[PRCo] Spring Hill recollections

[Bob Rathke]

I want to share the following e-mail that I received this week from my Uncle Bob who lives in Greensburg.  He grew up in the same house on Spring Hill that I did, but 20 years earlier.  The house was just one block from the end of the 5-Spring Hill trolley line.  He also liked rail subjects and photography, and he's given me hundreds of photos that he took in the 1930's and 40's.  He even took a few rolls of Kodachrome slide film in 1939, and the color in them is still good today. After he moved from the house in 1946, his sister (my mother) took over as family photographer, and by the mid 50's that was my job.
My uncle started to work at West Penn Power in 1938, and retired in 1987.  Although much of his collections disappeared (see below), he did give me that 1929 hand-painted West Penn Railways map that once hung in the company's headquarters, and that I now have here.  A scan of part of the large canvas map is posted at  http://www.rr-fallenflags.org/lightrail/west-penn-elec-map.jpg

His recent e-mail follows.

Bob 9/24/05

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Bob,  

In my teens I did a lot of fishing with street car motormen and spent a lot of time in the Millvale Carbarn "bulling" and taking pictures of the old orange and yellow cars. I had two shoe boxes full of those photos and one box full of photos of the big West Penn Railways cars that I took after I started working there.

I also took a lot of pictures of the two-ended trolleys on route #5.  I helped the motormen switch from front to back at the end of the line. Put the trolley up and move the control handles to the front, and pull down the trolley. For all that work I got to ride free any time up to when I went in the Service in 1942. Some of the old motormen were still around when I came home in 1945, and I still rode free.

I also worked after school at the Fulton Theater downtown and I could go in free to any theater in town.  When I got home in 1945, all my items stored in the attic were gone - all the fishing pictures, boxes of street car pictures, my full set of Topps 1939 Pirate baseball cards, my merit badges from the Scouts, etc.

Uncle Bob