(first posted 3/13/2016) Streetcars are enjoying a resurgence across the USA, but throughout the CC era, the car above was America’s streetcar. The PCC Car burst on the scene in 1936, the result of careful thinking and research by transit engineers and executives battling the steady erosion of traffic in the face of increased automobile ownership.
Compared to the heavy, slow, and rough-riding streetcars Americans were used to riding, the PCC was a major leap forward in terms of style, speed, and comfort. It was as modern, if not more so than the cars it shared the road with.
Just as importantly, the PCC car represented a fundamental change is how streetcars were built and bought. Until the PCC, virtually all streetcars were built to order for individual street railway companies, to their own designs. And those designs often changed when the companies came back to order their next lot. The result was that most transit companies operated a hodgepodge of cars, denying car builders economies of scale and complicating maintenance.
The car builders tried to standardize, but even their best efforts, like this “Master Unit”, introduced by J.G. Brill in 1928 garnered only a fraction of sales. Something had to be done, and in 1929 several transit executives formed the Electric Railway Presidents’ Conference Committee, securing financial commitments from operators to fund the development of a new standardized streetcar, popularly known as the Presidents’ Conference Committee or PCC car.
The PCC was a model of systems research and engineering. To reduce noise, the wheels and trucks featured heavy insulation. Inboard truck frames and roller bearings replaced greased-packed journal boxes, and instead of noisy spur gears, the wheels where driven by rack and pinion gearing. The body design was standardized, but modular, and PCCs would eventually be built in three different widths and multiple lengths, all with welded steel bodies – good bye rivets. The trucks were also modular, in widths ranging from narrow gauge in Los Angeles through broad gauge in Pennsylvania and Maryland, plus heavier-duty versions for suburban and interurban service. Virtually all PCCs were single ended, like Pittsburgh Railways 100 above, the first PCC to enter service, but a handful of operators acquired double-ended cars.
The Committee designed the PCC, but they didn’t build it. Any carbuilder willing to pay royalties could make their own PCC bodies and trucks. In practice, Clark Equipment built all the trucks for US and Canadian PCCs, while St. Louis Car and Pullman-Standard split the body orders. The St. Louis bodies were more sophisticated in terms of line and detail, but under the skin, the design was the same. J.G. Brill, until then the largest streetcar builder, didn’t want to switch to welded construction, and launched the riveted and ungainly Brillliner as their “modern” streetcar. It was a bust, garnering only 2 fleet orders. Not even a snappy Raymond Lowey-designed paint job for Atlantic City could make this beast look beautiful.
The PCC was a success. Between 1936 and 1951, 5,000 were delivered to 26 different transit systems in the US and Canada. Passengers appreciated the comfortable, brightly lit interiors, cushioned seats, smoother and quieter ride, and faster operating speeds. At the same time, transit companies enjoyed lower operating costs and increased ridership. Looking at this interior shot, it’s also clear that the PCC design had impact on other transit vehicles as well – at a glance only the reversing seats on this Philadelphia Red Arrow car tell you you aren’t in a GM “Old Look” transit bus.
Most systems bought between 50 and 100 cars at a time. Johnstown (PA) Traction had the smallest fleet, 17 cars purchased in 1947. while Chicago Surface Lines operated a fleet of 683 and Pittsburgh Railways 666. With slight modifications, the original design lasted through WWII, with the “Postwar PCC” launched with Pittsburgh Railways 1600 in 1945, and seen above as SEPTA (Philadelphia) 2100. The main differences were closer window spacing, “standee” windows, and a switch from air-electric to all-electric operation.
The last style change, to fixed windows and forced air ventilation – not air conditioning – was only used in the Pittsburgh 1700 series and to an even more dramatic extent in the Boston “Picture Window” cars of 1952, the last PCC cars built in the US. By then, the writing was on the wall for the US streetcar, done in by GM, Firestone, and Esso’s campaign of bus replacement, rising system maintenance costs, and city pressure to repave streets and switch to one-way street systems. Through the 50’s and early 60’s, city after city abandoned their streetcar systems and sold off or scrapped their PCC fleets.
But as the market for PCC streetcars evaporated, the basic technology found a new lease on life, in the form of light(er)-weight rapid transit cars. Brooklyn Rapid Transit pioneered the idea in the late 30’s, but New York City opted to stick with heavyweight cars. Not so Cleveland, Toronto, and Chicago, each of which operated large fleets of PCC-type subway and El cars. The Chicago cars seen here actually used salvaged components from the city’s scrapped PCCs.
The PCC streetcar continued to evolve overseas, thanks to licensing deals in the Netherlands, Belgium, and especially Eastern Europe, where Czechoslovakia’s Tatra Works, of T-87 fame, turned out over 3,500 T4 streetcars between 1967 and 1987. Many of these European PCCs operate to this day.
And the original PCC streetcars proved to be durable survivors. Many used PCCs went south and north of the border, with Toronto eventually operating the largest fleet of 772 new and used cars. Others went further, to exotic locales such as Sarajevo and Cairo, as seen here. And in 1970 6 US cities – Boston, Newark, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Shaker Heights, and San Francisco – still operated PCCs in daily service, mainly on routes that offered extensive private right-of-way. Aging, but practically irreplaceable, the remaining PCCs were treated to varying levels of upgrades.
Some were extensive, like Boston’s rebuilds, others little more than paint jobs, like SEPTA’s unfortunate “Gulf Oil” livery. Boston and San Francisco eventually bought Boeing Light Rail Vehicles in the mid 70’s, but these advanced cars proved a trouble-prone dead end – about what you would expect when an aerospace company tried to make a streetcar.
My hometown operator, PAT Transit in Pittsburgh, could only afford new paint jobs, but they showed a level of imagination not seen anywhere else. The psychedelic “Mod Desire” of 1973 was the most extreme, but through the early 80’s PAT earned valuable advertising revenue painting cars in a range of colors and designs, including a giant Clark Bar and a camouflage trolley for US Army recruiting. (That Army car had to be restricted from a couple of lines, because it had a nasty habit of sneaking up on cars at wooded grade crossings.)
By the 1990s, the days of the PCC were numbered. The remaining operators acquired new LRVs from European and Japanese manufacturers, but once again, the PCC refused to die. In Pittsburgh, rebuilt PCCs continued to operate until 1997. In San Francisco, restored PCCs painted in the schemes of original operators ply Market Street on today’s F Line, and in 2009, Kenosha, WI, a city that never operated PCCs, launched a downtown trolley loop featuring a similar set of restored PCCs. Both the San Francisco and Kenosha operations are really tourist lines, but Philadelphia relaunched urban PCC streetcar service on Route 15 Girard Avenue with a fleet of extensively modernized and air conditioned cars in 2015.
Those cars, along with those for San Francisco, were rebuilt by Brookville Locomotive Works, in Brookville, PA. The company recently introduced first new American-made streetcar since the PCC, the first of which just entered service on Dallas’s Oak Cliff line. The PCC lives on, and the future of streetcars looks like this.
Lastly, there’s a reason for all the Pittsburgh photos here, and it’s not these were the cars I rode growing up. Pittsburgh played a critical role in the development of the PCC, and lightweight, standardized streetcars in general. In 1912, Pittsburgh Railways Superintendent P. N. Jones worked with hometown Westinghouse to create a new low-floor, lightweight streetcar, made possible much smaller electric motors and a floor that sloped to the center. These “Jones” cars – like 4398 seen here at the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum in Washington, PA – became the standard in Pittsburgh until the PCCs arrived.
As noted above, Pittsburgh placed the first PCC in service, and Pittsburgh Railways collaborated with St. Louis Car, and hometown suppliers Westinghouse Electric and Westinghouse Air Brake on the design of both the prewar and postwar PCC. PCCs ran on 68 different routes in and around the Steel City, from short shuttles to tunnel and river-spanning suburban lines, to 30 mile interurban runs. The PCC was America’s streetcar, and Pittsburgh was America’s PCC city.
I use to ride in that Chicago Transit Authority’s Skokie Swift train all the time as a kid, (I was raised in Skokie, but don’t tell anyone I’ll never get laid).
It’s sister #52 is preserved at the Illinois Railway museum.
http://www.irm.org
http://www.irm.org/cgi-bin/rsearch.cgi?rapid=Chicago+Transit+Authority=52
Thanks for sharing. I just read yesterday that one can rent a PCC streetcar in Toronto for 3 hours for about $1,800 on a weekday, excluding rush hour.
Could someone, please, explain why does North American design uses a contact poll and Europe uses pantograph?
I grew up riding the PCC cars in St. Louis. Loved them because it was almost as good as a real train ride.
The fixed routes in an era of post-war America when suburbia was growing did them in as well as did growing auto ownership and the interstate highway system.
Most British tram (trolley) systems used poles too, though all but Blackpool were closed by 1962. A few used bows and even fewer pantographs.
The Melbourne (Australia) system used poles, though they experimented with bows and pantographs. There’s been another four generations of trams since I left town twenty-six years ago, so I’m not sure what they use now.
Poles can come off if the driver takes sharp corners too fast, which can be quite amusing when the pole bounces up and down and contacts the overhead, making the interior light flash on and off. I’d imagine sharp corners aren’t much of a problem in the US compared to European systems.
The other problem I noticed with the pole system was when the conductor didn’t take the other pole down at the end of the line and the driver tried to take off. Both poles up doesn’t work – sparks everywhere!
The discussion about trolley poles reminded me of my grandfather telling me about running up and pulling the poles down on stopped “streetcars” when he was a kid (1910s-’20s so pre PCC era!) as a prank! (the older generation, such bad influences!,LOL!)
Not so fond memories of taking a trolley pole down in a Blackpool gale.
Kids did this all the time when I was young (not me though, I was a good kid, or maybe just too timid). Usually when the trolley was stopped in traffic, which would create an even bigger backup when the driver got out to reattach it. Interestingly, I only remember this with the trolley buses, not the streetcars. In San Francisco in the late ’60’s and early ’70’s.
Kids did it here in the PCC era too, I didn’t have the “guts” my self (I know I’d be the one who got caught!) It was really a “thing” Downtown to stop traffic!
I heard one old-timer (much the same era) tell of greasing the tram tracks on a hill. Great fun when a loaded tram tried to climb and slid to the bottom!
Oh, Yes, in Pittsburgh too,with our hills, That was a popular prank in the streetcar era!
The trams all use pantographs now, even the few W-class trams left running, I think it just makes life easier with fewer delays (changing poles or pole coming off).
The interesting part is where you have a tram line crossing a train line; the trams run on 600V DC while the trains are 1500V DC, lots of sparks there too!
Toronto’s new Bombardier trams use poles:
Sorry I was replying to Old Pete re Melbourne trams.
I saw the headline for this post this morning and wondered if the old Pittsburgh Railway Company would be mentioned and Then opened it, I saw a car on the Shannon-Drake route! I rode that line almost daily in the 70s-80s! The “Mod Desire” coming southbound off of the Smithfield Street Bridge is a reminder of when half of the bridge was for trolley use only. Luckily, We still have the 1881 era bridge (and Station Square) The newer light rail cars are nice,but antiseptic having none of the charm of the PCC cars. Thanks for the trip down memory lane (track?) End of the line, and no transfers! PS the “Jones” or “Yellow cars” also were durable some saw service until the early 1960s!
Hah! We may have been on the same car at the same time. My folks left Pittsburgh just as the light rail was starting up, so I’ve only had a couple of rides downtown. But I agree – newer, but much less personality.
We could have been on the very car in the photo, The ad for WAMO (a radio station in Pittsburgh) on the side looks ’79-’81ish!
Memphis ripped up it’s main street to put in a trolley line, but it has never made money. Besides having a route that goes between 2 points with nothing at either end worth seeing, the cars are not air conditioned….a huge drawback. So what are they thinking of doing? Extending it from downtown to the airport so you can ride cheaper than a taxi in an un-airconditioned and cramped trolley. To drum up ridership, they are even planning to move (or have already moved) the Greyhound station to the airport.
These are fun and make sense in a city like San Francisco, but in many other cities they can’t really work.
San Diego installed its first “new” (as opposed to those ripped out decades ago) streetcar system sometime in the late ’80s/early ’90s. It was a huge ridership and financial success, as it served downtown from the Mexico border, and travelled through working class communities on the way to all the industrial and warehouse areas on the way to downtown. As an occasional rider, one could barely get standing room space, let alone a seat if you got on after the first couple of stops at either end of the line. It was also built mostly along existing trackage and rights of way, needing only cars, electrification, and stations along the way. A great cost/benefit trade-off. The system (and others around the country, I believe) has traded on that success ever since, justifying new lines in other neighborhoods, which have required buying up rights of way at huge cost, and with half empty cars at rush hour. Never underestimate a governmental authority that is eager to feather its own nest. Had San Diego stopped with that first Southern line (derisively called the “Tijuana Trolley”), the system would be a big profit center for the area, instead of the money sucking entity that it has become.
I used to ride the trolley from Mattapan to Ashmont and then switch over to the Subway into Boston. They used to advertise it as a “high speed trolley”. I don’t think it ever went faster than 30 mph. The signs were probably left overs from horse and buggy days when that was high speed. I always enjoyed riding them.
As a railfan I was long aware of PCC streetcars, but was so ignorant I thought it meant “Pennsylvania Car Company.” Great article; now I am better-informed! Surprising that this was a good enough design to interest European operators; nowadays the situation is reversed.
I like industry-driven standardization like this; now if only the same could be done for some car parts!
Great read, the streetcar system is always a fascinating topic for me and in the many old pictures I’ve looked through over the years the PCCs are by far the most prolific. I really appreciate the depth of this as there’s very little information on the previous trolleys they replaced and what made PCCs better (besides the obvious aesthetic differences).
I see bland jellybean(plus a sprinkling of monolith) styling has affected modern streetcars as well though, but I’m not surprised 🙁
Got to see these cars running in Catonsville, MD back in 1962 before they were pulled out in 1964 I believe. Big green monsters I called them as they wound their way down Frederick Rd and then disappeared into the woods off to the right heading west.
Now having lived in the City of San Francisco I have seen them roaming the streets and have taken the opportunity to ride them when I can. Maybe for tourists but they do run from Fisherman’s Wharf all the way to the Castro. Many in the colors of other cities rail cars from years past.
Always catch a tram when back in Blackpool for the punk rock festival & air show. Vintage trams are running between Pleasure Beach and Fleetwood ferry at weekends, bank holidays & half term.
Had a spell as a tram driver, nice job but never got used to shift work
Yes…come to San Francisco and ride our streetcars! Much credit is due the nonprofit, volunteer Market Street Railway group for the preservation, revival and expansion of the streetcars, and for reminding and inspiring city transit officials. Market Street Railway also funded acquisition of some of the streetcars, and restoration of historic cars in the San Francisco Muni’s own fleet.
While the run along the Embarcadero to Fisherman’s Wharf may be largely a tourist line, along lower Market St. the streetcars, both PCCs and Peter Witt cars from Milan, Italy, are part of basic public transit. Their trackway is shared with electric trolley, diesel and hybrid buses, and San Franciscans will get aboard any vehicle that is going where they are headed. On upper Market St., where most of the bus lines have branched off, the streetcars are the trunk line.
Many of San Francisco’s PCCs…painted in the schemes of PCC operators across North America, and preferred over the Italian cars because of their smoother, quieter ride and greater spaciousness…were formerly resting and rusting away in Philadelphia. Some more are ex-Minneapolis cars that were retired after a second career in Newark, NJ. But the favorites among The City’s streetcar supporters are San Francisco’s own, including most of the double-ended cars bought in San Francisco’s first order of PCC cars; and Muni 1040, the last PCC streetcar ever built (licensed foreign units with different bodywork don’t count).
Muni also still owns and operates their Car No. 1, the very first streetcar built for an American municipal transit agency, in an era when much transit was still privately owned.
My wife and I did ride a street car from downtown to Fisherman’s Wharf more than once while down there on business a few years ago. It was a great experience Andy allowed me to experience the difference between a restored streetcar which we have here and a PCC.
Thumbs up to cities that preserve and integrate the PCCs into public transit.
Hear hear! As a recent Bay Area transplant from New Jersey I was both tickled and shocked to see that some of the F Market PCCs are from Newark. Though I grew up in a neighboring town, I never knew about the trolleys (we mostly drove into Newark or took NJ Transit), and it’s pretty cool to be riding a trolley that was in service while I still lived near there.
On this very morning I rode on Muni 1071, one of those ex-New Jersey Transit Newark City Subway cars…as a regular transit user, not a tourist…and my log indicates that I rode that very same car in Newark in the 1990s. Newark bought those cars secondhand from Twin Cities Transit in Minnesota, and that car today wears its original Twin Cities livery, coming full circle.
http://www.streetcar.org/streetcars/1071-1071-minneapolis-st-paul-mn/
Loved watching these on a holiday in San F last year – especially the different liveries.
Nice to see this article on PCC’s. In Seattle, an original study in the late 30’s had PCC’s coming to the city. The streetcarmen’s Union wanted to borrow a car from San Diego to demonstrate on Seattle tracks but in the end, the municipal system ended up buying motor coaches and a fleet of 235 trackless trolleys to replace the city’s streetcars.
I would eventually drive the trackless trolleys, which weren’t retired until 1978, by then. 38 years old.
The first PCC that I ever rode, my son and I rode a second-hand, ex-St. Louis, San Francisco PCC in 1973.
I wish Seattle had bought some. The closest PCC’s were up the road, in Vancouver, BC.
I got to ride on the Johnstown Traction Company’s street cars a few times in my early childhood, before we became a two car family. I remember mom hating having to take them, because she always felt herself a little too good to be riding such low-class public transportation.
Sometime during the (mid?) Sixties, Johnstown replaced the streetcars with what they called “trackless trollys”. Essentially rubber tired electric powered buses that still got their power from the overhead lines and a boom contraption touching the lines all the time to transfer power.
That lasted about a decade or so, by which point standard ICE powered buses took over.
Trolley buses replaced British trams as the maintenance of the rails became too costly. Dad was a fan of trolley buses, I remember being taken to see the last one in London in the early 60s.
Perhaps only Western Pennsylvanians will dig this: Johnstown has an awesome incline! Pittsburgh has two, but I think the Johnstown Incline is steeper than both. I’ve ridden all 3 but the Johnstown is a worth a trip itself. (These kinda qualify as Trackside Classics, I guess?)
Love this article!
I was quite a tram nut back when I lived in Melbourne and used to ride the old Melbourne and Metropolitan Tramways Board W-class trams to work – the earliest of that class dated back to 1923, though they were often updated with features from later derivatives. Melbourne only had the one PCC-class, an experimental vehicle which I never got to ride on. It was withdrawn from service in ’71, though it served as a testbed for the locally-developed seventies Z-class. They seemed like spaceships after riding the oldies!
These are still used in Boston on the mattapan line
Thanks for the memories!
I grew up in a close-in suburb of Pittsburgh and the opening photo of the red and cream PCC streetcar made my day. However, I never rode on one. We lived on a hill just beyond reach of the lines and took the GM Old Look and later New Look buses to downtown Pittsburgh. After about the mid-60s, it became more common for us to drive downtown, as parking garages affiliated with the major department stores became so cheap and convenient.
and Brother today those same garages ain’t cheap today!
We had PCCs in Argentina for a brief period of time in the Urquiza railway line. This line was created as a horse-drawn tramway and upgraded as the years went by to a railway. But the local services were always served with trolley cars. In 1956 the government (which took the line in 48) bought the PCCs to replace, IIRC, some 1920s Brills.
These american cars were used two, three and up to four units in the same train. Several were modified to be towed with the remotion of their engines and with permanent connections between the cars.
Altough the extensive modifications they were all scrapped by 1962 due to the radically different configuration that made reparations and maintenance more difficult.
Older cars took their place until the arrival of the new Toshiba trains in 1973 that still are in service.
Your PCCs were ex-Pacific Electric double end cars, built for the Glendale-Burbank line in 1940. Didn’t realize they were in service for such a short period of time. I always liked how they changed the colors but kept the unique PE side striping.
Thanks for this; it’s a subject I’ve long wanted to see get covered here. Having grown up riding PCC-style as well a solder street cars in Innsbruck, I’ve always been a big fan of them.
+1 on that. I never knew America exported streetcars to Europe, or that retired vehicles had second lives.
Book mark for a second reading!
There’s at least 1 Blackpool “boat” open tram in San Francisco
Very enjoyable article – wholeheartedly agree – a landmark public transportation vehicle. The Ohio Railway Museum in Columbus has a PCC car that operates during Spring thru Fall.
If you’re ever in Southern California this is not to be missed.
https://www.oerm.org/
The Orange Empire Railway Museum.
They actually run the old PE cars on tracks laid through the museum grounds. It’s quite awesome.
OERM PCC
In the early 60s, Leonard’s Department Store in downtown Ford Worth bought some PCCs to shuttle customers between the store and the parking lot on the riverbank nearly a mile away. According to the Wiki article, the cars were built by the St. Louis Car Company and were purchased from the Washington DC system. The line ran underground from the store down Taylor St, emerging at the lower level of the riverbank lot.
Radio Shack’s parent company, Tandy Corp, bought the Leonard’s property and built it’s new headquarters building in the mid 70s. The Tandy Center included a shopping mall and the subway and parking lot were retained. The PCCs were rebodied. Tandy Corp operated the subway as a free service to mall customers until the mall failed in 2002.
This video shows the renovated cars, the stations in the parking lot, the station in Tandy Center, which was near the Dillard’s Department Store, as well as glimpses of the ice rink that was in Tandy Center and the street car repair barn.
Despite growing up in California I don’t think I ever rode in a yellow Crown school bus, as featured recently. But I did spend a lot of time in these street cars, in the green and tan livery of San Francisco’s Muni (Municipal Railway). K Ingleside, L Taraval, N Judah … I’ll associate those letters with those route names forever. And of course, I’ll always remember buying our student fare cards at the “car barn”, and checking out the greasy repair bays and sparkling welding. But I don’t think I’ve ridden on one for 40 years.
I rode the PCC trolleys in Boston in the early 1960’s , smooth and comfy there were , hot in Summer but so was everything else back then .
-Nate
I’ve never so much as ridden a streetcar (Raleigh and Richmond both got rid of their streetcar systems by the 40’s I think) but I’ve always found these PCC cars to be beautiful pieces of industrial design since seeing a rough unrestored model in a railway museum years ago. Should I ever find myself vacationing where a streetcar system is present, I’d love to catch a ride.
Hi, I am from Bratislava, which is in Slovakia, part of the former Czechoslovakia. I would like to add some more regarding the PCCs built in CKD Tatra.
The license for building PCC cars was bought before the WWII by the Ringhoffer-TATRA company, which was one of the tram producers in Czechoslovakia. Due to WWII, however, the documentation has not been delivered until after the war.
The first type made by CKD TATRA was T1 (or TI), which was built in 1951. The type was based on the needs and requests of the city of Prague, so the car was pretty narrow because of the narrow streets of old Prague city center. That was however not very effective and welcome in other cities, so there was only 287 units built in the years 1951-1958.
In 1955 a type was created, TII or T2, which was built between 1955-1962. This one was of the standard width and CKD also made the prototype of a non-licensed carriages for the 3 ft 3 3⁄8 in gauge. 771 units were made of all three gauges of 4 ft 8 1⁄2 in, 3 ft 3 3⁄8 in and 5 ft.
In 1963 the most successful model was introduced – The T3. It was built since 1963 till 1997 (!) with multiple modifications and 14,113 (!) units were built. Some of them had unlicensed carriages due to gauge and the last ones had a different electric equipment. Unmotorised pulled wagons are counted in.
In addition 3509 units of T4 were made, which were similar to T3s yet they were more narrow. That still isn’t all.
There were also articulated versions of T3 – types K1 (2 units), K2 (567 units) and K5 (200 units).
T2, T3 and K2 trams are still in service in various Czech and Slovak cities, yet most have been modernized to use modern semiconductor electrical equipment to reduce electricity consumption.
Wow! The T3 looks like it would have been a natural update of the U.S. PCC if they had bothered to update the styling here, But by the ’50s we were busy killing of the trolley lines. 🙁
I know. It is very sad, that the trolley systems were set down. I would love to see where it would get in USA… I would expect thick window frames and possibly skew window slopes? Who knows… It is still unbelievable, that the old PCC cars are still in service in San Francisco. I would love to have a ride by the original one one day. Currently original PCC T3s from 1982-1987 are being pulled out of service in Bratislava and only those refurbished with semiconductor electrical equipment will be allowed to stay in service as Bratislava bought 60 new trams from Skoda.
Btw… the T3 had the front and back from laminate, to make it lighter and laminate was used on seats – after all it was “the material of the future” in sixties. It was able to operate in double and triple unit trains as shown.
Do street cars have an advantage, economic or otherwise, over buses? It would appear that the cost of the infrastructure required and lack of flexibility makes buses a better alternative. American cities are very different today then they were in pre-WWII days. For better or worse we are more spread out hence lower population density, which is required for large public transportation systems, that rely heavily on rail, to be economic.
Here in Houston in a case of monkey see monkey do the city “leaders” have given us a light rail system that has only been successful in snuffing the lives of several motorists, and causing traffic problems since its inauguration. It is of limited benefit other than as a promotional tool to sell the city for events such as Super Bowl.
I think you will find that those Houston motorists snuffed out their own lives by committing traffic violations in front of something as unforgiving as a light rail vehicle.
I can’t account for all of them but I know of instances where the motorist was not at fault.
The “T” still runs in Pittsburgh – with newer cars of course – but is still a prime way for people to get downtown to work, particularly from the South Hills.
The car in the title shot displays an ad for WAMO – the station that, as WHOD in the early 50’s, introduced Pittsburgh to Rock & Roll via Porky Chedwick and his “race records.”
WHOD was in Homestead,PA (an inner borough). It became WAMO when it moved to the city. But, Yes: “Pork the Tork, The Daddio of the Raddio” (Chedwick) brought “race records” (Rock and Roll) to Pittsburgh!
I have mined a whole folder of Toronto TTC PCC Streetcars from their website. I grew up riding these. The most fun was when you got a driver who was willing to crank up the speed a bit (say 40 mph) and get going along some curvy roads along the Queensway. You would get some neat swaying back and forth while careening along at a good clip. Great fun!
Some PCC cars used it Toronto were MU equipped and some of my most pleasurable transit moments were commuting to work on the Bloor-Danforth line in MU trains back in the day. Presently, there are only 2 PCC cars on the TTC roster, 4500 and 4549.
Presently living in New Jersey, I am almost ashamed to say that I only rode the Newark PCC cars once when my nephew came up from Alabama. If anyone wants a PCC binge, go to Kenosha, Wisconsin and ride to your heart’s content on many painted in former operator liveries. If you are a car nut, also visit the Nash/American Motors car museum in Kenosha.
I lived in Toronto back in the great PCC days and commuted to work on the Bloor-Danforth line in MU’ed trains. The TTC and Shaker Heights were the only North American MU PCC operations as far as I know. In Europe, they run them in Berlin and Prague and singles in Moscow. Prague does triple MU’s. One can ID Toronto’s PCC’s as they have a blue-green advance light at the front of the roof which supposedly sped up loading as at night one could pick out that light in traffic and have the fare ready as soon as the car stopped.
In the Netherlands (Holland) The Hague City we operated a fleet of 250 PCC’s from 1950 up till 2003 made under license in Belgium. They have been updated (new boddies and interiors) and are still running today. The in 2018 bought new Siemens lightrail (tram) has been modified on request by the City fleetowner (Haagse Tramweg Maatschappij HTM), in using the footpedal system as used by the old PCC cars, wich is very unique, since the Siemens standard system uses manual speedcontrol.
Since I am 81 and lived most of my life around the Hague I do remember most details of the PCC cars, so if there are any questions….. please ask. >hanslindeman@ziggo.nl
Vancouver had a streetcar system (The Interurban) until the early 1950’s. Amazingly, someone had the foresight to do a relatively complete film, if amateur, record of all the lines before they disappeared. In total there’s about 2 hours of grainy film stock shot around 1950, with commentary by some of the people who knew the system added in 1990. The built city is almost unrecognizable, but somehow the general lay of the land still makes it clear where you are if you know the city.
A lot of cars to be seen as well. 🙂
Linked to a more rural segment, and couldn’t edit it.
This is one of the segments shot downtown – a lot of cars to peruse.
Amsterdam Brewery is a microbrewery in Toronto that started as a brewpub. The first location I remember was on King Street which is a major streetcar route. I realized that one of their brands features a drawing of a PCC on the can.
As a tyke, I lived a block away from a PCC line in Chicago. The PCC ‘Green Hornets’ were revolutionary compared to the big red clanking dreadnaughts that were their predecessors. The PCCs were extremely quiet and provided a silky ride. I was a frequent joyrider.
On May 25, 1950, a PCC collided with a fuel truck and 34 people perished. The press coverage is seared into my mind.
The streetcar’s future was already perilous, but the horrific crash hastened the curtain.