[PRCo] Another comment on the PAT union pictures

[Fred Schneider]

I guess we all have our favorites.  

Bob liked the picture of the 1600 up on Mt. Washington because it showed the home where he grew up.   Wonderful reason.

My favorite is this one

http://atu85.org/v2/images/IMG_6284.jpg

Why?   Because in the 1950s I spent all my time going after those lines I knew were about to be converted to bus and, since my grandmother lived on the Norside, I have that blanketed.   So I got the west end, route 68, route 56, route 94, route 62 and as a consequence 87.   

But I missed most of the heart of the east end.  When PAT converted it, I was just out of college, had my first teaching job a wife and baby and simply didn't have the money to keep running across the state to photograph them.   And in the early 60s I was in college, again, no money.   So I missed all those great pictures in Wilkinsburg and Swissvale.   And the cars among those fabulous mansions on South Highland and 5th Avenue.   

Oh, I got a few pictures ...

You know how it is.   You know the scenes you have to get so you dash in, take the picture, and move on.   I have the car in front of the Carnegie Museum.   I got the Inverted Mine Shaft (U of P).   I got a few pictures at Penn and Highland while waiting one day for a 96 car.   

And I justified missing it by saying to myself that the equipment had become so derelict.   It wasn't the Pittsburgh Railways I wanted to remember.   I guess we all try to find internal justification for those things we can't do.

But there was so much that was missed and image 6284 is an example.

And it was taken so close to where I grew up in Penn Hills.   I probably drove by that intersection hundreds of times with my parents as a young boy.   It was in route to the family doctor.   It's Rebecca St. at Swissvale Avenue in Wilkinsburg.   (I have no idea what the huge church is down at Coal Street ... I suspect that as the population dropped, it lost its function and is something else today.)