[PRCo] Interagency cooperation

[Fred Schneider]

I'm going to carry this issue of inter-company work even farther....
We tend to think in terms of what Pittsburgh Railways did or what Chicago Surface Lines (one of many Insull properties) but sometimes when you find corporate documents, you discover that collectively several companies behaved as one.  

What I am listing is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg.   Try to think how railfans despise National City Lines and then picture their favorite companies doing the same things they blame NCL for doing.   For example, EBASCO properties were expected to buy all their light bulbs and generators and motors and transformers from Generous Electric.  

Here in Lancaster, Pennsylvania the president of Conestoga Traction Company until 1929 was William Walton Griest.   He was also a state senator.   Until last year, the tallest building in town was named after Griest (it's only the second tallest today).    But Griest was more than just the president of CTC.   He was the president of the Lancaster Division of Lehigh Power Securities, which included the Lancaster division of Pennsylvania Power and Light Company and United Gas Improvement Company.

There was actually a fourth corporation in Lancaster that maintained the Griest Building and then billed the others according to their proportion of the space they used to cover heat, water, elevator operators, maintenance, snow removal, taxes, mortage and other building costs.   

Now how far did the cooperation between the companies extend?  I really do not know all the intricate intertwined relationships but I can give one graphic example.   Until 1931, when the power/gas/trolley companies were split apart here, the linemen on all the line cars and line trucks were on the payroll of the power company while the motorman and the truck drivers were on the payroll of the traction company. 

***** Does this give any of you the hint that the steam shovel you were looking at doesn't necessarily have to belong to the guy using it? ******    

Now to carry this a bit farther, it helps if you comprehend that most of the trolley companies were created at a time when there were no power companies.   Therefore they had to generate their own power.   Eventually many railways formed subsidiary companies to sell power because electricity was more profitable than hauling passengers.  Some simply established their own billing departments instead of subsidiary companies.  The only large company in Pennsylvania that didn't have a power subsidiary was Philadelphia Rapid Transit.

The second largest company was Pittsburgh Railways.   We already ascertained that Duquesne Light and Equitable Gas were part of that chain.
By the way, Market Street Railway in San Francisco was also part of that group.

Third largest was West Penn Electric Company in New York.   Under it we have West Penn Railways, West Power, Wheeling Traction, Monongahela Power, Monongahela - West Penn Public Service (the trolleys in Fairmount, Clarksburg, Parkersburg, Marietta), Potomac Edison Company, Hagerstown and Frederick Railway and in eastern Pennsylvania, the Chambersburg, Greencastle and Waynesboro St. Ry.   Actually only West Penn Railways was third.   I grouped everything in the holding company together. 

The fourth and fifth largest companies tended to flip/flop back and forth depending on the year you observed them:

One was Reading Traction and Light Company ... it's power subsidiary became Metropolitan Edison Company.   RememberGPU Nuclear, those fine people who brought you the meltdown at Three Mile Island.   That's the company.   RT&L's trolley empire originally stretched from northwestern Philadelphia to Reading to Lebanon.  It had over 200 miles of route.

The other in with also over 200 miles of route was an Electric Bond and Share property (General Electric owned EBASCO).   It was Lehigh Valley Transit Company.   The power affiliate was Pennsylvania Power and Light Company.   LVT and PP&L fell under Lehigh Power Securities Corporation, which in turn was under EBASCO.

The sixth largest was was Lehigh Power Securities' Lancaster Division ... PP&L, CTC, UGI.   Briefly Lancaster, Ephrata and Lebanon St. Ry. was also included.   PP&L bought the power customers of the Lancaster and York Furnace St. Ry. but didn't care to buy a railway that ran from no place to no where serving no one.  

Williamsport Passenger Railway; Jersey Shore Electric Street Railway; Lykens & Williams Valley were also all under Lehigh Power securities and in the PP&L footprint.   

New Castle and Sharon were Penn Ohio Public Service properties ... the power company was over in Ohio.

Altoona and Logan Valley was controlled by American Electric Power Company; the local affiliate today is Pennelec.   Scranton Railway was also an AEP affiliate.   So was Wilmington and Philadelphia Traction Co. (which included Delaware Electric Power Co. and Southern Penna. Traction Co.).   

York Railways was the power company in York.   They were owned by Sam Insull's Middlewest Utilities in 1939.   The railway planned in 1938 to rebuild a lot of worn out street track within the city and someone took the case before the PUC which ruled they could not use power profits to defray railway losses.   West Penn, on the other hand, could because they owned stock in the power company.  That was legal.   But if you simply sold power without the isolation of a separate company through stock ownership, the PUC held that was illegal.   That forced York Railways out of the streetcar business.   Insull's empire went broke.   Metropolitan Edison picked up the carcass.  A separate company was formed to run buses.    Now if you are the power company and the railway; how does a railfan maintain a roster of equipment?   Do we list line trucks used for maintaining wires going to the Jones Farm?  

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I think what you guys are dealing with here is simply that the railfans preserved lists of those things they cared about ... cars on steel wheels.  

Since they didn't care about the rest of the stuff, no one remembers.