[PRCo] Re: Electric Railway Accidents

[Fred Schneider]

HOLD IT.

On Sep 25, 2005, at 10:00 PM, <mtoytrain at bellsouth.net> wrote:

> 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.
>>
>>
>>
>>
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