[PRCo] Re: "sawmills"

[Fred Schneider]

Harold:

Were you in Kenosha on August 18th?  I thought I might have seen you.  
Or your double?

And for all of you:

                  here are some of my railfan opinions from the recent 
six-week-long odessy:  Opinions are in order visited ... I note that 
most of the negatives are up front and most positives are later on.  
Professional comments are welcome.  

Cleveland:  Stopped to ride the lake front extension of the former 
Shaker Rapid.  Very little business on a weekday.  Built to revitalize 
the lake shore and serve the museums.  Doesn't work well.   Shaker 
Heights is not the same place I remember from 1959 or 1969 or 1983.  
Herb Brannon can add his comments. 

Chicago:  We stopped to see and ride the subway from the Loop to Midway 
Airport.  Impressive loads and high speeds.  Serves a part of the city 
previously without high speed transit.  Some of us would not find the 
neighborhoods warm and friendly.  Also went through the Skokie Shops and 
had lunch with Walter Keevil of CTA.

Kenosha:  Interesting for those who like PCC cars painted in strange 
colors.  Intended to serve a lot of new condominiums and the train 
station.  I didn't see anything resembling heavy loads.  There is also 
some sentiment toward extending it a few miles west to an Indian 
casino.  Harold G can fill us in. 

Minneapolis looks like it is going to be a worthwhile investment.  Cars 
are really classy.  Middle class neighborhoods.  It may be a lot slower 
to build up than other cities.  I never saw any exceptional loads, not 
even in the rush hours.  The airport may be the real draw and that 
wasn't open yet. 

Tacoma:  I don't understand why anyone would build a trolley line 
connecting a train station with downtown when they are not permitted to 
run inbound commuter trains.  They run a _free_ service, using two Skoda 
cars out of a fleet of three, seven days a week connecting parking lots 
at a stadium with parking lots downtown.  Load factors are around 50%.  
Weird.  This is a great example of treating transit the same as police 
and fire protection. 

Seattle's dockside line was nice ... had never seen it before.  Also a 
chance to eat seafood again at Ivar's restaurant.  I note that the line 
is in jeopardy because the carbarn is on land needed for a park.  The 
crew we had attempted to short turn the car early for a smoke break and 
were visibly upset to find that not everyone agreed to not being taken 
where they paid to go.  And when we got there, the conductor told us in 
clear English not to waste her time in getting off the car. Public 
relations at its best.  Within seconds a butt was hanging out of her 
mouth.  But it is a neat little operation. 

Portland's Interstate Avenue line looks like it will settle in to be a 
useful line.  But what else would one expect in Portland.  It has to be 
the local mentality.  Downtown is still a destination where people go to 
shop, to be entertained, to eat.  They actually have department stores 
with display windows.  Remember them?  Maybe I'm missing something, but 
it [Portland] looks like a neat place to live. 

Sacramento's South Line is much busier than I expected.  And so are all 
the other lines in Sacramento.  A considerable amount of traffic has 
built up over the last decade.  And the line to the east has been 
extended two more stations since 1992.  Folsom (remember Johnny Cash's 
tune on Folsom Prison) is the ultimate destination.   The used San Jose 
cars were in the yard, still not repainted. 

San Francisco?  Amazing to see construction on 3rd Street to recreate 
the Market Street Railway #16 line that was abandoned in 1941.  And it 
probably will haul people.  How can you go wrong in a city with 700,000 
people squeezed into about 40 square miles.. (Rhetorical, no question 
mark)  We also rode the BART extension to the airport. 

San Jose?  The northwest line has been cut to a car every 30 minutes (I 
think it was about 10 when it first opened).  The new route to Alum Rock 
runs nearly empty cars about every ten minutes.  One of the transit 
police described the east side of San Jose as the worst part of town but 
I think there might have been some prejudice in his heart.  I would say 
middle class to lower middle class and heavily ethnic.  There is a huge 
mall in Milpitis on the line but it didn't seem to have a lot of traffic 
coming or going. 

Los Angeles?  I hear that the new Gold Line to Pasadena and beyond (the 
old Santa Fe mainline once trod by the Super Chief, the Chief, the El 
Capitan and the motor car to San Bernardino) moves about 20,000 people a 
day.  They've  now awarded the contract for the 9.6 kilometer extension 
into East Los Angeles.  That end should haul like gang busters.  I 
suspect, however, that the lack of a good downtown distribution system 
will handicap the line, which now ends upstairs by the train platforms 
at Union Station instead of convenient to the Red Line subway several 
flights down.  The connection is similar to a person coming entering 
30th St. Station, Philly, on Amtrak and needing to get down into the 
30th St. station of the subway.  Hard to photograph ... maybe the best 
picture would be the old Santa Fe bridge over Arroyo Seco and the 
Pasadena Freeway if you can find out how to get there without walking on 
the freeway.  The portion of the line in the middle of the Foothills 
Freeway is also nice, if you have a helicopter.  There are several great 
views in Pasadena where apartment buildings are being built over the 
tracks.   The whole LAMTA system moves about 210 rail passengers a day 
plus the railroad commuters on Metrolink. 

The heritage line in San Pedro is worth a visit ... two reconcocted 
Pacific Electric 500s running as a commercial public transit operation.  
The operator is a group of transit consultants under the Herzog name. 

San Diego?  The fleet has aged ... much of it is up to the midlife 
overhaul point.  It is a huge fleet.  You guys need to see it.  Much of 
the paint has faded (those who liked Pittsburgh in the 1960s would 
understand), but in San Diego much of the fading is due to chemicals 
used to remove graffiti.   Two years ago I saw the Santee line ending in 
the middle of the desert.  Today it ends in the middle of a shopping 
center ... it is a challenge to get the trolley with the right store 
fronts.  The connection between Mission San Diego stop and El Cajon on 
the east line looks like it could be ready to open in a few months ... 
rail is done and catenary is mostly up... some great curving bridges and 
a short subway.    I was told by a supervisor that many trips run late 
due to loading handicapped riders (remember when Washington DC could not 
open the busiest subway station in 1976 because of two handicapped 
people a day?).  I suggested that maybe the schedules need to be 
adjusted????  The answer was, it will be done after the green line opens 
(i.e. the line from Old Town to El Cajon will be broken off the line 
from San Ysidro and renamed green. Sneaked onto a parking garage upper 
deck on the Old Town line ... just off the end of the airport runway.  
The vertical clearance with the wheels down on the landing jets seemed 
to be somewhere between 30 and 125 feet ... I'm glad I'm not a pilot 
landing there.  But it did make for interesting pictures of light rail 
cars.  If I had stayed long enough I might just have gotten a jet and an 
LRV in the same picture.  (I didn't want to stay around long enough to 
have someone enforce the NO VIEWING signs. 

Houston has a VERY IMPRESSIVE light rail operation.  Sort of like the 
first line in San Diego which was built in the right corridor.  Weekday 
patronage is in the high 30,000 to low 40,000 range with an all-time 
peak day exceeding 60,000.  Weekends, of course, are lower but headways 
are half as often.  I saw crush loads on Saturday evenings and 50% loads 
on Sunday about lunch time.  Why so busy?  It connects Houston College, 
Rice University, three or four hospitals, the stadium that replaced the 
Astrodome, a major park and zoo, and downtown.  In other words, it goes 
somewhere.  We had a late dinner downtown on Saturday evening with Rich 
Krisak, the Senior Manager of Rail Operations, who told us that it was 
only beginning to get crowded at 9 PM.   The accidents?  They had the 
59th on the Sunday I was there.  Why?  I blame it on Texas traffic signs 
and signals which show limited parallels to U. S. and International 
signage conventions.  You have to be from Texas to know that two red 
lights somewhere near the left turn lane mean no left turn and that they 
overrule the green lights in the same intersection.

New Orleans?  The rebuilt Canal line is great if you are too young to 
remember the old Canal line.  But Canal was one of those lines which 
probably never should have been abandoned.  The new line uses about 25 
cars.  The old one scheduled 50 cars in the peak.  The new line is 
bogged down by tourists asking questions  ... so slow that I watched 
motormen (-women) get up, walk to the other side of the fare box, and 
feed the dollar into it because it was faster than explaining.  The old 
route connected all the other bus and rail lines in the city ... it was 
almost a moving sidewalk  I need to study the map to see how well this 
new service might do the same thing.  If there was ever a route that I 
think needs to go back to two-man cars, it would be Canal.  Conductors 
might just double the productivity of the fleet.  It was strange riding 
in a 1915 style car body with wooden seats but with air-conditioning and 
resilient wheels, rubber chevron springs in the trucks, AC motors and 
control.  The one thing I learned on this trip about AC motors was that 
their acceleration rate is linear almost to the maximum speed.  A PCC 
went to 15 mph by the other side of the intersection, 25 in a city 
block, 42 in a mile.  But those AC cars walk right up to 25 mph on Canal 
Street at a constant rate.  (And the AC cars in Houston are governed to 
66 mph, are allowed 40, and I saw 45 with almost a flat acceleration 
rate all the way to the top. 

Oh yes, we also went to Nelson BC.  For those unfamiliar, this is a two 
car operation using two former out buildings or chicken coups rebuilt as 
streetcars.  One is former Nelson 23, ex ex Cleveland Railway.  The 
other was a British Columbia Electric Birney, either used in North 
Vancouver or Victoria.  The east end of the line sits on top of an old 
trolley loop, but the route stays on the south side of the CPR and goes 
no where near the old city trolley line.  Most humorous part is watching 
the cars dodge automobiles in a shopping center parking lot ... I think 
I might have several passable pictures of 23 with a Wal*Mart store 
behind it.  For those who have never been there, Nelson sits in the 
Kootenay Mountains in southern British Columbia and is easier to reach 
from the U. S. than from other parts of Canada.  I wanted to go there in 
2002 and backed off because it would add an extra day between Calgary 
and Vancouver just to get there.  The railroads also came from the south 
except for a lake car float to the north to the CP mainline.  Scenery is 
majestic.  And there is a slightly longer way to get in from Idaho using 
a ferry boat across a very wide river (call it a lake at that point) 
which is worth the extra hour or so.  The town itself lives on tourists 
... looks like a commercial time warp. 

Museums?  We stopped at both of the Minnesota Transportation Museum 
trolley museums in the Minneapolis area.  They always put on a good 
show.  The one by Lake Como is now open summer evenings and they 
actually get crowds.  The other one to the west in Excelsior has an 1893 
Laclade car ... a real peach.  They run Thursday afternoons because the 
adjacent farmers' market is open that day.  And they also get crowds.  
These people understand marketing and location.  We left down before we 
got a chance to ride their steamboat at Excelsior (Saturdays and Sundays 
only). 

Rio Vista Junction?  Bruce and I went there the same day that the ERA 
convention swamped the place.  Of course every car that moved was out.  
They go on my list as one of the museums with enough perspective of 
their customer market and of the future to survive.  I'm not sure they 
need 20 plus miles of track but it doesn't decay as fast in the desert 
as it does in Pennsylvania.   Oh yes, there were enough transportation 
department workers from the Baltimore Streetcar Museum there that day 
that we had a group picture.  

That's it in a nutshell.   The chief record keeper reports that I put 
9,700 miles on my car.  It still runs just as nice as it did as 123,000 
when I left home ... a tribute to Folksvagen engineering.   Actually, 
this was the first time I crossed the nation with any car that it didn't 
find its way into a repair shop at some point in the trip. 


Fred Schneider

Harold Geissenheimer wrote:

>Hello to Fred and every one
>
>Glad to have Fred back to set the records and
>history correctly.
>
>About "sawmills"  I never heard of that expression.
>Wonder where it came from.
>
>Sometimes a fan hears a word from a motorman
>and regards it as the 100% truth.  That was a
>problem with the old Railroad magazine Electric
>Lines which was often full of motorman rumors.
>
>Harold Geissenheimer
>
>Harold Geissenheimer 
>
>
>
>  
>