[PRCo] Re: Electric Railway Accidents

[Dietrich, Robert J.]

I have not had the time to read all the information posted on this list
for awhile but this one from Fred III caught my eye.  I read it through
completely but still I must have missed something.  Fred why are you
apologizing to me?  

I hope this group can keep it going for a couple more years - part of my
retirement planning is to read every post from this group and maybe even
answer a few.

Bob 

-----Original Message-----
From: pittsburgh-railways-bounce at lists.dementia.org
[mailto:pittsburgh-railways-bounce at lists.dementia.org] On Behalf Of Fred
Schneider
Sent: Sunday, September 25, 2005 9:34 PM
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.