[PRCo] Re: Electric Railway Accidents

[mtoytrain at bellsouth.net]

Fred and all other contributors!

Thanks for the "exciting and endless" postings related to accidents with interurbans, I have printed and added to my Trolley Files.

thanks gentlemen!

PS - I got a question,  i never had to go, but on the interurban runs from Pittsburgh to Washington
and Charleroi, what if you have to use the facility?   what did you do?   Jump in the woods?
On my recent visit to PTM, Mark Mcguire and myself got on the T to go downtown, and boy did I
have an experience, thankful for a Sandwich shop near the Library station, or it would have been 
a disaster for me!    So where did one go when riding the interurbans?

This should lead to interesting responses.

Jerry M
> 
> From: Fred Schneider <fwschneider at comcast.net>
> Date: 2005/09/25 Sun PM 09:33:50 EDT
> To: pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org
> Subject: [PRCo] Electric Railway Accidents
> 
> I hope this will answer Jerry and with apologies to Bob Dietrich:
> 
> 
> 
> 'Most of you are aware of the U. S. Census Bureau ... those people  
> who count noses every tenth year.  Perhaps very few are aware that  
> the same people also did industrial enumerations in the past.   The  
> Electric Railway industry was done in a series of volumes (about 12  
> inches of them) in 1890, 1902 and every 5 years to 1937.
> 
> The year 1917 is a good one to look at because the railway industry  
> had reached its peak and the automobile had not.   Most accidents,  
> therefore, would involve people and horses / buggies.   Nationwide  
> there were 2,573 fatalities of which 311 were employees.  An addition  
> 141,854 sustained non-fatal injuries, and 20,561 of those were  
> employees.   What was the chance of an accident?  Well, nationwide  
> the cars ran off 2.139 billion revenue miles in 1917.   The chances  
> of a fatality were 0.1 per million car miles for an employee and 1.1  
> for someone other than an employee.   I have seen other data that  
> shows that most of the accidents did not involve passengers.   
> Instead, pedestrians and children hanging on to cars were more likely  
> to be hurt than passengers.
> 
> Twenty-three of the deaths were in Pennsylvania, so odds are that  
> both Pittsburgh Railways and West Penn contributed.   Ooooo.   Wasn't  
> 1917 the year that PRC rolled a car at Smithfield and Carson in the  
> Christmas shopping rush?
> The Pennsylvania averages were a little higher than some states for  
> that year but not really out of range for the east.
> 
> +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> 
> Lets go back to 1907 ... the average killed per 100 million  
> passengers carried (note we've changed the rules of game here) was  
> 7.4.   In 1902 it was 5.6.   But for steam railroads it was 69.8 and  
> 53.1 for the same years.
> 
> 
> If you want more detail, you can also look in the government  
> documents section of any good library.   I would suggest that most  
> state libraries in capital cities might have it in the federal  
> documents section.   If you cannot find these volumes anywhere else  
> on inter library loan, the state library in Harrisburg has it on  
> microfilm (I know, I paid for it).   PTM has the master for that  
> microfilm.
> 
> +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> 
> By the 1930s the problem had become blind motorists instead of blind  
> horses.   I inherited an album of clippings that Ben Hershey in  
> Manheim kept, lamentably without dates.   It was just filled with  
> newspaper accounts of trolley versus motor vehicle accidents.    A  
> picture of a Birney car on North Duke Street aimed at the Court House  
> after a truck took aim at it.   A man who stopped for the Lititiz  
> interurban car (or so the motorman thought) and then pulled out right  
> in front of it ... the testimony of the driver of the car before he  
> died exonerated the motorman.  There was one at a crossing in 1931 on  
> the Lincoln Highway on the Coatesville line at Slaymakers that went  
> to court --- the trolley violated the rights of the automobile  
> driver.   It went on and on and on.
> 
> One of the best known and most notorious here in eastern Pennsylvania  
> was an accident at Wood Siding on the Lehigh Valley Transit.  LVT's  
> Libert Bell Route (or Philadelphia Division) had been continuously  
> upgraded until 1912 and had become a pretty fast piece of interurban  
> railroad on which electric cars could compete to some degree.  (The  
> LVT ran from Allentown to 69th St. in 2 hours, then add in the subway  
> to center city Philadelphia; the Reading locals to Allentown took  
> 1:40 to 1:56.)  This was a point to point average speed including  
> stops of over 20 miles per hour, most commendable for any interurban.  
> There was a high school principal who crossed the trolley tracks at  
> Wood Siding, with the crossing flashers working, right in front of an  
> interurban limited, killing, I think, his daughter and one of her  
> girl friends.  A local friend of mine told me it was thrown out of  
> court two or three times.   This happened before the C&LE  
> lightweights came to the LVT -- his car got slammed by either a 1912  
> wooden Jewett or a 1918 steel car.
> 
> I think the reason West Penn accidents are not well known is  
> simple ... the area was pretty much isolated from the rest of the  
> world.  There was a group of railfans (Jim Shuman, Al Pitman  
> (remember Pitman model motors?, Bob Lewis (for many years the  
> publisher of Railway Age), and I think his brother Hans Lewis went to  
> see the West Penn in 1939 and the visit so surprised the company that  
> E. R. Koser took a day away from his desk and drove these lads  
> around.   Nobody came there.  Then in 1941 the national convention of  
> the NRHS was held in Pittsburgh and it included a West Penn fantrip.   
> There is one color slide of WP 611 from that trip that appears in two  
> of the Morning Sun Pennsylvania books (page 117 of book 4 and page 36  
> of book 3).   Then the war came and no one looked at West Penn again  
> for a while.  People just didn't travel much then and a place  
> shrouded in smoke wasn't number one on anyone's list.  Vacations were  
> a pleasure of the rich; until after World War II most of the rank and  
> file lived out their lives at home.   Most people didn't have the money.
> 
> But the did have accidents Jerry.   There is a picture of 292 near  
> the end of service with one platform sheared off.  It had an  
> altercation with a train;  I think at the PRR crossing in  
> Connellsville.  By the time of that accident there were more than  
> enough cars to go around and it wasn't fixed.
> 
> ++++++++++++++
> 
> I did a piece for Headlights some years ago written by Jim Shuman on  
> a one-week vacation that he took to Iowa in 1938 to ride the Crandic,  
> WCF&N, FDDM&S,  and several other interurbans.   I don't think Jim  
> had started with the Pennsylvania Railroad yet, and I believe he was  
> still with Folmer Clogg and Co., a local and very large manufacturer  
> of umbrellas.    I know he said he walked a mile each way to work  
> every day to save the 6 cents morning and even car fare for his  
> vacation.   I remember doing some up front calculations before  
> putting the story to bed, and including them in a preface to Jim's  
> story about the trip, which showed how much of a sacrifice such a  
> trip was.  Just to buy a round trip train ticket for 2000 miles, six  
> days of rooms, cheap meals and a dozen rolls of film took up months  
> of income.
> 
> In 1939 the railroads in the United States sold a see both Worlds  
> Fairs ticket.   Remember guys.   There were two of them at the same  
> time.  New York and San Francisco.   The fare was $99.  And you could  
> cross the country by any route you chose and return by any route.      
> But $99 was a lot of money.  That's your $3999 air ticket today!    
> The average person in Lancaster worked five or six weeks at the end  
> of the Depression to earn $99 gross, and probably six to nine months  
> to salt away $100.   I knew five people who did it; three are dead  
> and one is almost.   None of them ever had wives or children to support.
> 
>   That may also help to understand why we really don't hear about  
> West Penn accidents.   And now today I look at the cheap overseas air  
> fares and ask my wife if she wants to go to a play in London....   
> It's a totally different world. 
>   
> 
>