[PRCo] Re: Interurban track remains/ row

[Fred Schneider]

And I'll toss in another wrinkle.  The chance that pictures would be taken by
railfans or not taken depended to an incredible degree on whether the man with
the interest was able to find other people to share that interest.  If he could
not, chances are trolleys did not become a hobby.   It was that friendship
ingredient that resulted in the almost universal use of the 116 - 616 film
format in the hobby, and until Lucius Beebe and Charlie Clegg came along, an
almost complete expenditure of film on stationary engines (right side please,
rods down)  and cars (rear views are forbidden).  I loved the refreshing
artistry of Philip Hastings but I can still remember the bitching and
complaining from local railfans that Trains magazine had the audacity to publish
his work.  The presence of an organized body of railfans helped to preserve
history but it also prevented any change from the ideals of the whole!

The organization of the railfan hobby into groups of people happened in
Pittsburgh later than in many other areas of the country.  For example, the
National Railway Historical (or Hysterical) Society was formed in 1935 by merger
of the Interstate Trolley Club, with most members in New York City and New
Jersey, and the Lancaster Railway and Locomotive Historical Society.  The LR&LHS
existed at least as early as 1934 and perhaps 1933.  We had three local people
photographing the suburban trolley routes in the Lancaster area before the major
purge early in 1932, and Bill Moedinger was doing it from the driver's seat of a
1931 Buick with a 616 size Graflex SLR.  All three of those men are still living
but one is in a nursing home and an other is in a retirement home (I don't know
whether Bill is still capable of living on his own). There were other older men
to lend encouragement.  Leon Franks, a one time editor of the NRHS Bulletin,
passed away in the 1970s.  Harry Baughey, a high school music teacher and
perhaps leader of pack, died in 1957 (He remembered when the cars first rolled
past his house in 1895).  Without having a group of people (and Railroad Man's
Magazine's classified advertisement), there probably would have been no
pictures.   There is a very extensive collection of railfan photos taken in
eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey and eastern and southern New York.  I own all
of the Frank Goldsmith negatives ... he was taking pictures as early as 1935.
Howard Johnston's file, dating back to the early 1930s, is owned by the North
Jersey NRHS.  Joe Saitta has the Jeff Winslow file.  I have one picture of a
meeting in a home in the New York area in 1934 with Jim Shuman, Frank Goldsmith,
Jeff Winslow, Machine Gun and Bad Man Johnson, and several others ... all very
young men then.

Now if we go to Pittsburgh, organized railfan clubs date to about 1940.  There
was a local NRHS chapter and they owned a Pittsburgh Railways Jones trailer.
Then the war came, the trailer was scrapped, and the club disintegrated.
Sometime after the war the survivors began to get back together.  Bob Brown took
a handful of pictures in the late 1930s ... one he identified as the first Jones
car to be repainted without the front entrance sign on the dasher.  Charlie
Dengler took a lot of car pictures ... almost every vehicle that existed after
1938. But he missed most all of the 3400s, 3500s, most of the 4000s and 4100s,
and all of the trailers ... they lasted into the era of the eastern fans but not
long enough in the western end of the state.   While the easterners were taking
action pictures, those in Pittsburgh closed in on the car.  There were a lot of
western Pennsylvania lines that lasted long enough that, had they been in the
east, there would be hundreds of pictures taken by the fans.  As it is there are
none.  None on Johnstown's Windber interurban and it lasted until the 1936
flood.  Nothing on West Penn's Leechburg and Apollo line.  Only two pictures on
the Kittanning operation, taken with a borrowed box camera by Bob Gurley of
Utica, New York, when he went there to visit a friend.  West Penn's Allegheny
Valley Division is represented, outside of company official photos, by one Bob
Brown close-up at Aspinwall and a blurred picture that Dengler snapped of a car
entering a siding ... and that division lasted until 1937.  (By that time the
Lancaster group probably had approximately 15 members.)  The only later year
pictures on West Penn's McKeesport lines (their busiest division, by the way)
were car yard pictures of 200, 280s, 300s, and 298 and 208 on the Irwin line out
of McKeesport ... all taken by Charlie Dengler who stood so close to the car
that we have no record of the town.  The only later picture we've seen on West
Penn's route from Greensburg to New Stanton, Hunker, and Scottdale is one of two
700s passing at County Home Siding ... Steve Maguire came from one of the New
Jersey coastal cities and took that picture.

But be thankful.  If you had lived in the southern states there would be nothing
until the 1960s.  Look at the old NRHS directories and you will see places like
Augusta, Georgia with one or two members and no chapter.  Steve Maguire once
told me that he took a lot of pictures in the southeast because it was easy to
go there, probably because his wife and kids enjoyed it, and he got a lot of
good trading material that no one else had.  To this day, one of the largest
caches of trolleys in Mobile, New Bern, Atlanta, Birmingham, Chattanooga,
Knoxville, Nashville and other southern cities is that that Steve took.

John Swindler wrote:

> Don't most people, including railfans, work a Monday-Friday shift?  Which is
> another way of supporting Fred's last paragraph.
>
> JS
>
>

fws