[PRCo] Another guy complaining...

Sun May 11 17:10:35 EDT 2014

Yes, I did miss the Baltimorons … their last cars only lasted 19 years … 1944 to November 1963.  But I guess that's close enough to 20 years for govmint work.

Dallas cars for LVT?   Sounds like some dream that AWM would perpetrate.   Do we really think a company that has not bought a new car since then ten 950s in 1930 and could only afford other peoples' castoffs were going to buy PCCs in 1945?  

Not St. Louis.   Remember that they sold off the postwar cars first because they had a little value.   By the time NCL was sold to BiState, all that was still running were some of the 1941 order.  The 1947 order was in San Francisco, Tampico and where else???

Los Angeles?  I really do not know enough to jump in with both feet.  We know that LAMTA was founded in 1951 to develop plans and it took over LATL (the NCL property) in 1958.   By 1964 it was "virtually bankrupt" and was superseded by Southern California Rapid Transit District.   Ah, Washington passed the Urban Mass Transit Act of 1964 that same year which provided 2/3rds of all funding would come from Washington to take over the local bus / trolley companies and buy new vehicles, etc.   The federal dollars eventually got up to 80 percent.   

Did NCL get out because they wanted out?   Because they were crowded out?   Because they simply thought, this might be the time we'll get the best money back on our property?  Dwight, I do not know.   

I do know that this was a period when the evening newspaper in L. A. was catering to its advertisers … the car dealers, real estate agents, home builders, suburban shopping centers.   The newspaper was encouraging people to move to the suburbs.    I have revenue numbers by year for PE but not for LATL.   I do know the trolleys focused on downtown and the growth was in the suburbs.   

We know LATL got rid of a lot of the weakest routes right after the war and then had another huge purge about 1954-1955.  What was left after that was only a handful of lines … let's see what I can remember … W, V, J, S, R, P … did I get them all?   S was the only one using non-PCC cars.   P (West Pico - East First) was the heaviest line and a chunk of it is running again as the Gold line.

What has happened since 1963 is that the city has slowly grown (from 2.5 million people to 3.8 million) but L. A. County has exploded from 6 million to 10 million.  So in the last fifty years, the area outside the city has grown by more than the number of people who were in the city in 1960 … helps to explain why the light rail, which really serves the suburbs today, is so successful.   AND IF YOU STILL DON'T GET IT, DRIVE THE FREAKING SANTA MONICA FREEWAY OR THE LONG BEACH FREEWAY IN THE EVENING RUSH HOUR.   Makes Pittsburgh's Parkway West look like a walk in the park.   

On May 11, 2014, at 4:02 PM, Dwight Long wrote:

> 
> 
> Fred
> 
> Not to be unduly querulous, but I would say that the Flying Fraction WAS an east end line--especially the route 77 portion of it.  the 54 portion is marginal, but if you consider Oakland to be east end, then it was also.
> 
> I don't know the history of the extra fare zones on the long routes to the east.  I just know they existed during the time I rode PRC cars in that territory, and I know how they worked.
> 
> I assume the reason that 12 was kept for so long is because someone in the PRC office nourished a forlorn hope that someday the Harmony Route would realize the foolishness of its ways and would restore rail service out that way. :)
> 
> I know nothing about 22 being free.  The only times I ever used it I either paid cash or transfer.
> 
> Yes, you missed Baltimore. Or were their last cars delivered during the war?  (I'm not where your book is!)  You also missed Kansas City, probably because of their refusal to accept post-WWII standard standee window cars.  Were you including IT in St. Louis?  Louisville took delivery of at least some of their order and actually operated one of them for a short distance, but never in revenue service.  I think the post war cars in St. Louis just barely made 20 years--except that most all of them had been sold elsewhere by that time.  That brings up another point.  While it is true that the post war cars you cited, for the most part did not make twenty years on the systems that bought them, they DID last twenty years or more as most if not all were sold for use elsewhere.  LA's and St Louis's probably would have made the big 2-0 had not NCL sold out to transit authorities, and Washington's surely would have had not politics reared its ugly head.  Lastly, can anyone on this list verify or refute the story told by a prominent Philly area traction "expert" that the Dallas cars were originally authorized by ODT for LVT, but that property was too cash poor (account a series of wrecks on the Bell route) and sold the rights to Dallas? 
> 
> Dwight
>  ----- Original Message ----- 
>  From: Fred Schneider 
>  To: Western PA Trolley discussion 
>  Sent: Sunday, May 11, 2014 3:18 PM
>  Subject: Re: [PRCo] Another guy complaining...
> 
> 
> 
>  1)   Lougee was inconsistent.   They included 26 and 34 in with 25 Island Avenue.   Then they split 66 from 64 and 69 from 68.   Not my fault.    Consultants were no better then than some of them are today.
> 
>  2)   I said most were east end.   Eight of the heaviest ten were east end … routes 10/11/15 (again they put 11 in with them) and 77/54 were not.  
> 
>  3)  Yes, some of those East End lines had a second zone but I don't know if they did for their entire life or only at certain times.   I thought about that and ignored it because I didn't know enough to stick my food deep into my mouth.  My memory was telling me that McKeesport had zones when they had that short lived permit card in the 1950s.
> 
>  4) And you did not give me four points.   But one you should have mentioned and didn't.   Was there a period when route 22 was free?   Or was it just always pay enter when everything else was pay leave downtown.   It looked like the strongest money maker in the system …. UNLESS THEY WERE LARGELY TRANSFER RIDERS.  Again, there are too many factors we do not know.
> 
>  Obviously, a few of the marginal routes based on passengers per route mile could easily have come out significantly better if we looked at them in terms of revenue per car hour.     
> 
>  For example … Dormont (the old route 42) ranked 21st out of 65 lines in raw numbers of passengers carried and 13th in terms of passengers per mile but it was also going to come out pretty good in terms of revenue per car hour because most of that line was on private right-of-way.   Routes 2 and 3 were mid range in raw passenger counts and Millvale was average and Etna was below norm when we adjust it to mileage but if we adjust it to hours, they might have come out better because parts of E. Ohio Street were rather fast.   Same thing might apply to some of those West End lines.
> 
>  But I do marvel, Dwight, at how some lasted as long as they did … like 12 Evergreen, which ranked 52 out of 65 in raw passengers and worst of all adjusted to miles.  Why did they keep that going into late 1953 for a few hundred people a day?   Or was the rail so new that they ran it just to keep the rail in the rate base?  
> 
>  Of course the whole industry made a lot of insane decisions in the late 1940s thinking riding came back in the war and they could keep in … they didn't understand they only had riders because the car owners were forced to garage their machines because of gas rationing.   Think how many cities bought PCCs after the war thinking they needed them … only to sell them off for scrap within a decade (Minneapolis, Detroit, Louisville -- didn't event take delivery, Cleveland, Chicago, Birmingham, Los Angeles, Dallas, St. Louis, Washington).   Did I miss any?   All of those I listed didn't last 20 years.   
> 
>  On May 11, 2014, at 2:44 PM, Dwight Long wrote:
> 
>> 
>> Fred
>> 
>> Some points: 
>> 
>> 1)  By the methodology you used for other routes, Rt 69 was a cutback of 68 so the ridership should have been included in that line's figures.
>> 
>> 2)  Since when was 10/15 an East End route!!!!????
>> 
>> 3)  The really long East End routes did have zone fares--don't know how you equate that, though, unless you have revenue rather than ridership figures per route.
>> 
>> Dwight
>> ----- Original Message ----- 
>> From: Fred Schneider 
>> To: Western PA Trolley discussion 
>> Sent: Sunday, May 11, 2014 12:55 PM
>> Subject: [PRCo] Another guy complaining...
>> 
>> 
>> Another guy complaining because other routes have more service than the route he uses.   The link leads only to the editorial page; you will have to scan down until you find the headline reading "Greenfield Car Line Service Criticized."
>> 
>> http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=mvUaAAAAIBAJ&sjid=40wEAAAAIBAJ&pg=4977%2C2388619
>> 
>>  And now guys … the facts.    Again we are bitching because another line has more people riding and requires heavier service.   The guy complaining was riding the lightest hauling line coming up 4th Avenue so wouldn't we expect the company to dispatch the least number of cars?    And wouldn't we expect the newspaper to print something that would stir up the dirt?  Sure as God made green apples … because stirring the dirt sells papers.   
>> 
>> The heaviest car line on Fourth Avenue?   … Route 68 had a weekday average load of 28,200.   Of course that was influenced by summer weekdays at Kennywood.
>> 
>> Second heaviest would be 55 East Pittsburgh via 2nd Avenue and it's short turn, 57 Glenwood.  The typical weekday load was about 25,000.
>> 
>> Third was route 56 McKeesport with a normal weekday volume of about 22,000 riders.
>> 
>> O. M. G. … those three routes on 2nd Avenue added up to more than PATCO was hauling between Philadelphia and Lindenwold in its prime and they were running long trains in the rush hours!   
>> 
>> Fourth would be route 64 East Pittsburgh via Wilkinsburg and its short turn 66 Wilkinsburg via Forbes.   The two of them hauled almost 13,000 fares on weekdays.
>> 
>> Then we have route 67 to Rankin and Braddock with 18,300 followed by the Carrick car he mentions with 18,100 fares.
>> 
>> Next to the lowest was 69 Squirrel Hill carried about 6800.
>> 
>> Finally, his line carried fewer than 6,500.  One would expect about 24 cars to come down 4th Avenue on other routes for every car on this character's line.
>> 
>> Why?   Because he lived on a line 5 miles long with the only population at the top of the hill near the outer end of the line.   The inner four miles was wedged in between the B&O and the mills or in a ravine heading up the hill to Greenfield .. not much there to stimulate riding from his 'hood.   
>> 
>> And he thinks a bus company would want to serve that 'hood?   Maybe every 20 minutes then or every hour today.
>> 
>> Now guys … if you want to print and save the story, it is attached as a old style word file.     And if you want the route data, also attached is an Excel file showing all that information from the 1948 Lougee study.    I have added several addition columns to the basic Lougee data.
>> 
>> One ranks the routes by the raw number of passengers.
>> 
>> But just because we haul people doesn't mean we make money.   So I also added a column for passengers per route mile, which is an important number when we are not charging zone fares.   And then an additional column ranking the routes according to passengers per mile.   
>> 
>> That shows that the heaviest routes are, as we always understood, mostly those long East End lines like 88, 82, 87, 68, 77/54, 55, 56, 75, 94 and 10/15 in that order.   But those that hauled the most per mile were 22, 85, 88, 50, 82, 59, 44, 53, 94 (95) and 8 in that order.   You really didn't expect to see that Homestead - Homeville shuttle, now did ya?  Sixth heaviest on a car-mile basis.  
>> 
>> Of course the worst routes were … well, you look at it.
>> 
>> A third array of data I wish I had but have no way of calculating would be passengers carried per car hour.   Naturally it probably would not be too impressive on routes like 55 and 88 where you are just slogging along.
>> 
>> Nuff B. S.    
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
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