[PRCo] Re: PRCo

[Fred Schneider]

There was a lovely story told to me by one of the last motormen of  
the Lancaster and York Furnace Street Railway in southern Lancaster  
County, Pennsylvania.   The line was very rural ... one of those  
trolley lines that should never have been built in the first place.    
It opened in 1903 and closed in October 1929 and stretched from  
Millersville through Marticville to Pequea offering hourly summer  
service to handle the fisherman and people with summer cottages along  
Pequea Creek and vacationers to the old hotel on the Susquehanna  
River; and ever other hour cars in the winter.  I once counted the  
homes on the U. S. Geologic Survey Maps ... I was looking for my  
notes and cannot locate them ... I think it was about 200 people per  
square mile along that trolley line in 1910.    Outside of a few  
hundred people in Millersville (more when the college was in session)  
and fewer in Pequea, the greatest population were a handful of homes  
near the trolley in Conestoga Center, Marticville and Martic Forge.    
It improved after the automobile and then the residents had their own  
transportation.

It was a rainy fall evening.   Leaves were covering the rails.    
Harry Bortzfield said it was the car headlight picked up a bull  
standing on the track.   The bull showed no intention of responding  
to the car's air whistle.   And the brakes showed no intention of  
retarding the car that was now sliding on sap from ground up  
leaves.   Sand?   That was having little effect too.

Harry, in my 1963, interview summed it up it one sentence.

"There was shit all over."   Bull shit that is.   He didn't mention  
if he had a dark spot in the back of his uniform.   I did not ask.

And you can imagine what hitting a bull weighing as much as an  
automobile does to the dasher panels on a wooden streetcar.

He also mentioned having killed two cows in other events with a  
trolley and also killing one man who had fallen asleep on the track  
while waiting for the trolley to arrive.  (If a man sleeping on the  
track strikes you as strange, the news events on the West Penn that  
Ed Lybarger has found are just peppered with just events.   When I  
was working on the Strasburg Rail Road we stopped just in time one  
morning to get out and lift a drunken bumb off the tracks before  
running over him with a train.  These are your friends and neighbors.)

I'm not sure when Harry Bortzfield died ... my suspicion is that, if  
he were living today, he would be in the neighborhood of 120 years  
old.   He was an old man when I talked to him.


On May 23, 2007, at 9:07 AM, Boris Cefer wrote:

> It was probably very hard to stop without sand when the rails were  
> wet.
>
> B