[PRCo] Reading - Pgh. Press - March 1 thru 9.
Dwight Long
dwightlong at verizon.net
Wed May 21 16:48:56 EDT 2014
Fred
I believe that during the 1946 strike the Washington line operated only between Washington and Canonsburg. I don't know what the status of Charleroi was, but if it is true that WP supplied power to non-Allegheny County subs, they could have run between Elco loop in Roscoe and Riverview loop, or between Charleroi and Roscoe, or between Charleroi and Riverview. The Donora line could have run between Riverview and Donora. But I don't know if they did. Some research into the archives at Arden would no doubt disclose the answer.
Did paving projects also do in the outlying small operations? (Leave Wheeling Traction and M-WP out of this for the moment). I'm sure WP looked at the net present value of the estimated income streams if rail operations were continued, and compared this with the capital outlay required for the repaving. (obviously there were other issues to consider, but that is a simplistic way of looking at it). They MIGHT have put up the bucks for Crawford Avenue with consideration of all the factors. Or they might not have. They could have continued to operate south of Connellsville without Crawford Avenue, and that might have used enough power for their purposes in load balancing. I don't know. Certainly the fact that the issue never arose relegates all this to the area of supposition---------------------
Dwight
----- Original Message -----
From: Fred Schneider
To: Western PA Trolley discussion
Sent: Wednesday, May 21, 2014 1:18 PM
Subject: Re: [PRCo] Reading - Pgh. Press - March 1 thru 9.
I'll agree that there was no residential base load as we know it today … nothing but 25 or 40 watt light bulbs. We ironed or clothes by heating the iron on the kitchen stove. Furnaces were coal and often ductless … just a whole in the floor over the furnace all the way to the second floor so there was no fan load. Refrigerator? Well, GE began making them in 1930 and before that we used ice boxes although from the teens onward the commercial ice plants were often electrically powered instead of steam powered.
What was the industrial base load? What did mining use? What did the glass works and foundries and steel mills use? What about the local ice plants to make block ice for your ice boxes … they needed to run some pretty heavy ammonia compressors. And West Penn Power wasn't simply the railways' territory, it included Armstrong County, Washington County, some of the fringes of Allegheny County, Greene County
How fragile the railways were was impressed on me, Dwight, by the removal of the McKeesport city operations in the 1930s. That division of the company hauled more people any way you measured it than any other part of the system … more overall, more per route mile, more per man hour but as soon as the city of McKeesport said we are repaving the main drag down toward your carbarn and you are going to pay your share, West Penn abandoned service. As an aside, part of their base load included some Pittsburgh Railways substations … Tylerdale, Canonsburg, Thompsonville, Charleroi etc. Seems to me that in the 1946 Duquesne Light Strike and the 1936 flood, the interurbans and Donora and the Washington city lines continued to run.
Same thing happened when the borough of Youngwood had a paving project in 1939 … the back line had to go.
Those two incidents convinced me that if Connellsville had not redone Crawford Ave in the 1920s and gotten that out of the way, had such a project come up in the 1930s it would have wiped out the whole system because you could not have gotten to the shops.
On May 21, 2014, at 11:43 AM, Dwight Long wrote:
>
> Ed
>
> Not only would the write down have been deleterious to their stock values, it would in a much more practical sense have removed their ability to run their power plants at an efficient level. The railways provided the base load needed for efficient operation of them. It was not until the boom times (in electricity consumption, inter alia) after WW II that power demand in WP territory became high enough to take up a sufficient amount of installed capacity to make elimination of the rail demand an attractive thing.
>
> Also, I doubt that the railways, on a true net/net cash basis, lost money at least until the post war period. (individual lines were hopeless losers and got axed early on.) Of course an enterprise cannot sustain itself in the long run if it does not make a profit that includes not only positive cash flow but also coverage of depreciation, amortization, taxes and interest. So you are correct, the handwriting was on the proverbial wall not long after the Great War, and I believe WP management was fully aware of that. The way they executed gradual rundown of the transit assets was, IMHO, rather clever.
>
> Dwight
>
> From: Edward H. Lybarger
> Sent: Tuesday, 20 May, 2014 14:38
> To: 'Western PA Trolley discussion'
> Subject: Re: [PRCo] Reading - Pgh. Press - March 1 thru 9.
> Peak year for coal and coke was 1916. Clairton opened full time in 1918.
> Last year West Penn paid the bond interest out of the fare box was 1920. It
> all fits very precisely. The terminals were joint ventures with the power
> company, which eased the burden a bit. The 830s were part of a $400,000
> upgrade of AV Street Ry and were needed to convert to one-man operation.
>
> They didn't exactly know when they finished the system in 1914 what loomed
> on the horizon. And if they had dumped the railway company as soon as it
> became unprofitable in the fullest sense of the word, it would have killed
> the power company...the organization simply couldn't have taken that big a
> write-down and still been viable. But since Railways owned (in 1916) 100%
> of Power, it wasn't an issue to subsidize one from the other.
>
> Ed
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: pittsburgh-railways-bounces at mailman.dementix.org
> [mailto:pittsburgh-railways-bounces at mailman.dementix.org] On Behalf Of Fred
> Schneider
> Sent: Tuesday, May 20, 2014 11:01 AM
> To: Western PA Trolley discussion
> Subject: Re: [PRCo] Reading - Pgh. Press - March 1 thru 9.
>
> Yup. I chuckled two about Mitchell making it one of the most modern
> transportation companies in the country. Maybe up to the early 1920s until
> the public quit riding.
>
> But we also know that the mines were already fading in 1910 when West Penn
> built their last routes. If memory is working, it was about 1910 that the
> Clairton by-product recovery plant was built and that killed a lot of the
> beehive coke ovens along the West Penn.
>
> The last investment was around 1927-1930 . the new terminals in
> Connellsville, Uniontown and Greensburg and the attempt to get the cars off
> some of the busiest downtown streets in Uniontown. The 800 series cars for
> the Allegheny Valley were quasi-modern, meaning sealed gear boxes and 300
> volt motors but the brake and control package was anything but modern.
>
>
> On May 19, 2014, at 8:40 PM, Dwight Long wrote:
>
>>
>> Fred
>>
>> I love the part about Mitchell helping to make West Penn one of the most
> modern transportation companies in the country!
>>
>> I think Federal pre-emption of local ordnances came as a result of lots of
> similar things to the McKeesport fiasco.
>>
>> Dwight
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: Fred Schneider
>> To: Western PA Trolley discussion
>> Sent: Monday, May 19, 2014 8:07 PM
>> Subject: [PRCo] Reading - Pgh. Press - March 1 thru 9.
>>
>>
>> The Pittsburgh and West Virginia Terminal fire .. look in March 22, 1946.
> The fire happened over night Mar. 21-22.
>>
>> Philadelphia Company wins delay
>>
>>
> http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=E1MbAAAAIBAJ&sjid=1kwEAAAAIBAJ&pg=3000%
> 2C15764
>>
>> No page forward to page two, same edition. Bottom of column one. Look
> at that picture at the bottom of the first column of
>> the clothing department in Albert J. Mannsmann's department store in East
> Liberty. Hard to believe a neighborhood department store when we don't
> even have them downtown in our cities any longer.
>>
>> The next link is two columns over to the right . same page. I put this
> in for Ed Lybarger. AFL and CIO are battling over who should represent the
> employees at Champion Stores, the company store for Pittsburgh Consolidation
> Coal Company. So when "I owe my soul to the company store" and it is shut
> down and I have no money, do I starve? Or do I stick my shot gun in
> someone's face to get money to eat?
>>
>>
> http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=E1MbAAAAIBAJ&sjid=1kwEAAAAIBAJ&pg=3639%
> 2C25910
>>
>>
> http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=FlMbAAAAIBAJ&sjid=1kwEAAAAIBAJ&pg=2188%
> 2C938893
>>
>> It is hard to believe how primitive aviation was back then. This is
> also for Ed but the rest of you might get a kick out of "Moon Township
> Airport Due to Get Funds."
>>
>>
> http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=E1MbAAAAIBAJ&sjid=1kwEAAAAIBAJ&pg=3707%
> 2C83272
>>
>> Personnel action at Pittsburgh Railways
>>
>>
> http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=E1MbAAAAIBAJ&sjid=1kwEAAAAIBAJ&pg=3707%
> 2C8327
>>
>> We won't give up harassing the power company
>>
>>
> http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=FFMbAAAAIBAJ&sjid=1kwEAAAAIBAJ&pg=1579%
> 2C291182
>>
>> The Pittsburgh, Shawmut and Northern Railway was sold in March for 1.5
> million dollars. Doesn't say so here but the last trains ran about 27 days
> later.
>>
>>
> http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=FVMbAAAAIBAJ&sjid=1kwEAAAAIBAJ&pg=3055%
> 2C650711
>>
>>
> http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=FlMbAAAAIBAJ&sjid=1kwEAAAAIBAJ&pg=2557%
> 2C905732
>>
>>
> http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=GVMbAAAAIBAJ&sjid=1kwEAAAAIBAJ&pg=1940%
> 2C2206355
>>
>> Pittsburgh Railways unhappy that Montour Bus Company wants to serve
> Spring Hill
>>
>>
> http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=FlMbAAAAIBAJ&sjid=1kwEAAAAIBAJ&pg=2136%
> 2C940320
>>
>> This link is about eight hurt on a Greensburg-Blairsville bus when an oil
> truck slid into it on the Lincoln Highway west of Latrobe. But the story
> to it's right is a real winner too.
>>
>>
> http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=FlMbAAAAIBAJ&sjid=1kwEAAAAIBAJ&pg=5161%
> 2C1032106
>>
>> Baldwin Locomotive Company shut down temporarily because they could not
> get steel. There were peripheral stories that I did not send about coal
> strikes and a lack of gas that also affected steel mills. The second link
> comes a few days later when the United Mine Workers and John L. Lewis lost
> in the Supreme Court for breaching a contract with the government. The
> entire page of the paper in the third link gives some idea about what was
> going on in the coal fields in 1947.
>>
>>
> http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=FlMbAAAAIBAJ&sjid=1kwEAAAAIBAJ&pg=1546%
> 2C1062045
>>
>>
> http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=GFMbAAAAIBAJ&sjid=1kwEAAAAIBAJ&pg=5426%
> 2C1466133
>>
>>
> http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=GVMbAAAAIBAJ&sjid=1kwEAAAAIBAJ&pg=1945%
> 2C2013973
>>
>> This guy must have loved his work. H. L. Mitchell of West Penn achieves
> 45 years in harness.
>>
>>
> http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=FlMbAAAAIBAJ&sjid=1kwEAAAAIBAJ&pg=5121%
> 2C1062595
>>
>> Philadelphia Company's hearing is recessed
>>
>>
> http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=F1MbAAAAIBAJ&sjid=1kwEAAAAIBAJ&pg=5770%
> 2C1287583
>>
>> Same old - same old. I love this. They had clean coal back in 1947
> except that they were unable to find it. Coal industry accused of
> attempting to sabotage Pittsburgh's smoke control program. I find the
> whole thing rather amusing. This is the only item I have posted so far but
> the papers have been filled with it. One of the better items prior to this
> was an editorial cartoon showing Harrisburg aiming a canon at Pittsburgh's
> attempts to clean up the city because the coal companies were buying the
> legislators.
>>
>>
> http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=F1MbAAAAIBAJ&sjid=1kwEAAAAIBAJ&pg=6205%
> 2C1324122
>>
>> Sounds like this chap employed the law firm of Dewey, Cheetum and Howe to
> sue Pittsburgh Railways.
>>
>>
> http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=GFMbAAAAIBAJ&sjid=1kwEAAAAIBAJ&pg=2250%
> 2C1494659
>>
>> Fantastic article about all the rules McKeesport inflicted on the B&O.
> I can only wonder when the ICC or the FRA told the city to go pound sand.
> I know of similar cases where cities were told that they had no control over
> railroads.
>>
>>
> http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=G1MbAAAAIBAJ&sjid=1kwEAAAAIBAJ&pg=4302%
> 2C2502871
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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