[PRCo] Re: McKeesport_--_WP_-&-_PRCo

[Fred Schneider]

I do not have time to investigate now...   And I probably do not have  
time period because I think I got suckered into heading up the 50th  
high school reunion committee.  Ugh.

However, if someone wants to go to Harrisburg and look for the  
information, lt's all there for the looking.  Perhaps not in fine  
detail but in summary form.  And you will not find it for McKeesport  
but you will find data for Pittsburgh Railways accidents and West  
Penn Railways (or PMG or PMC) accidents.   Depending on how much work  
EHL has already done, he may have already dug out the West Penn data.

Each transport company was required to mail an annual report to the  
Pennsylvania Department of Internal Affairs.  These reports were  
largely financial in nature but they also showed some general  
information on equipment (passenger cars, trailers, and freight and  
service cars by type), passengers carried, employees and employee  
wages and accident data.   The 1911 report, for example, showed the  
accidents beneath the car roster data on page 55 and it broke out the  
number of passengers, the number of employees and the number of other  
people who were killed and who were non-fatally injured.  This same  
general summary followed in each year.

The reports filed by individual companies (West Penn and Pittsburgh  
Railways for example) will be found in the Archives Tower at the  
southeast corner of North 3rd and Boas Sts in Harrisburg.   The state  
prepared summary statewide reports each year from the company  
reports.   The summary reports are filed in the state library.

How dangerous were streetcars?   When Harold Cox was doing his two  
roster books on Philadelphia Rapid Transit, he was confronted with  
the problem of having no scrap dates for many of the cars.   However,  
Harold did have very comprehensive accident information.   He told me  
there was at least an accident every week involving every one of  
PRT's cars.   Therefore, if the car did not reappear on the accident  
matrix for six months, he presumed that the last one had been the one  
that wiped out the car and he listed it as scrapped.     What we need  
to realize here is that accidents were often reported but they were  
probably seldom very serious.   A lot of people stumbled getting off  
cars.   Kids hitched rides on the outsides of cars, which is why the  
bumpers had sloping sheet steel plates installed (to prevent riders  
from standing there).   Phillly installed similar plates on the  
trucks of some Nearside cars to prevent kids from standing on the  
trucks and hitching rides.   There could be a man who wants on the  
trolley, raps on the glass and puts his hand through it.  There's an  
accident report form.  There was a lot of paper filed but very few  
serious forms.  A lot of the accidents prior to 1920 involved horses  
who didn't have the good common sense not to run in front of a  
trolley.   In the 1890s we had idiots who thought they could hold  
electric wires.

Was Pittsburgh Railways truly any worse in McKeesport than West  
Penn?   I doubt it.   I suspect that if you were to look at the  
reports in the archives you might find that they were remarkably  
similar in the number of miles each company was able to operate  
between accidents and between fatal accidents.    However, there  
might have been prejudices by the McKeesport Daily News or by some  
other newspaper that the book's author unwittingly picked up on that  
favored West Penn as a home-town operator over the more distant and  
alien Pittsburgh company.

I found similar prejudices when I was researching Conestoga Traction  
Company's early history here in Lancaster.   The town has always had  
multiple newspapers and if we were to go back into the 1860s and  
1870s the behavior of those papers was just plain comical.   One of  
them made no mention of the War Between the States until the battle  
of Gettysburg, perhaps in the hope that it would go away, and then  
they gave that battle only a couple of column inches of space.   The  
other paper mentioned it every day.    When the Lancaster and  
Millersville horse car line opened in 1874, one favored it and one  
despised it.   The one that favored it remarked every time a new car  
was purchased or an old one repainted.   The other paper reported  
every time the line was shut because of a snow storm or all the  
accidents in absolutely glowing terms.   I remember one fatality ...  
and remember this was about a horse car line ... that described the  
"5 o'clock express train to Lancaster thundering up George Street in  
Millersville when it ran over and killed a dog....."    IN ORDER TO  
GET THE ENTIRE STORY, I HAD TO READ BOTH NEWSPAPERS.  Read Mr. Beale  
with a grain of salt.  If there had been a huge number of accidents  
with West Penn, would they have managed to stay in business until  
1952 in rural Pennsylvania?



On Jan 28, 2007, at 7:20 PM, Bill Robb wrote:

> Maybe it was one person per week killed by trolleys.  Remember most  
> people have never encountered heavy machinery in their daily life  
> before the trolley came along.  By the turn of the century  
> streetcars were getting larger and heavier.  When researched the  
> Toronto Star archives a couple of years ago I was appalled by the  
> number of people getting maimed and killed by streetcars in Toronto  
> even into the 1950s.  People running for streetcars and either  
> getting hit by a car or worse falling under the streetcar-- when  
> there was almost always a streetcar in sight. These types of  
> accidents aren't directly chargable to the streetcar system, but  
> happen because people were not safety conscious in the streetcar's  
> operating environment.   Probably the worse accident I came across  
> was the track walker cleaning out switches who was crushed between  
> two steel cars rear bumpers on a non-clearance curve at Bloor and  
> Yonge.
> Even with TTC having very good equipment and track there were many  
> accidents with open switches and rear end collisons.  Numerous  
> newspaper photos of PCCs and articles these accidents atest to the  
> number of accidents.  Many times it was a young or inexperienced  
> operator at the controls.
>
> The attached photo in the old Frederick Street shops shows the type  
> of casual attitude to heavy machinery.  A steel car hoisted up on a  
> wooden barrels, cobblestones and wooden blocks for truck repairs.   
> This was standard operating practice at the Toronto Railway Company  
> until 1921.  By 1924 the TTC had built a modern repair shop.  But  
> not every city could or did rebuild their system at mid-life.
>
> Bill Robb
>
>> May I be the first to observe that this is an Absurdly High Death  
>> Rate
>> --  Even for All PRCo!!!!
>>
>>
>> Jim Holland wrote:
>> .
>>
>>> From pg.140 of Beal's *McKeesport__Trolleys::*
>>> .
>>> .......(unlike PRCo carmen who seemed to defy speed limits, load
>>> limits and all other authority, and whose irresponsible actions were
>>> blamed for one death per week in McKeesport.) Meanwhile, the WEST  
>>> PENN
>>> carmen gained a reputation for care and courtesy.
>>> .
>>> .
>>> .
>>> Jim___Holland
>>
>
>
>
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