[PRCo] Re: Pittsburgh Railways Interurban

[Derrick Brashear]

On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 5:17 PM, Schneider Fred <fwschneider at comcast.net>wrote:
> Wikipedia shows all sorts of stuff but it falls flat with things that
> are controversial because anyone who doesn't like what is in
> Wikipedia can edit it themselves.
>

Sorta


> Something that is wrong can be
> corrected.  Then made incorrect by a zealot to make himself feel
> good.   Be recorrected.   Be uncorrected again.
>

Yup


>  And on and on
> forever.


Nope. After a while the article gets locked and goes to arbitration.



>  If you were to look up Los Angeles City in Wikipedia, you
> would probably get some pretty decent information because it really
> isn't something that is arguable.   It's a great place to get
> population numbers.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles
>
> But it is not a good place to get information on something like
> National City Lines, for example, because there are a lot of people
> who still wish to penalize General Motors for things they really did
> not do.   You will notice that the NCL page was last modified just
> eight weeks ago ... not a good sign for a business that essentially
> closed four decades ago.  It's sphere of influence ended when the
> federal government started providing dollars for transit in the late
> 1960s, although NCL continued in some cases to stick around to
> provide management services after that.   Houston was a case where
> they sold the business to an authority just a handful of years after
> they bought it but continued to run it for the county ... for a
> while.   ATA did the same thing in Harrisburg PA.   Was that bad ...
> well, it wasn't too many years afterward that GM went out of the bus
> business anyway so it was academic that even a management company
> could favor them.
>
> How good is the NCL write up?   First thing I notice is the claim
> that Cleveland and Detroit were NCL properties.  Huh?  To the best of
> my knowledge both were among the very earliest publicly owned transit
> agencies ...  Detroit Department of Street Railways completed its
> takeover of Detroit United Railways by May 15, 1922 (that's nineteen
> twenty-two).
> Cleveland Railway sold their system to the city on April 28, 1942.
> I think the only other big systems that were public before Cleveland
> were Seattle Municipal Railway and the city take over of Boston
> Elevated Railway.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_City_Lines
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_streetcar_scandal
>
> There is no sense trying to tell anyone that NCL was simply vertical
> integration of the industry similar to General Electric owning
> trolley lines and power companies in 22 states because the railfans
> would not want to hear that ... it would be scandalous to tell them
> their favorite industry did the same thing that the industry that put
> their toys out of business did.
>
> If you want to see what General Electric owned, look up Electric Bond
> and Share Co.   EBASCO was the GE subsidiary that owned the power and
> light and trolley companies.   In Pennsylvania, it owned Pennsylvania
> Power and Light Company (today's PPL Utilities), United Gas
> Improvement Corporation (today's UGI Utilities), Lehigh Valley
> Transit, Williamsport Passenger Railways, Jersey Shore Electric
> Street Railway and Conestoga Transit Company.   Included in that list
> were the 4th and 6th largest railway companies and a total of about
> 500 miles of track and that was just one of almost half the states in
> the United States where EBASCO owned railways.   EBASCO was the
> principal reason why Roosevelt campaigned in the late 1930s for the
> Public Utilities Divesture Act.   But don't tell that to the railfans.
>
>
>