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

[Boris Cefer]

This all sounds logical from an economical viewpoint. But what about the
maintenance technically and administratively? What jobs were conducted on
car bodies, trucks, electrical components and where these jobs were done?
What jobs did car houses and what Homewood? What was the maintenance scheme
from the view of intervals and mileages? Do we have any records from the era
before 1964 and since that? Did PAAC have any PCC maintenance rule book?

B

----- Original Message -----
From: "Fred Schneider" <fwschneider at comcast.net>
To: <pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org>
Sent: Monday, September 11, 2006 7:19 PM
Subject: [PRCo] Re: B3 TRUCKS ON PITTSBURGH CITY 1700S


> 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.