[PRCo] Christmas at PTM.

[Fred Schneider]

For those of you who never get a chance to get to Pittsburgh at  
Christmas time ... here is the crew of Santa Trolley at the  
Pennsylvania Trolley Museum on the Sunday after Thanksgiving.   Talk  
about Featherbedding.    Did you ever see a seven person crew before?
Santa this year was Charlie Fife, who owns a moving a storage company  
up the road from the museum with branch offices in Harrisburg and  
Philadelphia.   Charlie was also the president of the museum in 2007.

I cannot remember the name of the male elf on the right nor the cute  
15-year-old female elf on the left.   But who says we don't try hard  
to get young blood in our museum.   Those kids worked all weekend and  
did a great job.

The girl who looked sweeter in the green sweater is Briana; she never  
once failed to get a round of applause for her rendition of Twas a  
Night Before Christmas.   That 20-something is fabulous.  They ought  
to clone her.

The man with the billboard on his hat advertising instant photos for  
$2.50 is Art Ellis.   Artis possibly the last of the charter members  
of the Pittsburgh Electric Railway Club.   He is 88 and when they had  
a birthday party for him this year, the candles set off the smoke  
detectors!   He is one fabulous man to work with.   In the real world  
he was a schedule writer for Pittsburgh Railways.

The trainman on the right front is Carl Weber.   This may be his  
second year at PTM as an operator but his badge and membership number  
goes back more than ten years.   And the other trainman on the left  
is Fred Schneider.   Normal procedure is simply to trade the handles  
back and forth every other trip, that is you work as a motorman one  
trip, conductor the next, then motorman, then conductor.   Some days  
you get a trip off for lunch, some days you get a candy bar out of  
the machine.

Those kids made this probably the most enjoyable year I've had out of  
the last fifteen.







-- Attached file removed by Ecartis and put at URL below --
-- Type: image/jpeg
-- Size: 1189k (1218470 bytes)
-- URL : http://lists.dementia.org/files/pittsburgh-railways/PTM%20Santa.jpeg