on some cars.  Of course, considering this
was a stock corporation and the stockholders deserved a return on investment, what they
did was the proper way to go.  The money they saved as returned in low fares ... there was
an increase from 7 cents to a dime (first zone) after the war, and the next increase
didn't happen until about 1960.   The strike?  There were actually two after the war ...
about a year apart.

Now, should you like to go back a few years and see what they looked like when the paint
was fresh, you need to look at the preserved Lancaster Birney car in Manheim.  We run it
every Sunday afternoon from the first Sunday in May until the business dries up in the
fall.  Other days by appointment.  I'm the superintendent of the Manheim Hysterical
Society's transportation department.  Therefore the appointment phone is my home phone ...
717 569-6791 (unlisted).