[PRCo] Re: B3 TRUCKS ON PITTSBURGH CITY 1700S

[Fred Schneider]

I'm not certain that a whole lot survives.

I'm going to give you EHL's very succinct comment about the 1951  
reorganization of Pittsburgh Railways:  they were left with no  
cash.   They didn't have money do expend on trivial projects.   When  
they bought new buses, they transferred no smoking signs from the old  
ones.   Anything to save money because they had no cash.

There were a lot of cars, including low-floor cars painted before the  
reorganization in 1951.   Then zip.

John Bromley just found a large group of pictures taken just about  
the time or the reorganization.   They had even given up washing cars.

We were out trying to find where a picture of a Bon Air shuttle car  
was taken and that prompted me to ask if PRC built any loops to  
eliminate shuttle lines after the 1951 reorganization.  Ed's comment  
was that they built two loops after the reorganization, one at Drake  
and the other at Library.   Come to think of it, the remaining  
shuttle lines (Corey Avenue, Evergreen, Donora, East-West, Jefferson- 
Maiden and North Washington) were simply abandoned or converted to  
motor coach operation).  Money wasn't spent on track work.

The window sash and doors that are going into 4398 at PTM came out of  
inventory at Homewood but they were fabricated not post  
reorganization but pre reorganization ... probably back in the late  
1940s ... when the Philadelphia Company was still part of the picture  
and there was still some capital.   After 1951 they had enough double  
end cars that if some one banged up a window or a door or a  
compressor or a motor failed, it probably would have been just as  
easy to pull another car out of storage as to fix the ailing one.     
The same applied to single end cars ... remember that the abandonment  
of the interurbans as well as Millvale and Etna lines in 1952 and  
1953 probably eliminated the need for 60 to 75 single-end low floor  
cars.   The strike in 1954 wiped out another 100 of them.   So its  
pretty clear to me that they didn't waste any money fixing them after  
1950 or so.

And PCCs?   We know that they were down to 650 or so cars by the  
summer of 1954 including spares.  Requirements continued to drop.    
All the 1000s and 1100s were out of service by 1959.   The 1200s were  
gone by 1964.   Translated to maintenance, that probably tells us  
they quit maintaining the 1000s by 1956 and the 1100s by 1957 and the  
1200s by 1962.

On Sep 11, 2006, at 12:25 PM, Boris Cefer wrote:

> Forward my thanks to Dave Hamley.
>
> It would be interesting to know more about truck maintenance  
> practices (and
> the whole streetcar maintenance rules) in Pittsburgh, both in PRCo  
> and PAAC
> days.
>
> B
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Fred Schneider" <fwschneider at comcast.net>
> To: <pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org>
> Sent: Monday, September 11, 2006 1:05 AM
> Subject: [PRCo] B3 TRUCKS ON PITTSBURGH CITY 1700S
>
>
>>>
>> HERE IS HAMLEY'S RESPONSE TO YOUR QUESTION, BORIS:
>>
>>> The best answer I can give you at the instant is "Most of them"
>>> There is no doubt an actual accounting of B2B vs. B3 trucks on all
>>> the 1700s, but I don't have it.  PAT bought a number of sets of B3
>>> castings from Hall Industries, who in turn had the castings made by
>>> a French foundry, the name of which escapes me at the moment.
>>> Their French nameplates were still on many of the truck castings.
>>> Some trucks had a mixture of original St. Louis castings with the
>>> Hall parts.  By the late days of 1700 car operation (i.e., just
>>> before the 7/88 retirement of all non-rebuilt cars) almost
>>> everything that was active had B3's.  A lot of the "city" 1700s
>>> that got B3 trucks did so because PAT had scaled back construction
>>> of the 4000s and had a lot of truck parts "left over."
>>>
>>> DH
>
>