[PRCo] Re: PRCo

[Boris Cefer]

This is very hard to make a comment.

B

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Fred Schneider" <fwschneider at comcast.net>
To: <pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org>
Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2007 4:00 PM
Subject: [PRCo] Re: PRCo


> 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
> 
> 
> 
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