[PRCo] Re: Fwd: Toluca Yard revisited (FWIW)

[Fred Schneider]

YES, I REMEMBER HIM.   I think his name was Ira More-and-More-about- 
Less-and-Less Swett?  I never had the pleasure of meeting Ira  
although we did have correspondence.   I understood he dedicated his  
life to the Salvation Army and that he was also quite an accomplished  
organist.

I remember sitting in a restaurant and chatting with Dave Garcia  
about working on cars in Toluca Yard.  Los Angeles is hot in the  
spring, summer and fall and relatively warm in winter.   But what do  
you do in February and March when the rain comes at your  
horizontally?   Remember that the pit at Tolluca was open to the  
weather.   Dave's answer was you sat inside and waited for the rain  
to quit.

Pacific Electric was one of those organizations I would have liked to  
have seen in its prime, along with the Terre Haute, Indianapolis and  
Eastern and the Ohio Electric and the Lake Shore Electric and some of  
the Michigan properties.

I spent a lot of time on vacations with Donald Duke, the founder of  
Golden West Books.   Don grew up a block south of PE's Northern  
District mainline in San Marino and when you spent months with Don,  
some pretty good stories were bound to creep out.

One was about Don going to school as a young man and often passing  
this old man in a bowler hat, looking very much the part of a English  
butler.   He said if he only knew then, what questions he would have  
asked.   He later found out that the man was Henry Huntington's  
butler.   One of the questions he always wanted answered was why  
Huntington never established real estate developments along certain  
PE lines and why he built them on other lines.   Interestingly, all  
that stuff is in the Huntington Library but it is locked up and is  
not allowed to be opened to the public.

Don also talked a lot about how when PE built the system there were  
really no cross streets.   There was no place to go.   Then PE built  
the neighborhoods.   Huntington built the interurbans and he bought  
the land and he developed it and he sold land sites and homes.   And  
then there was a clamor to get across the tracks.   So instead of  
Huntington's crossings every mile, they became every half mile, and  
then every quarter mile, and....    Well, you get the picture.    
Instead of 50 mile per hour trains things got a whole lot slower.    
And the public would rather drive their Fords and Chevys and  
Desotos.    And there were places like Glendale where the right-of- 
way was simply paved over.

And then there was this fantastic story about the time Mr. Smith, the  
President of PE, who was a card playing buddy of Norman Duke, Don's  
father asked one evening in the house, "Do you know what little  
Donnie's been doing after dinner in the evenings?"   Story goes that  
A. O. Smith got on to one of his Glendora trains and found the  
brakeman/conductor sitting in the car and the motorman also sitting  
there studying for a college class.   Hmmm.   Who was running?    
Turns out that Duke went up every evening and spelled the motorman so  
he had time to hit the books.   There was something about Don being a  
very competent operator but that "We have to put a stop to this."

That's sort of like me pulling the levers at CORK block station on  
the Pennsylvania Railroad for a whole summer when the regular  
operator was off sick.



On Nov 11, 2007, at 5:55 PM, James B. Holland wrote:

> --- In PEry at yahos.com, Harry A Marnell <RedCars at ...> wrote:
>
> Those of you who are familiar with Ira Swett's "Lines of Pacific
> Electric - Western District" know his "morning, noon, and night"
> pictures of Toluca yard, taken from atop the subway portal.  This
> afternoon a gentleman named Sergio Guerrero emailed me a picture he
> took on Oct 27 from ALMOST the same spot (the exact location is now
> blocked by construction atop the tunnel), looking northwest at the
> substation and toward the Beverly viaduct.
>
> Notice I said at the substation but toward the viaduct.  See why at
> http://harrymarnell.com/TolucaYardOct2007a.jpg
>
> The series of shots, from 1925 to now, is at
> http://harrymarnell.com/toluca.htm
>
> Thanks to Sergio for the photo and his permission to use it on my
> website.
>
> Harry
>
> --- End forwarded message ---
>
>
>
>