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

[Edward H. Lybarger]

The West End was not marginally profitable, according to PRCo numbers.  It
lost money.

Items 1 and 2 below are right on, except that no one is sure of the dates of
the weight restrictions.  I remember two or three rebuilds; it was an
ongoing thing.  In 1951 they replaced the deck with aluminum to reduce the
weight of the structure itself.

Item 3 below would have been done by reducing the headways, you can be sure!

-----Original Message-----
From: pittsburgh-railways-bounce at lists.dementia.org
[mailto:pittsburgh-railways-bounce at lists.dementia.org]On Behalf Of Fred
Schneider
Sent: Thursday, January 04, 2007 3:28 PM
To: pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org
Subject: [PRCo] Re: PAT and the "T" operation


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....
>
>