[PRCo] Re: Cleveland Subway Tours

[Schneider Fred]

Do crews on the Red Line work through from the Airport to  
Windermere?  Where do you report on and off?   At the shop perhaps?    
Or Cleveland Union Terminal?   Are all reliefs at the same point on  
the line?
Does not having any clearance issues (such as you would have running  
a car or driving a bus on a city street) make the job unchallenging  
to the point of boredom?

After running PCCs and driving buses for years where you interfaced  
with the public, what is it like to be sequestered into little box in  
the corner of a car with no one to talk to?   I guess you just have  
to bring a cell phone along so you can text your friends!

For God's sakes, don't take that seriously.

But the question about what is it like to be hidden away is a valid  
psychological question.

I was talking about 35 years ago to a BART instructor (My God, has it  
been that long) who was telling me about a train attendant they had  
hired.   I do not know if he is still even living.   Probably not  
because I have not see the name mentioned in years and he wasn't  
young then.   He was a railfan but I had better not mention the  
name.   Lets totally disguise it and call him Sergio.   Well Sergio  
was used to running subway trains in Manhattan.   Then when he  
started with BART there were apparently some emotional problems  
because all he had to do was look out the cab window, make sure no  
one was getting caught in the doors, and the push the door close  
button.   Then the train would run itself.   I believe he had come to  
the job from San Francisco Municipal Railway and then left BART and  
went back to Muni because he was simply unable to reconcile himself  
with doing nothing more than walking back and forth across the cab  
for eight hours and pushing the start button.

In other words, you wrote some nice pieces for us before ... I'll  
remember, "He should have taken the $50.".... so I'm asking you to  
tell us what it's like to run a subway train in Cleveland.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

And something else you might want to tell us when you are in the mood  
to write a long epistle and would be the differences in being a  
transit operator today versus when you first started and how those  
differences work for or against the individual driving the vehicle.

I'll give you some thoughts as a lead in:  In 1915 the fastest way to  
get an injured farm worker to the hospitals in Lancaster was to put  
him on a trolley car.  That sort of thing was written up in the  
newspapers.  At that, everyone who went to work in town either  
walked, had his footman drive him there using the horse and buggy, or  
used the trolley.  By 1950, even in suburban Lancaster (city  
population 65,000, county about 250,000) Armstrong Cork Company had  
to schedule its work shifts around suburban bus schedules.   The  
working man was still on the bus.   I remember coming home one  
evening on the 5:00 Neffsville tripper, which preceded the 5:05  
Lititz.   Every suburban line had an extra even rush hour bus that  
went about half way out.  Some routes had even more service ... There  
was a Mountville tripper, followed by Columbia Local (express to  
Mountville), followed by a Columbia Express (first stop was in  
Columbia, 12 miles out).   All of the trippers were gone by 1954.   
But even through the 1950s, the bus riders represented some sort of a  
cross section of humanity.    Even my mother, a graduate of Carnegie  
Tech in Pittsburgh, regularly used the bus to go to town to shop.

Now, let's fast forward to about 2006.   I went in to the library to  
read old newspapers to ferret out more of the local trolley  
history.   A friend dropped me off and I came home on my Medicare  
card.   I think there were five people on the bus.   Two were talking  
about their experiences in prison.  I think I remember one old lady  
riding free.   There was some other character that I would not have  
wanted by daughter bring home to dinner.   And the lady driving the  
bus seemed to have an I. Q. about ten points lower than most of those  
that Conestoga Transportation used to employ back in the 1950s ...  
not surprising because the chief dispatcher told me he was just lucky  
if he could get warm bodies to drive his buses.

Are my observations about the users and the operators in anyway  
universal Herb?  Is this just a small city phenomena or is it  
something that even happens today in places like Cleveland?   How  
does it affect the operator who has to deal with the public?



I understand Herb that the questions I'm asking are are not typical  
railfan questions but then for 30 or 40 years I haven't approached  
this hobby the same way most people do.






On May 24, 2009, at 10:16 AM, Herb Brannon wrote:

> The next Detroit-Superior Trolley Subway Tour (featuring PATransit
> 4000-series (ex-1700-series) PCC) will be held Saturday, September 5,
> 2009 from 9am until 3pm. This year two tours are offered. I have been
> hard at work operating the GCRTA Red Line all week and failed to post
> the first tour of this year which was yesterday. Sorry.
>
> The tours are informational, fun, self-guided, filled with Pittsburgh
> trolleys, and exciting, especially when looking 300 ft down into the
> "Flats District" and the Cuyahoga River while standing on open grating
> in the center of the Detroit-Superior Viaduct.
>
> In September, if I am not at work running the electric cars, I will
> arrange for any members of "The List" to visit the Cleveland,
> Pittsburgh, and Chicago streetcars and interurban under the Terminal
> Tower before or after the subway tour. This is, as stated, providing I
> am not working that day. My "part-time" job operating the RTA Rapid
> Transit keeps me busier than when I was full-time.
>
>
>
> -- 
> Herb Brannon
> On America's North Coast
> WHERE PITTSBURGH TROLLEYS CAN BE SEEN
>