[PRCo] Boston Resilient Wheels

[Fred Schneider]

There was a dialogue going back and forth that I am summarizing here  
regarding the removal of resilient wheels from the Boston PCC cars.

Two close friends, Phil Craig and Russ Jackson filled me in on the  
details.   Rather than cut and pasted paragraphs of commentary, it  
seems what was happening is that the shunts around the resilient  
rubber inserts were failing and thus not shorting out signal  
circuits.   I recall from earlier correspondence that perhaps the  
commonwealth had something to do with forcing the hand of the MBTA  
into solid steel wheels on the PCCs because of the safety issue with  
the PCCs.

Now, why were they failing?   Was it wheel maintenance?   Russ  
pointed out that it had nothing to do with wheels.   It had  
everything to do with sloppy guard rail maintenance that was shearing  
off the the shunts.   He blamed it on the track department.

And now I'm going to delete all those messages.