[PRCo] Re: PRCo Oil City

[Dwight Long]

Fred

Pennzoil has certainly had a long and tortured history, being sought after and passed from major oil company to major oil company ever since its days as South Penn Oil (not RailRoad) back in the Rockefeller years.

I wonder what Joe Jamail’s reaction was when the sale of the company to Shell was announced!

Dwight

From: Fred Schneider 
Sent: Thursday, 16 February, 2012 20:50
To: pittsburgh-railways at dementix.org 
Subject: [PRCo] Re: PRCo Oil City

Not hard to see why the line went out of business is it?  I counted 33 houses within walking distance of the southern line between Oil City and Franklin.   The only thing on it to draw traffic was the park for three months out of the year.   And when the ice jam took out the Big Rock Bridge, there no reason to run the car line at all except for the park so the park was closed too.   

Another one of those great examples of trolley lines that should never have built like the few I put on line the other day.    

In 1900 Franklin had a population of about 7,000 people and Oil City was home to 13,000 and only 50,000 lived in all of Venango County.   By the time the line quit in 1928 ... well, let's use the 1930 census ... about 11,000 in Franklin and 22,000 in Oil City and 63,000 in the county.   The area peaked between the 1950s and 60s.   The county got up to 65,000.   Today Venango county is down to 55,000 just 10% more than it had in 1900.   The fortunes of the area were very much linked to the production of oil.   When it ran out, the economy went south.  In the 1950s Pennzoil was headquartered there; today it is a subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell (Shell oil) and its offices are in Houston.   Pennzoil closed its refinery at Rouseville, just north of Oil City, 13 years ago.   Bing Maps shows a huge empty wasteland where it used to employ hundreds of people.   I think Atlantic used to have a refinery in Reno on the other side of Oil City at one time.   

And thanks Ray for posting.   I had seen most of the trolley stuff but the views at Monarch Park were great finds.   

Many of the pictures came from Donald Slick.  I got a chance to visit with that gentleman at his home in Oil City back in the early 1960s and he nicely provided me with a lot of those pictures.   They are now in the PTM archive.   A very nice man.  I have no idea how old he was then ... I suspect he was in his 60s then (and I was in my early 20s).     He remembered and had ridden the cars.   

http://www.cardcow.com/c/65817/pennsylvania-oil-city/

If any of you saved old Railroad magazines, about 1950 or 1951, Slick wrote a piece on Cititzens Traction which Steve Maguire sent in to Freeman Hubbard for publication.   

On Feb 16, 2012, at 2:22 PM, Derrick Brashear wrote:

> USGS has them scanned as whole maps now.
> 
> On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 2:16 PM, robert netzlof <wb3iqe at rocketmail.com> wrote:
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: pittsburgh-railways-bounce at lists.dementix.org
>>> 
>>> Just a cool website. Also check out Monarch Park.
>>> http://www.oilcitypa.net/Oil%20City/trolley_images.htm
>>> 
>>> http://www.oilcitypa.net/Monarch%20Park/monarch_park.htm
>> 
>> Interested readers may also like to see:
>> 
>> http://historical.mytopo.com/getImage.asp?fname=oilc24nw.jpg&state=PA
>> 
>> and:
>> 
>> http://historical.mytopo.com/getImage.asp?fname=fran11ne.jpg&state=PA
>> 
>> Bob Netzlof a/k/a Sweet Old Bob
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Derrick
>