[PRCo] First Harmony Car Enters Pittsburg

Fri Nov 8 19:59:00 EST 2013

Not something, Ed, that the railfans want to hear because they often isolate themselves from the sacred scrolls.   Dollars and cents do not interest most of them.   

Years ago when I was editing Headlights magazine … we're going back 40 years … the co-editor called me one morning and asked me what percentage of business decisions I felt were valid.   Now I have to admit I really liked Howard White because he was the kind of man who would find time at work to read three newspapers before his break every morning … one really sharp, scholarly individual.   I do not know what business study he was reading that morning.

But the result showed that in a very well managed company …

     About 57 or 58 or perhaps at the very outside 59% of the decisions were valid and 41 to 43 percent were bad.

And in a company cruising for bankruptcy ….

    About 51 to 53 percent of the corporate policy issues were correctly thought out and 47 and 49 percent were flawed.  

I hung up the phone realizing that there was a lot of room for failure in almost any business.   

The Harmony route was not alone.  Maybe the only difference in many cases between being a Harmony Route or a Philadelphia Rapid Transit was just having the sheer dumb luck to be in the right environment in 1890 … and then you lasted seven years longer until the bankruptcy that wiped you out.  

On Nov 8, 2013, at 5:24 PM, Edward H. Lybarger wrote:

> You have to wonder how many other companies nationwide were built, like the
> Harmony Route, to satisfy the gigantic ego of the guy behind it.  It went
> the long way to Butler (and probably drew just enough traffic from the Short
> Line to render it insolvent); New Castle was a long way off and although it
> had people, not enough of them wanted to go to Pittsburgh.  In between was a
> lot of nothing, plus Evans City and Ellwood City.  Oh, yes, there was also a
> nice camping area along the Connoquenessing that Mr. Boggs favored.  He also
> favored the most expensive construction that could be had...only the best.
> 
> Mr. Boggs built the line with the expectation that everyone adjacent to it
> would come to his department store.  This just didn't happen.  David
> McCahill compounded the misery by acquiring the Short Line out of
> receivership in about 1919...now he had two companies that couldn't earn a
> living, and when the bonds came due, there was no money.  Some of the
> bridges sat for years after abandonment because no one could earn enough in
> scrap value to justify the labor cost of dismantling them.
> 
> Just another company that never should have been built.
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: pittsburgh-railways-bounces at mailman.dementix.org
> [mailto:pittsburgh-railways-bounces at mailman.dementix.org] On Behalf Of Fred
> Schneider
> Sent: Friday, November 08, 2013 4:05 PM
> To: Western PA Trolley discussion
> Subject: Re: [PRCo] First Harmony Car Enters Pittsburg
> 
> The scary thing is that they were set up to haul a maximum of 52 passengers
> per hour and we know they didn't even accomplish that.
> 
> What would they have had to have charged each rider in order to amortize all
> the fixed and variable costs?    My guess is somewhere in the 4 to 8 dollar
> range back in 1908 and they were probably charging a few cents a zone
> because that was what they could get.   
> 
> Rather than have mortgages like you and I do on our houses where you pay
> back part of the principle and interest every month, the interurbans
> deferred the principal until one huge balloon payment at the end.   They
> simply paid interest for 25 years (or whatever the term of years), and then
> had to come up with the principle and interest at the end.   They bargained
> on cheaper dollars thanks to inflation.   But when the time came . usually
> about 25 years later .. we were in the Great Depression and almost none of
> them had the money because they had never established adequate sinking funds
> to pay off the mortgage bonds and the fares were probably never high enough
> for the inadequate riding.   They also could no longer sell refinancing
> bonds because the public was not buying streetcar bonds to help broke
> interurbans in the 1930s.
> 
> So if we begin building the Harmony in 1906 and open in 1908 and then 25
> years later the bonds are due (I'm speculating that was the cause because it
> was in so many similar cases), we get to 1931 and we are in bankruptcy.  
> 
> Of course it sure didn't help that all the major highways had been paved
> between 1920 and 1930 and we now had over 1.5 million cars and light trucks
> on the state highways.   
> 
> Glad my grandparents didn't invest in those bonds for their retirement.
> 
> 
> 
> On Nov 7, 2013, at 2:54 PM, Bob Rathke wrote:
> 
>> Attached is from the Ross Twp. Historical Society - a scan of a newspaper
> article dated 11/2/1908. 
>> 
>> 
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