[PRCo] Re: Maintenance standard

[Fred Schneider]

But they bought the P3 class in a totally different era ... 1948 I  
believe ... there was some reason, albeit weak, to believe that the  
public might continue to use public transportation in our larger  
cities.   They probably thought they could get 20 years out of their  
investment.   LATL only got ten years.    The county got another five.

Boris, you need to remember your thoughts when you first rode with me  
from Philadelphia to Lancaster.   Remember how astonished you were at  
how many automobiles you saw on the roads?

You need to understand that the general public ... the people who  
vote for the politicians who ran LAMTA and PAT and BiState and Muni  
and all the other public agencies ... are also the people own  
automobiles.   Historically, when they saw the back of a trolley,  
they believed it was the trolley that was holding up their  
progress.   It didn't matter if there was a line of automobiles a  
mile long in front of the trolley holding up the trolley.   They only  
saw the trolley and they told their elected officials that they  
wanted that damned trolley off the streets so they could drive their  
cars without it in their way.

Sadly, the mayors of many cities and their underlings were only doing  
what the public wanted when they replaced the trolleys with buses.    
Of course, afterwards, the public now complained that the buses were  
also in their way and the mayor should also get rid of the buses  
too.   (That argument is going on right here in Lancaster right  
now ... the fine people up in the town of Manheim want a bus stop  
removed because it interferes with the rights of motorists.)

In the United States, about one percent of all trips to work are made  
by public transportation and 99 percent are made by private  
automobile.   Trips to the store, movies, churches, and non work  
trips are probably 99.8 percent by private car.    That's today.

Now where were in 1948?

Let's go back to World War II.   We had gasoline rationing.   The  
average American ... let me rephrase that ... the typical American  
had a class A sticker on his car which entitled him to 3.5 gallons of  
gasoline per week.   Assuming he could get 14 miles per gallon, that  
permitted him to drive 50 miles per week or 2,500 miles per year.    
(Our average today exceeds 15,000 miles per year.)   Rationing during  
the war was not so much to prevent the use of gasoline as it was to  
prevent using tires which were almost impossible to get.   Remember  
than most tries then used natural rubber and most natural rubber  
supplies were under Japanese control.

So, gasoline rationing forced most people back on trolleys, trains  
and buses.   Patronage rose in the early 1940s rose to the highest  
levels since the early 1920s.   Unfortunately, this gave many transit  
managers a false sense of security.   Many of them irrationally  
believed that, when the war ended and prosperity reigned, their  
business would continue.   But it didn't   Rationing ended in the  
fall of 1945.   As soon as manufacturers could retool, 1946  
automobiles were shipped to dealers.   There had been four years of  
no new automobiles so it took a while for supply to catch up to  
demand.   Not everybody could get off the trolley or bus right  
away.   Demand and supply equalized about the summer of 1948.   When  
the 1949 automobiles hit the dealers, for the first time since 1942  
they had to work to sell the cars.   And from 1946 through 1950  
transit riding dropped every year ... maybe 10 percent per year.

There was a huge backlog of new streetcars after the war.   Many  
cities ordered cars in 1945 and 1946.

Those Los Angeles P3 cars that were delivered in 1948 were ordered  
in  October 1946.   Most cities experienced peak riding in 1946  
because the war was over, many the troops were home, and they didn't  
have automobiles.   Everything looked rosy.   The massive order of  
600 Chicago all-electrics was ordered in 1945 and January 1946.  The  
first of the Philly all-electrics went on the order books in 1944.    
The Boston all-electrics were ordered in 1944.   Detroit signed the  
order for the first 79 all-electrics in 1945.  Minneapolis ordered 90  
in 1945 and the other 50 in 1947.   Philly ordered the 2100s in  
1946.    The really strange orders were Muni's 25 cars and the Boston  
PW cars that came after all the fury had died down and most people  
could tell that it was all over.

You'll notice that most of the postwar orders came right after the  
war when riding was still high.   Once transit managers saw that the  
downward trend was irreversible, even the big cities quit buying.    
They quit doing any more maintenance than necessary too.



On Jun 14, 2006, at 1:01 PM, Boris Cefer wrote:

> But LATL did not buy the PCCs to scrap them.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Fred Schneider" <fwschneider at comcast.net>
> To: <pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, June 13, 2006 11:46 PM
> Subject: [PRCo] Re: Maintenance standard
>
>
>> OK, Boris.   LATL did better.   From your point of view.   Now from a
>> business point of view they were stupid.   One doesn't spend money
>> maintaining a property that you are going to scrap.   That was
>> taxpayers money.  It constitutes malfeasance in office.    And if it
>> were a private corporation, it was the stockholders' money that was
>> thrown down a rat hole and you don't spend the stockholders' money
>> fixing something you plan to retire if you want to be relected to the
>> board next year.
>>
>> What makes sense is buying a piece of machinery and running it to
>> make money until that piece of machinery is worn out and then
>> scrapping it.   Fixing it and then scrapping it is not something a
>> sane businessman does.
>