[PRCo] Reading - Pgh. Press - March 1 thru 9.

Fri May 23 12:06:56 EDT 2014

No records exist in our possession that detail the MWP (no hyphen in the company name) cars.  It would not surprise me to see WPSD involved; it was a West Virginia corporation but was owned by The West Penn Electric Company.  The MVT and successor minute books that we received quit once West Penn bought the company.

-----Original Message-----
From: pittsburgh-railways-bounces at mailman.dementix.org [mailto:pittsburgh-railways-bounces at mailman.dementix.org] On Behalf Of Dwight Long
Sent: Friday, May 23, 2014 11:41 AM
To: 'Western PA Trolley discussion'
Subject: Re: [PRCo] Reading - Pgh. Press - March 1 thru 9.

Ed

Is there any information extant that would bear on the arrangements for the four non-AVSR cars the ones that went to M-WP?  Were they part of the same arrangement or were they separately financed directly by M-WP?  Interestingly the timing, assuming it was the same 15 years as the AVSR cars, dovetailed with the takeover of the M-WP rail properties by City Lines of West Virginia.

And before someone perhaps newer to the M-WP story gets all excited about  City Lines of West Virginia,   I hasten to add that this property had nothing to do with National City Lines, to which it was not related at all.  Conspiracy theorists need not apply.

Dwight

From: Edward H. Lybarger
Sent: Friday, 23 May, 2014 08:21
To: 'Western PA Trolley discussion'
Subject: Re: [PRCo] Reading - Pgh. Press - March 1 thru 9.
West Penn Securities Department, Inc. paid cash for the cars, I believe.
They took over the order from the parent company, West Penn Electric, who had ordered them.  WPSD owned a bunch of real estate that the empire used.

There was another company, Coke Region Supply Company, that was involved in the 1921 cars.  I don't have enough information to explain it yet, but it was interesting to encounter the proposition in the corporate minutes.  It involved an equipment trust, and one of the certificates was archived.

-----Original Message-----
From: pittsburgh-railways-bounces at mailman.dementix.org
[mailto:pittsburgh-railways-bounces at mailman.dementix.org] On Behalf Of Dwight Long
Sent: Friday, May 23, 2014 12:31 AM
To: Western PA Trolley discussion
Subject: Re: [PRCo] Reading - Pgh. Press - March 1 thru 9.

Fred

Who was "they?"

It sounds as if "West Penn Securities Corporation" was a DIY equipment trust certificate provider.  CCC held the paper on quite a few of their last production cars and wound up in several cases taking them back for non payment.  I'm sure they were quite happy not to have to do this with the WP cars.

Dwight

From: Fred Schneider
Sent: Thursday, 22 May, 2014 21:23
To: Western PA Trolley discussion
Subject: Re: [PRCo] Reading - Pgh. Press - March 1 thru 9.
Well, we know the reason for the demise of the Allegheny Valley St. Ry., with its seven-year-old cars was repaving and widening route 28 up the
valley.   I think it is also reasonably well known that, since the Allegheny
Valley Street Railway did not have a dividend stream from the power company (Allegheny Power) like the Coke Region did, management had to protect its
investment in the new cars in another way.   They would not risk having the
railway buy them and then having the railway go broke.   So they (cars
831-842) were put into the ownership of West Penn Securities Corporation until they were paid off and then they were sold to the West Penn Railways
for a nominal amount.   I never ceased to be amazed that, unlike the
management of todays politically affiliated transit authorities, West Penn's management (and most other private company managers) were anything but mentally challenged.

I think there was also a bridge project that killed one of the two other up river (Leechburg-Apollo or Kittanning-Ford City) lines but I am not sure.
Remember that they both lasted, unmodernized with 30+ year old Stephenson
cars until about 1936.   One of those was very heavily damaged in the '36
flood.

The only other one was Oakdale - McDonald.   How do you justify keeping
something in the middle of no where, unconnected with anything, running beyond 1920 other than we have not paid it off yet???

Wheeling . that we know was a case of the bonds came due.

On May 21, 2014, at 4:48 PM, Dwight Long wrote:

>
> 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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