[PRCo] Re: Interurbans and Animals

[Schneider Fred]

Jerry:

A lot depends on the weight differential between the animal and the  
vehicle.

Hitting a water moccasin with a Florida East Coast freight train  
isn't even going to leave you with a decent snake hash dinner.

I suspect if I were to hit one of those ubiquitous deer that cross  
PTM's right-of-way with the Red Arrow center door car at Christmas  
time, the car might have some fur on it and some crying kids inside  
and that would probably be the extent of the damages.  A deer only  
weighs a few hundred pounds and that car frame was engineered for  
multiple-unit operation and the anticlimber is a foot high with a  
coupler underneath it.

On the other hand, there was a great story relayed to me by Harry  
Bortzfield back in 1963.   Harry was one of those people who started  
working for the trolley industry as a young man and was fired when it  
quit ... in this case he still relatively young.   The Lancaster and  
York Furnace Street Railway opened in 1903 and went out of business  
in October 1929.   All they had to do was smell the Depression coming  
and they were gone.    (They had a subsidiary company that ran cars  
to Hog Pen Station, south of Rawlinsville, from 1904 to 1908 and  
again from 1912 to January 1916.)

In the company's better years cars operated from a connection with  
Conestoga Traction Company in Millersville to Pequea every hour in  
the summer and every two hours in the winter.   The summer service  
was "needed" to haul fisherman and campers and people with summer  
homes down to the Susquehanna River.   The winter service was best  
described as an accommodation for ghosts.   In the final years they  
were down to every 90 minutes in the summer and 120 minutes in the  
winter.   That what you get when you build a trolley from nowhere to  
no place and back.   The trees outnumbered the people in that area by  
several thousand to one.

Well, Harry was describing a trip on a rainy fall night.   He came  
over a hill or around a curve and the headlight on the little single- 
truck wooden car picked up a bull standing on the track.   Now a bull  
isn't light weight.   It probably weighed 30% of the weight of that  
wooden trolley.   The bull was not about to be intimidated by a  
trolley car.   It stood its ground.   Harry blew the whistle and  
stomped repeatedly on the gong.   The bull just looked at Harry and  
then turned around with its rear toward the car.   And Harry, in  
spite of his best efforts, was unable to stop.  Remember I said the  
trees outnumbered the people.   Well, you just don't stop a streetcar  
on leaf covered wet rails ... it's sort of like the skating rink at  
Rockefeller Center.   Harry summed up the incident by saying, "There  
was shit all over."   Knowing how fragile that car was, I suspect the  
bull may have been dead but the car was too.

By the way, in the good years, when it had its subsidiary company  
connection, it hauled a whopping 192,000 passengers a year.   That  
was before anyone knew what an automobile was.  But it only worked  
out to 1.32 people per car mile.

Fred Schneider


On Feb 12, 2009, at 9:35 AM, Jerry MATT Matsick wrote:

> Having had the opportunity to hang out on the tracks of the  
> Charleroi interurban line near Eldora, I know
> there were alot of "wild" animals in that area, I was wondering  
> have animals caused accidents or derailments on any of the PRCo  
> interurban lines?    Also here in Florida often "wild" fires near  
> RR tracks
> have suspended train operation, was that face by the PRCo trolleys?
> --
> From: Jerry "Matt" Matsick "PHD"
> Living without trust in God is like driving in
> the fog.
> -------------- Original message from Schneider Fred  
> <fwschneider at comcast.net>: --------------
>
>
>> Amazing..... that is the population of the city!!!!!!!
>>
>> On Feb 10, 2009, at 9:04 PM, Bill Robb wrote:
>>
>>> BobDietrich wrote:
>>>> I was in the middle of 300,000 Steelers fans last week and none  
>>>> were
>>>> behaving badly.
>>>
>>>> Don't knock the sport because of the actions of their "fans".
>>>
>>> Maybe the 300,000 were fans of something good happening for
>>> Pittsburgh rather than "sports fans."
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>
>
>