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

[Fred Schneider]

Pittsburgh Railways shifted a lot of the inspection work from  
Homewood to the car houses in the early 1960s.   This was brought out  
in the condemnation proceedings.   The county pointed out that PRC  
had reduced the number of cars going through Homewood and the  
railways countered with a statement that they were doing a lot of the  
work in the car houses.   What work, I don't know.   It may have  
simply been a fluff statement.   There was documentation of the A, B,  
C program in the Transit Journal when it was started about 1933 as a  
depression economy move.  What they were trying to do was rationalize  
how they spent money and inspecting cars on a mileage basis seemed to  
be a logical answer.   I think we would all agree it makes sense ...  
that's the way we do our automobiles today.

But by the 1960s the company is in a liquidation mode.   The county  
was condemning it.    The company was simply trying to conserve  
cash.   Conserving cash meant not wasting it running cars across town  
to the shops to inspect them if you could do it in a car house and  
not fixing something that didn't need to be fixed.

It also meant that some things could be delegated.   If the motorman  
could be coerced into washing his own windshield, then let him do  
it.   If you think I'm kidding, I'm not.   I remember Norm Vutz  
telling me about a conversation with a motorman about what it was  
like working for PAT and the answer was, "I didn't have to wash the  
streetcar windshield this morning."

There were only three car houses left when PAT took over:   Tunnel,  
Keating and Craft.   If memory serves, there were about 360 active  
cars ... the 1400s, 1500s, 1600s and 1700s.  The 1200s were mostly  
stored in Rankin.   Keating closed in 1965.   Craft closed in early  
1967.   They wanted to keep Homewood open and tracks were maintained  
but it rapidly became impossible to get cars in and out of the shop  
because people would park autos on the tracks.   I'm also not sure  
what PAT did in Homewood between 1964 and 1966.   They took the  
building but not the overhead crane.

So after early 1967 the issue of which cars went to the shop and  
which were done in the car house was moot.    They might have trucked  
parts across town for a while.

EHL can fill in the details from Trolley Fare when Homewood was  
physically closed.

On Sep 11, 2006, at 1:45 PM, Boris Cefer wrote:

> 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.
>
>