[PRCo] Re: Pittsburgh - Toronto Trolley Differences Explained

[Derrick Brashear]

On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 8:55 PM, Fred Schneider <fwschneider at comcast.net> wrote:
> I wonder if the $375 and $350 figures for track maintenance were showing, unwittingly, that the transit commission and the city were splitting the paving costs 48-52 and neither writer knew the whole truth?
>
> What Palmer chose not to say because it would have made Pittsburgh Railways look bad was that those long stretches of track to Etna and Millvale, to Castle Shannon, to Dormont, to Crafton were some the fastest track in the system.   In an industry where labor is half or more of your operating costs, increasing labor productivity by increasing speed of the car is a significant factor.   I suspect that the speed on East Ohio Street to Millvale and Etna was probably twice the average on Penn or Centre and perhaps three times faster than Forbes or 5th through Oakland.   If you move twice as fast, and labor is 50% of your costs, you can reduce your load factor by 25% and make the same money.
>
> I'm not going to touch the track maintenance costs because I'm clueless.   Obviously tearing up a street cost a fortune.   But uncreosoted ties on open track sure didn't last long either.   I suspect they could have actually spent as much or more trying to keep the track in one place on the hill around Boggs and Oak and Morse on the interurbans than the spent on Forbes or Fifth on track that stayed put.
>
> But Palmer was correct in his comparison of rail in Toronto in 1951 with Pittsburgh at the same time.   Almost all of the mileage in Toronto at that time was on streets in very tightly compressed neighborhoods with a very high riding habit.   A light route in Toronto (Long Branch or Mount Pleasant) probably hauled as many people per mile as a line like Dormont or Brookline in Pittsburgh.  The really heavy lines in Toronto (Yonge, King, Queen, Bloor-Danforth) were like subway lines and two of them are today.
>

I live in one of the tightest neighborhoods in the system.
Deliberately. We keep having service cuts. I went downtown briefly
today, not during rush. SRO.

Derrick