[PRCo] Re: Making sense of the PRC assignments....

[Dwight Long]

Fred

By the time of the 1952 car assignment list that we all have, there were no 3750s used on Rt. 23.  I don’t know when that stopped, but it was well before then.  In fact, only a few months later there would be no Rt. 23 west of Graham Loop on Neville Island.  So would it not make sense to group all the remaining 3750s together?  Their only remaining normal use was as trippers on the interurban lines, and that use had only a short remaining life span by the beginning of 1952.  The downward slide in business had already caused the removal of the low 3700s and the 3800s, all of which were scrapped a few months longer.  About the only time 3750s were really needed by 1952, that I can think of, was for Allegheny County Fair service in the summer. Non-rush hour Rt. 37 service, for which one could argue they were suited, was a thing of the past, and even when it had operated, it tended to be run by PCCs, not 3750s. After the interurban headways were cut from half hourly to hourly (in early 1953) there was no need at all for the 3750s.

Now as to their use on Rt. 23, when they were so used, use of Tunnel Car House actually would result in much less stem time than Ingram would have for afternoon runs, and for morning runs the difference was not great and the operating conditions were superior coming from Tunnel.  This assumes they were operated out of Tunnel when used on Rt. 23.  

By 1952 the MU equipment had long ago been removed from these cars.  I do take your point, however, about the remote control remnants of it being different from a K controller. That does make sense both from a parts and an operator’s point of view. 

Dwight

From: Fred Schneider 
Sent: Friday, 17 February, 2012 19:41
To: Pittsburgh Railways 
Subject: [PRCo] Making sense of the PRC assignments....

By the way, for those who want to make sense of the PRC car assignments, one thing that always bewildered me was the assignment of the 3750 series to Tunnel.   You will see that on that 1952 list that has been cited on the list a little while ago.

The high 3750s were fitted with left front doors for use on Sewickley.   The logical barn would have been Ingram.   The crews worked out of Ingram.   The low 3750s were used as extra cars on the interurbans.   Once in a while one would run all the way through to the far end of one of the interurban lines.   Bill Vigrass accidentally was tortured by one on his grand loop on the West Penn and Pittsburgh Railways when he found one waiting for him at Roscoe to take him back to Pittsburgh in the late 1940s.   

OK, I can understand keeping MU cars together because the controls are identical and non MU cars together.  Makes a lot of sense. But why keep all the 3750s together just because they were 3750s?    Was it done simply to keep them in a barn with MU cars?  

No.   Ingram was filled with 4200s (HL control), 4344 on Schoenville (Don't know what it had and it probably doesn't matter), 26 cars from the 5000s, the lone remaining 5100, and 6 5200s ... all MU.  So why did the 3700s have to be in Tunnel when their operators worked out of Ingram?   And why were there a mixture of 5500s at Ingram too?   

Tunnel had all the 3750s and a mix of 4800s (K), 4900s (same), 5000s (HL), 5200s (HL), and 5400s (HL).   

Was there an every so slight difference in the window sash perhaps that made the company say we want to keep them all together?   Or a minuscule difference in seat cushions?   There may have been a logical reason for keeping them all together.   Or perhaps there wasn't....
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Must behavior always be rational?   I may have cited this before and if so, I apologize.   Back in the 1970s, Howard White, who edited Headlights magazine with me for many wonderful years, called one morning to ask "What portion of management decisions are valid or good?"  He had been reading some study which showed that about 58 or 59 percent of the corporate decisions in a well managed, top flight company were good and 41 to 42 percent were flawed.   The corollary was that in a bad company ... one heading for bankruptcy ... 47 or 48 or 49 percent of the decisions were bad and only 53, 52 or 51 percent were good.   There was plenty of room for mistakes in any company, good or bad, and abundant room to question, why the hell are we doing this.
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One of my favorite examples of things we do that are wrong came out when I was working on the PCC books.   I was looking at pictures of the Los Angeles PCC truck and I failed to see a whole lot of difference between the trucks on the P, P1 and P2 class (air) cars and the trucks on the P3 class (all-electrics) except that they no longer needed the the mounting hardware for brake shoes and they had to add a place to mount the drum brake solenoids.   I was discussing this issue with Dave Garcia, the air brake guru at Orange Empire.    Dave explained that for years the parts department at South Park Shops in Los Angeles kept the truck parts for the P3 cars segregated from the parts for the air cars.   Then he showed me a letter from the head of LATL engineering or shops  essentially saying, "hey guys ... the trucks are identical ... why are we wasting time keeping separate accounts for parts and separate bins?  It's costing us money."   

Is there any reason to believe they were alone?
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Now lets go back to Pittsburgh.   They had a very rational system of keep cars separated as much as realistically possible by barns in order to minimize to a reasonable degree having different parts scattered all of the system.   You don't want windows for all class of cars in every barn if you avoid it because windows are often broken.   You don't want multiple control types in a variety of barns if you can avoid it.   If the controls behave differently, perhaps you don't want two different designs in the same barn confusing operators because that can lead to more accidents and more claims and more lost money.   But even in the best system, yes, we can have unexplained differences.   

But some of this is simply railfan (rail fanatic) material.   The sun will still come up tomorrow whether or not we know about which 4300s were at Keating on June 12, 1951 or why there there might have been Westinghouse PCCs on Fineview.
Sometimes you can put this using deductive reasoning applied to the car assignment sheets.   Sometimes you can't.  And looking back, probably doesn't matter.

There were many stories about the two schemes, both negative and positive.   Westinghouse was easy to fix.  In order to work on the GE commutator controller, you had to remove it from the car.   Pittsburgh, I was told, designed a portable lathe that could be used to true the controller commutator segments on the car without having to remove it ... maybe that resulted in them liking it more than some other people ... but you still end up with dirt down your neck while working on it.    Ed Allen, who worked for Shaker Heights, was very positive.   He told me if he had a problem with a car, he would call GE and they would a man in Cleveland the next day.  He thought those people in Erie were great.    A SEPTA shop foreman told me he liked the GE cars far better than the Westinghouse cars ... then I counted the cars in his shop and found the ratio of GE cars in his shop was twice as high as the Westinghouse cars on the roster ... perhaps he liked them because of job security?   !