[PRCo] Re: PAT and the "T" operation

[Fred Schneider]

I would not know what was in the thinking of the Pittsburgh Railways  
at that time.   I would suspect that there were several factors and  
you can sort out what you think are most important:

1.   The Smithfield Street Bridge was not a strong structure and the  
company may have been reluctant to add another 100 cars an hour to  
it.  There was a period when they were actually trying to space no  
more than one car on each span in each direction.   My recollection  
may be faulty.

2.    Wood and Smithfield Street traffic may have already been too  
intense to have added these additional routes.

3.    Moving the West End Lines to the Smithfield Street Bridge would  
have probably added ten minutes per car per line which would have  
required a substantial increase in fleet size or a major decrease in  
headways.

4.    Remember that the West End already was marginally profitable.    
The company had twice, in 1936 and immediately after the war,  
considered converting the division to trackless trolleys in order to  
reduce fixed costs (while continuing to utilize electricity provided  
by partner Duquesne Light Co.).     We've discussed this before in  
this site.   It was marginally profitable because of the long  
distances cars had to travel hauling passengers for single zone  
fares, which was only partly offset by higher crew productivity owing  
to higher speeds.

On Jan 4, 2007, at 2:15 PM, Derrick J Brashear wrote:

> On Thu, 4 Jan 2007 mtoytrain at bellsouth.net wrote:
>
>> When I left Pittsburgh the mighty PCCs were operating "great" in  
>> 1965, my question is what was the first year of operation for the  
>> "T"?    How long was Overbrook shut down?    Another question:   With
>> Ardmore Boulevard (private right of way) was there no  
>> consideration of running the LRVs to East End of the city, which  
>> is a very populated area?
>
> You'd have to get the cars to Wilkinsburg to enter the RoW.
>
> Even the West End RoW along Steubenville Pike didn't survive (the  
> Point
> Bridge died, and I guess the trip from the Smithfield St Bridge was  
> too
> long... Then we got the West Busway to essentially bring back a  
> similar
> RoW, so....
>
>