[PRCo] Re: Heat at PRCo 1700 Series Cars

[Fred Schneider]

The whole idea behind the fans was evaporative cooling.   When water  
evaporates, the temperature of the water drops.   And water (in this  
case, sweat) evaporates faster if you blow air over it.   The Rio  
Grande railroad used to provide engineers with water bags that the  
hung on the outside of steam locomotive cabs ... they leaked ever so  
slightly and the leakage evaporated, thereby cooling the remaining  
contents.   A nice example of how this can be made to benefit  
mankind.   And before we had refrigeration air-conditioning, we  
simply used fans.   And if you were dripping wet, turning the fan on  
you felt so much better.

No wonder the open cars and convertible cars felt so good!

The only window on a 1700 that opened was the operator's visor, and,  
on the interurban cars, one of the rear windows opened so you could  
reset a pole from inside the car when on a bridge.

I think that originally the fans all blew air in one direction, i.e.  
into the car.   Pressurizing the car would really only work when  
there is a place for the hot, moist air to go, i.e. when the doors  
are opened at a stop.   The scheme probably worked a whole lot better  
on 1600 and 1630 because the windows opened.    I suspect that PRC  
and Boston, which also played around with forced ventilated cars,  
also found another problem: that of ingesting rain water into the  
cars.   Early pictures of 1700 running on route 22 Crosstown show  
that there were no rain deflectors on the roof monitor but these were  
later installed on all the 1700s.   Car 1630 didn't have them  
either.   My suspicion is that more than a few peiople early on got  
their white shirts speckled with dirty water on rainy days.

However, PRC or PAT made some attempts to improve this on the 1700s  
by changing the direction of half the fans.   Of course this meant  
that the air would blow in one fan, skim along the ceiling of the  
car, and blow out the next fan.   It did little, if anything, to make  
the passengers comfortable.  The only true solution came ten years  
later when transit air conditioning was finally practical.

The 1700 at PTM is a pain in a museum environment.   You can't have a  
decent conversation with the passengers without turning off the fans,  
and, of course, if you turn off the fans, no air moves.  It's a nice  
spring and fall car.   It's horrid in the summer.   And, as with  
PCCs, I don't think it has any supplemental heating so that it heats  
in the winter only when accelerating or braking.   So it isn't a good  
winter museum car either.

On Aug 2, 2006, at 1:10 PM, <mtoytrain at bellsouth.net>  
<mtoytrain at bellsouth.net> wrote:

> Mark Mcguire often speaks of the problem with the 1700 series cars  
> and the heat!
> must have been terrible riding in them during Heat spells or did  
> the PRCo not  run them
> on HOT days!   Other than put in the "Standees" litle windows on  
> top, did not the lower windows open at all? I am sure they must,   
> haven't been able to get hold of Mark and ask him direct?
> Would be interested in the various comments we get??
>
> Jerry Matsick
> a double ended Jones  low floor rider!
>>
>> From: Fred Schneider <fwschneider at comcast.net>
>> Date: 2006/08/02 Wed PM 12:24:42 EDT
>> To: pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org
>> Subject: [PRCo] Off subject mail
>>
>> For those who wonder if the list has dried up, this is posted just to
>> create the illusion of mail.
>>
>> Therefore you have mail....
>>
>> First off I wanted to comment that there was an interesting survey in
>> this morning's local newspaper that there was a significant drop in
>> the number of Americans who actually like to drive their cars.  The
>> percentage who like driving is a number now roughly 0.10 lower than
>> it was in 1991.   The number who simply regard their cars as a means
>> to get from point a to point b increased.   And Ford and GM were
>> staring at 40 and 50 percent drops in sales this July under last
>> July.   If more and more people are no longer enamored with cars just
>> for the sake of them being cars, maybe the automakers are not
>> thinking right?????   And then there was Daimler-Chrysler suing a
>> firm for importing the Smart car into the U. S.   I see that they
>> have now decided to market the car in the U. S. themselves at perhaps
>> $15,000....   And Vespa is selling 25% more scooters this year than
>> last in the U. S.  (of course 25% times 4 = 5 ... when dealing with
>> small numbers, it really isn't a big increase.
>>
>> And I want to thank Holland for telling me that heat wave was coming
>> east.   The outside the car thermometer read 100 yesterday
>> afternoon.   At 9:30 this morning, when I left the barber shop, the
>> outside one read 88 and the inside the car one read 108 degrees.   By
>> the time I left the Waffle House some 45 minutes later, the outside
>> air was up to 92 degrees.   They're calling for 100 degrees with a
>> heat index of 108 today.   Thanks for sending it East, Jim.
>>
>>
>>
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