[PRCo] Re: Johnstown 362

[Fred Schneider]

And Dave Hamley explained that the accident damage happened at the museum in Illinois.   
Museums have several problems that probably result in a much high accident ratio than the street railway industry as a whole had ... just my hunch with no  statistics to back it up.    Museums really don't have good accident per mile stats to compare with the transit industry as a whole.  But we do know that a streetcar probably ran 30,000 miles a year in public service and an operator worked about 18,000 miles.   Interurban cars?   I suspect a car on the Indiana Railroad or the C&LE might have easily run up several hundred thousand miles in a year.  I remember Jim Shuman telling me of seeing a trainman in the morning about to leave Indianpolis for Louisville and then seeing the same man later that day getting on a car to pilot it on his second round trip of the day to Louisville.   That would be about 480 miles of running in one day!   In the depression he had to be glad just to have the job.   If you multiply that out to a full year, that is 149,760 miles of twirling a controller if he was forced to work 6 days a week with no vacations and no holidays.   

1.   Most museum operators work a few hundred miles a year or fewer.   If you want to get good, you need to work 18,000 miles a year.

2.   Most museum operators suffer with all sorts of control and brake schemes.   Even though I've never seen a drum controller that didn't wind up clockwise and wide off counterclockwise, you surely get confused when get something like an old K-8 at the Baltimore Streetcar Museum where the off position is at 4 o'clock instead of 1'oclock and the full parallel position is where your mind instinctively tells you the off position should be.    If you were working for Pittsburgh Railways, you would have had PCCs of one or two classes (and they behaved pretty much the same) and perhaps high speed yellow cars with the same controller and brake valve.  You couldn't get confused.  

Between the museums I work, I have K8, K35, K36, K63, PCM, PC, type M, HL which is really type M because that's what Pittsburgh wanted.   I've also run foot operated type PCM and hand VA and some other weird schemes like the Cineston on a Muni Bandit at Western.  Even PK at Branford.

Even worse are the variety of brake schemes in museums.   If you work at PTM you will be confronted with self-lapping straight air, manually lapped straight air (and with a variety of valves to the same thing but designed to confuse), and PCCs with air (1183) or all-electric.   But I also work in Baltimore, so add one more type of self-lapping straight air and cars with hand brakes.   I've also worked cars with dynamic braking drum controllers at National Capital (it might have been their Linz, Austria car) and a London double decker at Crich ... these are all similar to West Penn Railways had.   I also had two years on the payroll in engine service and almost eight more years as a brakeman at the Strasburg Rail Road so I do understand automatic air ... I've run steam engines, an MU car for 35 miles on the Pennsy mainline, a CA&E car at RTY and a PE Blimp at Orange Empire, all with automatic air.

3.    Today most of our museum operators come to us in their 40s, 50s, 60s.   It's a lot easier to train a man or woman to run a vehicle when they are 16, 17, 18 maybe even 25 than it is when they are 65.   They grasp concepts a lot more readily and retain them longer and better when they're young.

I'm really surprised that we don't have more accidents in our museums.   


On Jul 8, 2010, at 9:03 PM, John Swindler wrote:

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> Perhaps getting some cars from Trolleyville that once operated in the Chicago area had something to do with the storage space issue.
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> At one time car 362 was at RTY.
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>> From: fwschneider at comcast.net
>> Date: Thu, 8 Jul 2010 14:57:05 -0400
>> Subject: [PRCo] Johnstown 362
>> To: Pittsburgh-Railways at Dementia.Org
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>> Scott Becker got his name in the Johnstown Tribune Democrat yesterday. Seems the guys out at the Fox River Trolley Museum (Illinois) did not have enough storage space for their former Johnstown car. Becker found a home for it back in Cambria County. The links below lead to the story in the local papers. 
>> Thanks to Ed Havens of Tucson, Arizona who forwarded the links to Frank Pfuhler in Brooklyn who passed it my way. Ed is an old Philadelphia fan.
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>> http://tribune-democrat.com/local/x279770942/84-year-old-streetcar-returns-to-Johnstown
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>> http://tinyurl.com/2wz5kvg
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