[PRCo] Re: Inside PCC 1673

[Fred Schneider]

Please don't shoot the messenger before you read the whole message....

It is the American way ... it is not an indictment against Pittsburgh  
Railways as one of you said but an criticism of public transportation  
in general.   It goes back to Henry Ford telling us that each of us  
wanted our own cars.   I think I once mentioned that when my mother  
and father met at Carnegie Tech in February 1928, he had two  
wishes.   One was a vacuum tube radio to replace the crystal set.    
The other was one of those new Model A Fords.   He bought the Ford in  
1930 when he graduated from CIT and he built the radio.

Cars came with heaters.   You didn't have to stand in the rain on a  
safety island in the middle of the street.   You didn't need to have  
the fat lady beat you to the seat or sit on you.   You didn't have to  
suffer the misfortune of having some other son-of-a-bitch shed the  
water from his umbrella onto your clothing.

I suspect there are also more antique automobile museums than there  
are trolley car museums, if only because we love them more than the  
trolleys.

The other side of the coin is perhaps we've made very idiotic mistake  
burning up oil like crazy.   We worry about cutting trees to make  
paper bags but I wonder if if we have not used more non renewal  
resources using the resins in oil to make plastic bags?????   We've  
decentralized ourselves onto 1/2 acre building lots and left our  
cities as hollow shells in which the welfare recipients and drug  
culture live.   Those who live there, except for a few places like  
New York and San Francisco cannot even shop in the cities any  
longer.  In many cities they need to commute to the suburbs to find a  
store in which to shop (or rob).

And some of you probably wonder why I like the European culture ...  
maybe it is because they still have cities where people live, work,  
eat, shop, worship and are entertained.   They don't have hollow  
shells.   As Josh Coran, who was with us remarked, you don't need a  
shopping center in Vienna ... the whole city is a shopping center.    
Right ... same applies to Munich, Graz, Linz and every place else we  
were.   Seems strange seeing elementary school kids on the streetcars  
by themselves.   Says something about the safety in their culture.    
And Munich ... the S-Bahn (commuter rail) is running at capacity, not  
like ours at 50% of capacity in Philadelphia, but at  
strangulation ... at the point where you really can't put more people  
on it.

So the messenger isn't against streetcars.   He is simply observing  
that many in our culture want to preserve their automotive lifestyle  
come hell or high water ... they want gasoline at 29.9 a gallon with  
big Oldsmobile 98s and no one on the highway in front of them.    I  
don't think that will remain possible.

fws



On Nov 6, 2007, at 4:19 PM, Jim Holland wrote:

> This will get them writing Matt~!~!~!~!
>
>
>
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> Barry, Matthew R wrote:
>>
>>
>> Here is a page out of the University of Pittsburgh's 1963 Owl  
>> yearbook
>> with a photo of inside PCC 1673, and a description of riding the cars
>> that year by, apparently one of the editors of the yearbook.
>> [cid:image001.jpg at 01C8208E.F3EED6A0]
>>
>>
> http://lists.dementia.org/files/pittsburgh-railways/image001.jpg
>