[PRCo] Re: Fred at OERM

[Fred Schneider]

Now in this, Derrick, why did it create a separate text file with nothing in it?   And nothing is missing either?


On Jul 1, 2010, at 3:12 PM, Fred Schneider wrote:

> For those curious minds, let's see if this single image will appear on Derrick's demented web list.   It's Fred standing in front of Los Angeles Railway 3001 inside a carbarn at the Orange Empire Railway Museum two weeks ago.    The photographer was John Smatlak.  
> Why two cameras?   I'm still taking slides with one Nikon.   The other is a D90.   This was the day before I was up in Las Vegas with Ken.
> 
> This was the car that appears in the old pictures with the young starlet Shirley Temple at age 9.   I never saw the picture, but my friend Donald Duke told me he had a picture of him playing with her in her basement when they were kids ... probably so because his mother was a teacher in one of the movie studio schools and Don claims he had some bit parts in some of the Little Rascals movies.   Shirley would have been a year older than Don.   The PCC was the first of the Los Angeles cars, 
> built in 1937.  The one on the far left was one of the wartime cars.   OERM also has one of the all-electric Big PCCs from LATL.   The two-tone yellow is the original Los Angeles Railway paint scheme; the Fruit Salad (yellow and olive and white) is the NCL version used on Los Angels Transit Lines cars.  
> 
> I have attached a second picture ... the modern version of East First Street service.   The photographer was Fred Schneider, the date was June 9th.   The first part of the Gold line opened from Los Angeles Union Station over the former Santa Fe passenger line through Pasadena to Sierra Madre Villa in 2003.   Then last November the southern part of the line opened out east First Street, Indiana and East Third in East Los Angeles.   Last Saturday they had a ground breaking to extend from Sierra Madre to Azusa.   An extension on the south end from East Third and Atlantic in East L. A. to Whittier is in the design phase.   
> 
> Why did the streetcars disappear and why are we bringing them back in Los Angeles?   When Pacific Electric began building tracks, they built  over open fields in a county with only a few hundred thousand inhabitants.    When the automobile appear, Los Angeles had less than a million people.   The auto took over and completed development.   By the middle 1930s PE was being squeezed out by the automobile ... there were only about 2.5 million inhabitants and most people in the small towns they served had a car.   PE as a commuter railroad that connected those small towns to LA.    Those people would rather drive.   When the PCCs came off Glendale in 1955, the county had about 5 million people.   When the last cars rolled to Long Beach, the county had about 6.5 million.   
> 
> Today Los Angeles County has just shy of 10 million people.   There isn't room to breath.   The freeways and streets are full.   The dream of an auto doesn't work.  The traffic backs up from one light to the next in the rush hour.   
> 
> You can see that the city that once spread out over the land ... where the tallest building was once the city hall that featured so prominently on television's Dragnet is now dwarfed by numerous much taller office buildings.
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> By the way, I threw out county population numbers.   Some of you are old enough to remember when LATL had that first wave of postwar streetcar abandonments because the fleet had so many old wooden cars.   NCL figured it made more sense to get rid of those 1905, 1910 wooden half-open, half-closed cars and replace them with modern buses about 1946.   Since then the city has doubled in population from about 2 million to almost 4 million people.   Part of that comes from annexing areas around it such as San Pedro; part comes from suburban farm areas within the city filling in like the entire San Fernando Valley and part comes simply because it did not loose people like eastern cities did.   Even the near in unincorporated East Los Angeles is more densely populated today than it was 40 years ago when the PCCs came off. 
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