[PRCo] Re: Car Barn Assignments

[Fred Schneider]

The one missing car is still there .... it's under Miscellaneous  
cars.   Remember the former 100 was by them M-11, the instruction car  
based at Craft Avenue.   The first column under storage is HS for  
high speed cars.  There were no longer any LS or low-speed  
conventional cars.    There are only 10 DE cars by that time and they  
too will all be high speed cars.

If you need an explanation, Matt:

In the early 1930s, Pittsburgh Railways began to modify the fleet of  
low-floor cars to make them accelerate faster, run faster, and  
decelerate faster.   I'm not going to look up any details, OK?   The  
original cars were essentially a 25 mph car as were most city street  
cars of the teens and twenties.   The revised cars were a 37.5 mile  
per hour car, which was good enough to blend in with a PCC without  
major problems.   The brake rigging was also changed to get greater  
leverage.   I don't know if the cylinder size was changed or not ...  
I have no surviving documents to research and the two cars at PTM are  
both HS cars.   M210 was a low-speed car but I don't know if the  
brake cylinder is original.   The HS cars also received stop lights  
and air pressure switches to turn them on when brakes were applied.

Which cars were high speed?   Most if not all 4800s, 4900s, 5000s,  
5200s, 5400s and 5500s.   Very few 4700s.   Only one 5100 (5149).    
No 4200s, 4250s, 4300s.   There were ten 4350s that were high  
speed.    No 4400s.

Most of the single end low-speeds were retired before World War II.    
Then the war came along and screwed up all the great dreams of mice  
and men.   Manchester became a low-speed barn during the war.   I was  
told that Westinghouse trippers on 87 Ardmore (Homewood to East  
Pittsburgh) used anything that would turn a wheel ... HS, LS, PCC ...  
and they ran about every two minutes at shift change.   I think  
Keating might have even had some low-speeds during the war.   When  
the war ended, the low-speed single-end cars went back to Rankin.

On the other hand, most of the cars on shuttles and transfers were  
low-speed cars.  Assignment lists show that the 10 HS DE cars were at  
Glenwood, which would indicate service on 99 GLASSPORT-EVANS AVEUE  
and 69 HOMESTEAD-HOMEVILLE and 63 COREY AVENUE.  If the LIBRARY ST  
shuttle was still running when those cars were speed up, it might  
have had a HS car.   The other shuttles - 5, 9, 12, 17, 28, 32, 38A  
78, 81, Donora, the three routes in Washington, and anything I've  
forgotten and any earlier ones like 8 PERRYSVILLE  or Superior- 
Shadeland, never had anything but LS cars.

End of lesson

On Mar 18, 2006, at 3:40 AM, Mark McGuire wrote:

>  I can't make out the first column under "storage". Second columm  
> is DE I presume for double-ender.
>  665 PCCs at the time. Which one was missing? Only one out of 666,  
> that's pretty good. Thanks Matt!
>
> -- Matt Barry <mrb190+ at pitt.edu> wrote:
> Hi,
> Interesting little carbarn assignments list, if you can read  
> it!     It
> is a small scan.    My suggestion is to save it to your hard drive,  
> then
> magnify it in whatever photo viewer you use.
>
> 665 PCCs at the time.
>
> Matt
>
>
> -- Attached file removed by Ecartis and put at URL below --
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> -- Size: 44k (45811 bytes)
> -- URL : http://lists.dementia.org/files/pittsburgh-railways/car% 
> 20assignment.jpg
>
>
>