Pennsylvania Trolley Museum - Washington, PA

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The Presidents' Conference Car, or PCC, was designed around specifications created by a consortium of transit company executives in an effort to counter the effect of the automobile on streetcar ridership. Compare with traditional streetcars, the PCC was sleek, stylish, and fast and provided comfortable seating and a smooth, quiet ride.

The PCC accelerated more quickly than the older cars, and could be configured for speeds of 60mph for interurban service. The PCC was first demonstrated in Cleveland in 1936, and many cities kept them in service until well after World War II. Pittsburgh Port Authority Transit's last PCC went out of service in 1999.

The car barn provides storage for currently-active cars at the museum.

Cars built in 1923 and 1924 by Brill and Perley Thomas continue in service in New Orleans. During Hurricane Katrina the cars were stored in a secure facility above the flooding, and escaped damage. Some were transferred to the tourist-oriented waterfront line, whose fleet of later replica cars was nearly wiped out.

Interior of a PCC streetcar

Interior of a 1923 Perley Thomas car from New Orleans. Most older streetcars and some PCCs were double-ended; they had controls in both ends to avoid having to turn the cars around at the end of the routes. Note that the seats in this car are reversible so that passengers can face forward, no matter which way the car is traveling. These are called walk-over seats.

Often old streetcars are in much worse shape than this one when they come to museum collections. Some have been converted into residences or even farm livestock sheds. Often their appearance has been completely changed with exterior coverings and their interiors have been stripped of all original fixtures. Thousands of hours of labor are required for restoration, along with long searches for salvaged parts. Sometimes components are borrowed from other collections for use as patterns that can be replicated.

Electric railways need non-electric motive power and maintenance equipment for periods when catenary is out of service because of accidents, weather-related incidents, or maintenance.

A pit in the floor of the car shop allows access to the equipment on the undersides of the cars.

The trolley storage building houses approximately thirty cars of various ages and in varying stages of restoration.

Prior to electrification of most systems in the last decade of the nineteenth century, streetcars were horse-drawn. Some cities with harsh winters elected to use mules instead of horses, because mules are hardier and more sure-footed than horses, and resistant to equine influenza that often occurred in epizootics that could disable all the horses in a city for weeks.

Sweepers, or "brooms" are used to clear snow from streetcar tracks.

Built in 1931 for the Philadelphia and Western, later SEPTA's Norristown High Speed Line, the all-aluminum Brill Bullets were the first railcars designed with the aid of a wind tunnel. They were capable of speeds approaching 100mph, and regularly worked at 80mph. The last Bullet continued in service until the 1990s.

An electric freight motor, or locomotive.
Many interurban and city streetcar lines interchanged freight with steam railroads. Most of the freight activity on city lines took place late at night, after the streetcars stopped running. In my home town of Fort Wayne, Indiana, Indiana Service Corporation's box motors and freight motors used city streetcar lines to deliver coal to power plants and various commercial and institutional customers, chemicals to the city water purification plant, and carloads of grain to breweries. There was also an interurban freight house near the passenger depot, and less-than-carload freight was a significant part of the business.

Bye!

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