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

[Dwight Long]

John

See my earlier reply to Fred.  All 3750s off Sewickley by that time.

Date of the car house assignment list is 1 January 1952.

Dwight

From: John Swindler 
Sent: Saturday, 18 February, 2012 10:58
To: pittsburgh-railways at dementix.org 
Subject: [PRCo] Re: Making sense of the PRC assignments....

 
And what is the date of the roster??
 
And wasn't it the low 3750s that were fitted with left hand doors?  And how many 3750s were needed for Sewickley at that time??  Were any PCC cars assigned to Sewickley by 1952??
 
 
 

 

> Subject: [PRCo] Re: Making sense of the PRC assignments....
> From: fwschneider at comcast.net
> Date: Sat, 18 Feb 2012 10:29:10 -0500
> To: pittsburgh-railways at dementix.org
> 
> 22 June 1952
> 
> 
> On Feb 17, 2012, at 8:21 PM, John Swindler wrote:
> 
> > 
> > 
> > When was route 23 converted tobus??
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> >> Subject: [PRCo] Re: Making sense of the PRC assignments....
> >> From: fwschneider at comcast.net
> >> Date: Fri, 17 Feb 2012 20:03:53 -0500
> >> To: pittsburgh-railways at dementix.org
> >> 
> >> Flaw ... 5400s were K-35. Fifth paragraph. Typo. 
> >> 
> >> 
> >> On Feb 17, 2012, at 7:41 PM, Fred Schneider wrote:
> >> 
> >>> 
> >>> 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....
> >>> _______________________________________________________________________________________________________
> >>> 
> >>> 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.
> >>> ________________________________________________________________________________________________________
> >>> 
> >>> 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?
> >>> _________________________________________________________________________________________________________
> >>> 
> >>> 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? !
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