[PRCo] Re: Electric Railway Accidents

[Fred Schneider]

Just because of what you told me before and what you repeated now  
Bob ... your lack of time to read everything.   I was apologizing for  
dumping stuff that I knew you didn't have time to read.  fws

On Sep 28, 2005, at 8:09 AM, Dietrich, Robert J. wrote:

> 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.
>
>
>
>
>