[PRCo] Re: 4393 Versus 4366

[Fred Schneider]

Funny thing, Herb.  
Normally cars were segregated to barns in Pittsburgh by equipment.   We all knew which barns had GE PCCs and which had Westinghouse PCCs. 

The yellow cars had a similar scheme.   There were barns that had cars with K-35 or K-43 controls.   Then there were other barns that had cars with HL control.   Same as with the PCCs, the idea was to minimize parts inventory.   And, just like the PCC assignments, Homewood was totally mixed because it was right next door to the central parts room so it didn't matter.   

What is HL?   For those unfamiliar, HL was a Westinghouse remote control system, meaning the motorman's controller did not physically handle the 600 volt motoring circuits, it instead told a separate controller, usually mounted in a case under the car, what to do.   Westinghouse used low voltage lines between the platform controller and the motoring controllers.  In HL or AL, the L stood for Line voltage passed through a dropping resistor to get a low voltage control circuit.  In AB or HB, a battery was used for the control circuit.   The H stood for hand notching, a A for automatic progression.   Got it?   OK, now most Westinghouse schemes used pneumatic switches to control the actual 600 volt (or 1200 volt) circuits, and they we be mounted so that if you lost air, they would naturally open by gravity.   

General Electric favored solenoid (magnetic) switches instead of air (pneumatic switches). Almost all of the Westinghouse HL installations in Pittsburgh were really knock-offs of GE type M control ... they were low voltage (instead high voltage with GE favored) but they used solenoid switches instead of pneumatics.  The only possible exception (and I have never been able to prove this one way or the other), those 6000 series late 1920s experimental cars might have been pneumatic.

OK, which barns ... Keating was supposedly a drum control barn.   All of the single-end cars there in my memory were 4700s or 5500s in later years.    I made a stupid assumption that 4366 was therefore a K35 car.  Ooops.   I found a picture of it at 12 Evergreen and guess what?   I can see very clearly, the HL contactor box under the far end of the car.    What the blanket-blank caused them to mix cars at Keating unless it was the only car they had available to put there?  In the period up until 1951-52 when route 9 also worked out of Keating, it used a 4200 and all those low 4200s that were still active very late were HL cars also.  Roster pdf file attached.    This roster also confirms that 4366 was a HL car; 4393 was a K-35 car.   

Might be when we got to the very bitter end, it didn't matter.   If it worked, put it there.   



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