[PRCo] Re: PRC book
Schneider Fred
fwschneider at comcast.net
Sun Aug 23 21:10:03 EDT 2009
(Certain key people are getting this twice because the bold letters
will come through that way.)
The problem Phil,
with selling the book that you have outlined ... track, lines, cars,
routes, schedules, infrastructure ... is that it will sell only to
railfans that the number of those people willing to buy that book
declines every year through deaths. Randy Kulp told me in 1963 that
the Lehigh Valley Chapter of the NRHS could print and sell 2,000
copies of any book they wanted to publish and there would be enough
nuts out there to buy them ... even some time title so esoteric as
the 800 series 1912 Jewett cars owned by Lehigh Valley Transit ...
remember that there were only one dozen of those cars and he could
sell 166 books for every full sized car. I think today you would be
damn lucky to sell 10 books for every one of those cars.
Your audience today isn't going to be the railfans. There are not
enough of them. If there were enough, Beal would have recouped his
money long ago.
I'm not supposed to know this but I do. Kalmbach printed 20,000
copies of the Interurban Era. Just a few years later, The Time of
the Trolley was down to 12,000. PCC The Car that Fought Back was
considered a best seller at 6,000 ... that was three times the
average press run for an Interurbans press book in the late 1970s.
PCC From Coast to Coast went 4000. Those picture books that are
being done by Arcadia are done in the hundreds. Those numbers are
not wasted on anybody bright enough to write a decent book. The
long term trend is DOWN.
The next thing to consider is that publisher's royalties were (past
tense) 10% of net sales, i.e. 10% of what the publisher takes in.
If the jacket price is $50 and you discount it 40% to retailers,
that means the publisher gets $30 a book and the author gets $3 a
book. But wait a minute. Companies like Borders are going to
demand that they get the book for 50% off or they won't sell it. So
that reduces your commission to $2.50 a book or maybe the publisher
will simply say you don't anything on sales under 60% off gross.
Bill Middleton could make some real money on books like the
Interurban Era and he could pay $5 or so for each picture in the book
out of his royalties. But if you are dealing with an outfit like
Arcadia ... hey guy, forget the word royalty. It doesn't exist.
They are an overgrown vanity press in business to make money for
themselves.
So, if I am willing to write a book today, where am I going to get
enough money to make it worth my effort. Steve Carlson and I each
got about $8700 on two PCC books. We gave away about 10% of the
first book to an industry expert for his work in proof reading it and
10% of the second book to a person reading this note for typing the
fold out charts. Paying nothing gets you nothing. We arranged to
pay the photo contributors in discounted books or free books.
Those were 1980 dollars. Today you will get a lot less money and
the dollars will be greatly diminished in value. You are not really
interesting me in doing any writing because I'm not going to get
anything out of it. I am at the age where I am perfectly happy to
give away my collection to PTM and I'm not even going to bother with
the effort it takes to get two appraisals to get the tax write off.
But writing a book takes work. Steve Carlson told me he put a lot
more work into those two books than he did into his doctorate degree
AND WE KNOW WHERE THE MISTAKES ARE EVEN IF YOU DO NOT. (In addition
to what he put into it, I did the layout ... rough layout on the
first one and the actual paste up on the second one.)
If I had to write a book about Pittsburgh Railways, I would slat it
more toward something that would help me sell it to the general
public in Pittsburgh and those people who come through the trolley
museum:
1. Why were the trolley lines built?
2. Who were the investors and why did they put their money into it?
3. Why the connection with Standard Shares, Duquesne Light,
Equitable Gas, Market Street Railway in San Francisco? Was this a
common practice in the industry or something very unique to
Pittsburgh. (We know vertical integration was very common in the
industry.) Why was it merged into one company by
1902.
4. Who rode the cars? How far did the average person go from
home? Did the wealthy use the cars or only the poor people? How
expensive was trolley / bus travel? How much did riding the trolley
to work or to shop take out of your family budget? How does that
compare to today? Where the people rode to? Why they rode?
Because the city and suburbs today are so different than they were in
1859 or 1890 or 1910, I would feel we would need to have a series of
maps to show population and employment at different years,
particularly the years when the trolley lines were being constructed.
5. Why did the trolleys disappear? A honest answer. I don't
believe in blaming the hemorrhage of passengers on anything other
than we liked automobiles because I have enough good data to prove that.
6. How did politics in the city and other municipalities affect
transit in Allegheny County? This might be a great opportunity to
work in why the trailers and low-floor cars were built. There is a
reason for everything.
7. How useful were feeder bus lines in preserving the company longer?
8. What affect did all the jitney operations that evolved into
independent bus companies in Allegheny County have on Pittsburgh
Railways? Why could they not be eliminated? How did politics play
into this?
9. How did Pittsburgh City affect the continuation of streetcars or
the substitution of buses and the profitability of the company in the
later years?
10. And I would not stop with the end of Pittsburgh Railways .... I
would take it right into PAT and show what has happened since the
government took over PRC and 28 independent bus companies. What
they wanted to accomplish and how it worked.
11. Would I fill it with car rosters and route descriptions? Not
if I wanted to sell it.
Notice all those interrogatives. Why? How? If you wrote a book
about streetcars in 1945 or 1960, people understood the concept.
Today all the visitors to the trolley museums come from suburbs.
They do not know cities. Out of the 330 million people in the USA,
84 million live in cities over 100,000 population and 20 million live
in our largest cities. But the people who come to the trolley
museums come from the 240 million or so that don't live in the
cities. You actually have to explain to them what a city is. The
idea of living in a city, going to school in a city, working in a
city, going to church in a city, yada yada yada, is alien to most of
those people. And if you write a book today, you will also have to
explain it. That is especially true for the smallest cities
where people actually go outside of them to shop today ... those who
live in Lancaster, PA, where my mail comes from, don't shop there
today because there are no stores left in town ... they have to go to
the suburbs to shop. There is nobody left who remembers when there
were six movie theaters and seven department stores in this city.
You have to explain this to people. You cannot just write a book
about trolley cars.
Philip, we may not agree on everything. We may often agree on
little. But I have found that you do read news magazines. You are
pessimistic. I guess I am too. You said the following:
> (I hope I am wrong but I expect
> the economy to get much worse; what others say is the end to the
> recession 'could' be just a breather before more problems present
> themselves.
I have sized up this recession as caused by a multitude of things
that all came home to roost as once and the American public may not
and probably does not see it. It is very easy to blame it all on
the obvious ... real estate and banking speculation is very visible
and makes a great target for blame.
I am not sure how we bail ourselves out of morass when the American
public doesn't understand that the president is only the man who
approves or disapproves legislation passed by 535 other people in a
bicameral system of houses. I get the feeling that they expect or
think they sent a magician to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and that he is
supposed to cure everything.
Furthermore, I don't believe the average American (and really I hate
the word American because is shows an arrogance that implies we are
the only people in the western hemisphere) ... let's say the average
U. S. resident doesn't have any instinctive reaction just how
interlocked the economies of all the worlds industrial and developed
nations have become. They do not fathom that they banking
operations of Mellon Bank and Trust Company, now Citizens Bank, is
owned by Royal Bank of Scotland. Or that Mittel Steel, the remnants
of Bethlehem Steel, in Steelton or Sparrows Point, is a Luxembourg
firm. Or that you can walk down a street in Budapest and find an
Office Depot. Or that Wal*Mart actually trades under four or five
names around the world. Armstrong Cork used to have a plant at 24th
Street in the Strip District ... I have a buddy who is one of my
Birney car operators who is a fire safety engineer for Armstrong ...
two weeks ago he was conducting fire retardant tests on ceiling tiles
for E. U. certification near Manchester, England ... you cannot use
Lancaster PA tests ... it has to be retested in Europe to qualify to
sell there. How far should I carry this to prove that we are part
of a world economy? BMWs made in the USA? Siemens or CAF cars in
Pittsburgh? McDonald's restaurants in Delhi India or St Petersburg,
Russia? Toronto Dominion (TD) Banks in West Chester PA or San Juan
PR. We simply are no longer in a single nation economy. That's
gone. And until you travel the world and see the same brands
everywhere, I just doesn't sink in.
The point I need to make is, how do we fix an economy if five
countries try to fix it one way and five try to fix in 180 degrees in
the opposite direction?
But the thing I think we may all be missing Phil, is that the oil
prices in the summer of 2008 were behaving like one would expect them
to behave when demand starts to exceed supply ... price goes up.
Then when supply exceeds demand ... because it was probably also one
of the root causes of this recession ... the world wide consumption
of oil dropped 3% ... the price of oil plummeted. I expect the
price of oil to come back up as we come out of the recession and
demand again begins to exceed supply. That could trigger another
recession. I would not at all be surprised to see a series of back-
to-back oil price induced recessions.
I think Phillip that the people of our age and down through the Baby
Boom generation are in denial. Just ask them. Oil will never run
out. The supply will go on forever. Sure it will.
Unfortunately it will be our children and grandchildren who will have
to live with the screwed up world we left them. They are going to
have to learn to live in cities, walk to work, ride transit, live
next to the neighbors they don't like. My own granddaughter had
herself all set up living where she could walk to work ... she was
working as a nurses aide and going to school to be an RN. But it
looks now like the hospital is making her do some of the work in a
hospital they are buying 15 miles away and she is unhappy. I guess
they want good people there. (Sorry Ken ... boring ... you've
heard me preach this sermon before.)
On Aug 23, 2009, at 6:41 PM, Phillip Clark Campbell wrote:
> Mr.Lybarger;
>
> You have struck a cord; I was thinking along this very line
> and composing a mental email but now have a reason to reply.
>
> First, I have seen this book topic a multitude of times in the
> archives.
> Mr.Schneider has addressed the work involved in his PCC books.
> I have an academic understanding of the work involved; that said,
> such an understanding still "seriously underestimates" the actual
> amount of work involved by 20 to 100 fold and more. By way of
> example, just consider the foldouts in the back of the PCC books
> about PCCs 'world wide.' Collecting that information before the
> inet would be tedious and time consuming, but just look at the wealth
> of information that is included. This is just in the foldouts;
> the books
> continue with the wealth and depth of information. Maybe we need
> to add to your questions below:
> Specifically name other trolley books that are this thorough and this
> accurate and this high quality. I hope there are more out there but
> it would seem they are very few in number doesn't it.
>
> It would seem that the 'promise' of several PRC books dampens
> enthusiasm of others to produce same thus the delay in getting
> 'good' books to market. Additionally, the market is thin; production
> costs are expensive and unfortunately the current economy may
> kill any and all efforts in this regard. (I hope I am wrong but I
> expect
> the economy to get much worse; what others say is the end to the
> recession 'could' be just a breather before more problems present
> themselves. Historical precedent exists; those who claim 'we know
> too much to repeat mistakes of the past' are blind to the "Fact" that
> the very same was said from the 1920s into the 1930s; please
> check here:)
> http://www.gold-eagle.com/editorials_01/seymour062001.html
>
>
> Weren't the low-floors developed as trailers for the High Floors?
> Then
> Mr.Jones coaxed WH to develop a motor for such small wheels. Some
> of the trailers were converted to motors and the low-floor era in
> Pgh. was
> born.
>
> #2 would be extreme competition but after formation of PRC the highly
> unusual millenium leases of the underliers siphoned off profits. Many
> other items could 'contribute' but the amount of contribution may be
> difficult to assess. Pgh City seemed highly hostile to PRC and thus
> obstructive. Trolleys were disliked early on but it is amazing
> that the
> same existed in Pgh. longer than elsewhere.
>
> I don't have a clue as to the rest.
>
>
> Time Period:
> 1930--1955 but please enclose info about the 3600s which were
> scrapped by 1928.
>
> * Pittsburgh inherited a hodge-podge mixture of equipment for
> which research would be far far more than tedious. This equipment
> was gone or totally phased out very early in this period. While
> these cars are interesting the low-floor and PCCs are the corporate
> identity. This helps to eliminate excessive work.
>
> * While PRC did order some new equipment very early on, the low-
> floor trailers also debuted early allowing low-floors to become the
> backbone of the system. The St.Louis-38s and Brill Interurbans
> were a variation on this theme.
> * PRC identity, all equipment save the PCCs, and infrastructure
> were well established by this time. PCCs delivered during this
> time frame.
> * During this time frame PRC was highly consistent in its
> operations which seemed to fall apart by 1960 forward.
> * There is a wealth of photos available on the inet from 1960
> forward; little is available before 1955 and certainly less before
> 1950. Most of us have memories, photos, booklets, experience of
> the 1950s forward; I want to 'see the unseen' to know the 'glory
> days' if such a term may be used. It was downhill at considerable
> speed in the mid-1950s with the spread of suburbia.
> * I don't understand the objection to the 'same paint livery;'
> that is the way it was. Up close roster shots are needed for car
> detail but 'Ed Miller' style photos of trolleys in their environs
> mutes the color objection, which is certainly not an objection
> personally. Car Barn shots are tedious; Dave's photos on the inet
> emphasizes that point. Professional designers were apparently used
> when the cars were built allowing for good aesthetics. As paint
> was simplified and design features compromised, the character of
> the cars changed for the worse in most cases. This accelerated
> markedly in the very late 1950s.
> * Roster photos don't need to come from the builder; the enclosed
> photo of 3709 could be used for such. It is dynamic, has real
> visual impact, is in service, location easily identified, not quite
> an Ed Miller style photo but trending that direction while still
> 'roster-quality;' action packed. (My apologies but I do not know
> the source of this photo.)
>
>
> History:
>
> Apparently hundreds of underliers were incorporated into PRC;
> reading such
> is not unlike 'Abraham begat Joseph and Joseph begat...' Good
> Grief, that
> gets old doesn't it. How much stock was issued for how many $$ and
> so on
> is of little interest. Regardless of articles of incorporation,
> politics, love / hate
> relationships, fire, famine, flood, and bankruptcies, PRC
> existed. I am
> interested in this 'existence.'
>
>
> The following interests me without specific order:
>
> * Equipment assignments - re-assignments
>
> * Routes
> * Track diagrams like the museum map.
> * Infrastructure
> * Schedules - frequencies - owl routes.
> * Safety decisions - derails, construction of trestles, equipment
> considerations.
> * Special operations like County Fair; I have gleaned some
> information from the archives. It amazes me that operators from
> Homewood and other remote PRC areas or lines would take cars on the
> Interurban to W.Library and back because operational
> characteristics are so different, or did operators change out at
> South Hills?
> * Where external policies like below significantly affect
> operations, this could be mentioned to add impact.Even more
> specifically I am interested in the PRC Interurban system
> which could be a book unto itself. South Hills lines follow that,
> then the
> West End because of its elusiveness and early demise relative to PRC.
> Regardless, the WE certainly lasted longer than trolleys in other
> cities.
> The East End because of its size and variety comes next followed
> by the North side.
>
> Other items could be included but it would seem that this covers
> most basics. It would seem a decade of work would be needed to
> complete such a project; at 76 I doubt I shall see the results.
>
>
>
> Phil
> Without a 'coast' but not a 'cause.'
>
> PS - Mr.Lybarger; I forwarded your roster comments to Mr.Holland,
> actually blind-cc. I am also blind copying this to a number of
> people
> who may be interested in a PRC book.
>
>
>
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: Edward H. Lybarger <trams2 at comcast.net>
> To: pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org
> Sent: Sunday, August 23, 2009 2:18:21 PM
> Subject: [PRCo] Re: PRCo Volumn 2
>
> And since John, together with Fred, are the only two on the list
> that I know have authored books and know what's involved,
> I would next ask: In what era?
>
> As for all the facts not being in, I will discuss a couple examples of
> things I have learned in the last year or so. But I'll put them as
> exam
> questions, to see if it was just me who was behind the times!
>
> 1. What was the real history behind the development of the low-
> floor car
> (Fred is disqualified to comment on this question, since he and I
> had a
> discussion on the matter last Friday!)?
>
> 2. Why did the corporate entities comprising the streetcar company
> serving
> Pittsburgh never have a chance of being financial successes?
>
> 3. What was the 49-Year Agreement with the City of Pittsburgh?
> Did it
> affect the railway company's future well-being?
>
> 4. Why was the Traction Conference Board essential to the
> reorganization of
> the railway company?
>
> 5. Why couldn't Pittsburgh Railways change a routing whenever it
> wanted to?
>
>
>> From: Ed Lybarger <trams2 at comcast.net>
>> Reply-To: Pittsburgh Railways Group <pittsburgh-
>> railways at dementia.org>
>> Date: Sun, 23 Aug 2009 12:13:34 -0400
>> To: Pittsburgh Railways Group <pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org>
>> Subject: [PRCo] Re: PRCo Volumn 2
>>
>> "Nothing is impossible to the person who doesn't have to do the
>> work."
>>
>> Are we wanting a history or a railfan book?
>
>
>
>
>
>
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