Rubber Band Vehicle Designs
The name “PCC” comes from the name of the organization that created the design, the Electric Railway Presidents Conference Committee, a trade association for streetcar operators. In 1929, with its members facing increased competition from those newfangled automobiles, the Committee embarked on the design of a state-of-the-art streetcar, in the hopes that a more modern and attractive vehicle would help retain riders while lowering operating costs.
The design was finalized by 1935. The base-model PCC was 46 feet long. Most were single-ended cars like the ones pictured above and to the right, with doors in the front-entrance center-exit configuration used today on transit buses. (Double-enders with doors at the ends on both sides were built for a few operators.) The PCC had streamlined Art Deco styling for that “trolley car of the future” vibe, but the beauty of the PCC was more than skin deep.
The PCC used the latest and greatest in streetcar technology. A rheostat-type
system controlled the flow of power, resulting in
smoother acceleration than the 14-step “notched” controllers on older
trolleys. The electric traction motors were connected to the axles by hypoid gears for quieter operation. The wheels had their steel tires mounted on rubber “sandwiches,” and the “trucks” (wheel assemblies) featured extensive use of rubber parts, all in the name of a smoother and quieter ride. The sophisticated brake system combined regenerative braking using the electric motors (like on the Prius), friction brakes acting on the wheels, and a magnetic parking brake.
The PCC was wicked fast for a streetcar, able to out-accelerate most contemporary (mid-1930s) automobiles and hit a top speed of 50 MPH–though it would be rare for any PCC to go that fast unless it was running on a “private right of way” (off-street trackage).
The designs and patents for the PCC were owned by the Transit Research Corporation, which licensed them to manufacturers. There were a number of refinements to the control and braking systems
over the course of production, and later PCCs received a mild restyling
which raked back the windshield to reduce glare and added a row of
small “standee windows” along the upper side.
About 4,500 PCCs were built by Pullman-Standard, the St. Louis Car Company, and Canadian Car & Foundry, for use in 33 cities in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. The first production PCC entered service in Pittsburgh in 1936; the last was delivered to San Francisco in 1952.
The PCC thus became the standard streetcar of North America, and arguably of the world. Cars built in the U.S. were exported to Argentina, and secondhand PCCs ran in Egypt. Tens of thousands were built under license in several European countries, and thousands more unauthorized copies in Poland and the Soviet Union. European PCCs used the same basic mechanical and control systems as those built in the U.S. and Canada, but they tended to be narrower and smaller and very different in styling. Some, such as Madrid’s, had a strong family resemblance to their North American cousins, while other European versions did not.
Most American streetcar systems had been converted to buses by the time I was born, but I did get a few opportunities to see and ride PCCs in my formative years. I remember one trip on the Shaker Heights Rapid to Cleveland Stadium for an Indians game when I was maybe two or three, but most of the PCCs I saw were in Pittsburgh.
Pittsburgh was unusual in that its streetcar system–sometimes jokingly referred to as “America’s Largest Trolley Museum”–survived into the 1960s mostly intact. The privately owned Pittsburgh Railway was acquired by the newly-formed Port Authority of Allegheny County in 1964. The Port Authority, in line with the latest “progressive” thinking among city planners, began abandoning “obsolete” streetcar lines in favor of “modern” buses, and concocted a grand scheme to build a flashy new automated monorail system called “Skybus.”
It is widely believed that the abandonment of trolley lines in the 1940s and 1950s was the product of a vast conspiracy by General Motors to encourage sales of transit buses. Whether that’s true or not–personally, I’m not convinced–there are rational reasons for preferring buses. Buses do not require the trolley’s complex infrastructure of tracks and overhead wires, and they are far more flexible in operation–the trolley can only go where tracks and wires already exist, while the bus can turn down any street; if the route is blocked, the bus can go around the obstacle while the trolley has to wait for the track to be cleared. On the other hand, a PCC looks cooler and has more personality than a transit bus, and when you’re a kid (or a kid at heart) that’s what really counts.
Every time we went to Pittsburgh, it seemed, there would be more streets where the wires had been pulled down and the tracks sat forlornly, never to be used again. By 1970 or so, the only trolley routes left in service ran from downtown across the Smithfield Street Bridge and into the “South Hills.” These lines tunneled through Mount Washington and ran mostly on private right of way from there on out, allowing for a faster trip than a bus could manage on the parallel city streets.
By this time, the Port Authority had sort of come to its senses. As the public became more sensitive to the issue of air quality (and with the steel mills the way they were in pre-EPA days, Pittsburgh’s air quality needed all the help it could get!) electric streetcars were seen to be more eco-friendly than smelly diesel buses. When political support for the grandiose Skybus project collapsed, someone finally realized that instead of spending mind-bending sums of tax money to build a new electric transit system from scratch, it might make more sense to work with the one they already had. The surviving PCCs were spruced up and repainted. Most were given a variation of the “mod” scheme, with bright colors at either end of the car separated by a white band in the middle. Bold, yet not too overstated, the “mod” PCCs looked pretty good.
Other cars were painted in “billboard” advertising schemes: one as a loaf of bread, one as a giant candy bar, one as a Pittsburgh Steelers “Terrible Trolley,” and one poor thing cursed with a demented zigzag rainbow that was supposed to induce you to watch public television. And then there was the ultimate custom paint job, the one that got written up in The New York Times, the legendary streetcar named “Desire”–”Mod Desire,” that is:
I kinda liked it. What can I say? I was a kid, and it was the 1970s.
In one of that dreadful decade’s more spectacular bad ideas, the Urban Mass Transit Administration commissioned Boeing-Vertol, which normally builds helicopters, to develop a replacement for the PCC, a “US Standard Light Rail Vehicle” employing the latest and greatest technology. Advanced new railroad cars built by a helicopter company–what could possibly go wrong?
A lot, actually. The first Boeing LRVs entered service in Boston in 1976, and, like many 1970s automobiles, almost immediately started breaking down. There were shorts in the electrical system and traction motors that wore out faster than they could be replaced and doors that failed to open or close properly. The cars derailed on curves they were allegedly designed to go around. At various times, more than half the LRVs on the Boston transit system were out of service. It got so bad that the transit agency stuffed the broken-down Boeings in an abandoned subway tunnel to hide the extent of the problem–a “CYA” move which only added to the agency’s embarrassment when an enterprising newspaper reporter discovered the hidden horde of troubled trolleys and splashed the story on the front page.
Like many domestic autos of similar vintage, the Boeings were eventually replaced by more reliable Japanese imports. To keep things operating in the meantime, Boston refurbished some of its stored PCCs and put them back in service–the sturdy PCCs thus replacing the cars that were supposed to have replaced them.
Nothing quite that spectacular happened to the Pittsburgh trolleys. Beginning in the 1980s, the trolley lines were rebuilt into a modern “light rail” transportation system. The downtown street tracks were replaced by a subway, and the lines through the South Hills upgraded. The subway is now being extended under the Allegheny River to PNC Park, in what is hoped to be the first stage of a return of rail transportation to the north side of the city.
The last Pittsburgh PCCs ran in 1999; they’ve been replaced by modern “light rail vehicles” built by Siemens-Duewag which are faster, safer, more efficient, and just plain better by every objective measure than the PCCs.
They also have no soul and no personality.
If you want to ride a PCC, and I mean ride it on a real trip, not just take a joyride around a museum’s demonstration track, there are still a few places you can do that. PCCs are in daily service on the Ashmont-Mattapan rapid transit line in Boston and on Philadelphia’s Girard Avenue streetcar line. The Kenosha, Wisconsin downtown trolley uses five cars that originally ran in Toronto; each is painted for a different city which once ran PCCs.
The biggest and most interesting PCC fleet is owned by the San Francisco Municipal Railway, and used on the Market Street line. There are 27 PCC cars in service, each painted in a different scheme, and another 30 in storage or undergoing restoration. These trolleys are restored and maintained with the assistance of the Market Street Railway, a nonprofit organization which also helps with cable car preservation and runs the San Francisco Railway Museum.
I’ll leave you with some film of PCCs in St. Louis, Missouri in January of 1964. While the cameraman was obviously concentrating on the trolleys, it’s interesting to see the mix of old Detroit iron they shared the streets with. I noticed a “batwing” ‘59 Chevy at 0:30, a fastback Caddy “club sedan” at 1:00, and a gloriously garish ‘58 Buick at 2:10.
The drawings of SF Muni trolleys came from the Market Street Railway’s site. The photos of Pittsburgh streetcars came from two websites that concentrate on Steel City trolley history, Pittsburgh Railways and Pittsburgh Transit History. The latter site is maintained by Shawn Bennear, who used to be a bus driver for the Port Authority, and his affection for buses and trolleys is the sort of thing we here at Car Lust can relate to.
–Cookie the Dog’s Owner
The name “PCC” comes from the name of the organization that created the design, the Electric Railway Presidents Conference Committee, a trade association for streetcar operators. In 1929, with its members facing increased competition from those newfangled automobiles, the Committee embarked on the design of a state-of-the-art streetcar, in the hopes that a more modern and attractive vehicle would help retain riders while lowering operating costs.
The design was finalized by 1935. The base-model PCC was 46 feet long. Most were single-ended cars like the ones pictured above and to the right, with doors in the front-entrance center-exit configuration used today on transit buses. (Double-enders with doors at the ends on both sides were built for a few operators.) The PCC had streamlined Art Deco styling for that “trolley car of the future” vibe, but the beauty of the PCC was more than skin deep.
The PCC used the latest and greatest in streetcar technology. A rheostat-type
system controlled the flow of power, resulting in
smoother acceleration than the 14-step “notched” controllers on older
trolleys. The electric traction motors were connected to the axles by hypoid gears for quieter operation. The wheels had their steel tires mounted on rubber “sandwiches,” and the “trucks” (wheel assemblies) featured extensive use of rubber parts, all in the name of a smoother and quieter ride. The sophisticated brake system combined regenerative braking using the electric motors (like on the Prius), friction brakes acting on the wheels, and a magnetic parking brake.
The PCC was wicked fast for a streetcar, able to out-accelerate most contemporary (mid-1930s) automobiles and hit a top speed of 50 MPH–though it would be rare for any PCC to go that fast unless it was running on a “private right of way” (off-street trackage).
The designs and patents for the PCC were owned by the Transit Research Corporation, which licensed them to manufacturers. There were a number of refinements to the control and braking systems
over the course of production, and later PCCs received a mild restyling
which raked back the windshield to reduce glare and added a row of
small “standee windows” along the upper side.
About 4,500 PCCs were built by Pullman-Standard, the St. Louis Car Company, and Canadian Car & Foundry, for use in 33 cities in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. The first production PCC entered service in Pittsburgh in 1936; the last was delivered to San Francisco in 1952.
The PCC thus became the standard streetcar of North America, and arguably of the world. Cars built in the U.S. were exported to Argentina, and secondhand PCCs ran in Egypt. Tens of thousands were built under license in several European countries, and thousands more unauthorized copies in Poland and the Soviet Union. European PCCs used the same basic mechanical and control systems as those built in the U.S. and Canada, but they tended to be narrower and smaller and very different in styling. Some, such as Madrid’s, had a strong family resemblance to their North American cousins, while other European versions did not.
Most American streetcar systems had been converted to buses by the time I was born, but I did get a few opportunities to see and ride PCCs in my formative years. I remember one trip on the Shaker Heights Rapid to Cleveland Stadium for an Indians game when I was maybe two or three, but most of the PCCs I saw were in Pittsburgh.
Pittsburgh was unusual in that its streetcar system–sometimes jokingly referred to as “America’s Largest Trolley Museum”–survived into the 1960s mostly intact. The privately owned Pittsburgh Railway was acquired by the newly-formed Port Authority of Allegheny County in 1964. The Port Authority, in line with the latest “progressive” thinking among city planners, began abandoning “obsolete” streetcar lines in favor of “modern” buses, and concocted a grand scheme to build a flashy new automated monorail system called “Skybus.”
It is widely believed that the abandonment of trolley lines in the 1940s and 1950s was the product of a vast conspiracy by General Motors to encourage sales of transit buses. Whether that’s true or not–personally, I’m not convinced–there are rational reasons for preferring buses. Buses do not require the trolley’s complex infrastructure of tracks and overhead wires, and they are far more flexible in operation–the trolley can only go where tracks and wires already exist, while the bus can turn down any street; if the route is blocked, the bus can go around the obstacle while the trolley has to wait for the track to be cleared. On the other hand, a PCC looks cooler and has more personality than a transit bus, and when you’re a kid (or a kid at heart) that’s what really counts.
Every time we went to Pittsburgh, it seemed, there would be more streets where the wires had been pulled down and the tracks sat forlornly, never to be used again. By 1970 or so, the only trolley routes left in service ran from downtown across the Smithfield Street Bridge and into the “South Hills.” These lines tunneled through Mount Washington and ran mostly on private right of way from there on out, allowing for a faster trip than a bus could manage on the parallel city streets.
By this time, the Port Authority had sort of come to its senses. As the public became more sensitive to the issue of air quality (and with the steel mills the way they were in pre-EPA days, Pittsburgh’s air quality needed all the help it could get!) electric streetcars were seen to be more eco-friendly than smelly diesel buses. When political support for the grandiose Skybus project collapsed, someone finally realized that instead of spending mind-bending sums of tax money to build a new electric transit system from scratch, it might make more sense to work with the one they already had. The surviving PCCs were spruced up and repainted. Most were given a variation of the “mod” scheme, with bright colors at either end of the car separated by a white band in the middle. Bold, yet not too overstated, the “mod” PCCs looked pretty good.
Other cars were painted in “billboard” advertising schemes: one as a loaf of bread, one as a giant candy bar, one as a Pittsburgh Steelers “Terrible Trolley,” and one poor thing cursed with a demented zigzag rainbow that was supposed to induce you to watch public television. And then there was the ultimate custom paint job, the one that got written up in The New York Times, the legendary streetcar named “Desire”–”Mod Desire,” that is:
I kinda liked it. What can I say? I was a kid, and it was the 1970s.
In one of that dreadful decade’s more spectacular bad ideas, the Urban Mass Transit Administration commissioned Boeing-Vertol, which normally builds helicopters, to develop a replacement for the PCC, a “US Standard Light Rail Vehicle” employing the latest and greatest technology. Advanced new railroad cars built by a helicopter company–what could possibly go wrong?
A lot, actually. The first Boeing LRVs entered service in Boston in 1976, and, like many 1970s automobiles, almost immediately started breaking down. There were shorts in the electrical system and traction motors that wore out faster than they could be replaced and doors that failed to open or close properly. The cars derailed on curves they were allegedly designed to go around. At various times, more than half the LRVs on the Boston transit system were out of service. It got so bad that the transit agency stuffed the broken-down Boeings in an abandoned subway tunnel to hide the extent of the problem–a “CYA” move which only added to the agency’s embarrassment when an enterprising newspaper reporter discovered the hidden horde of troubled trolleys and splashed the story on the front page.
Like many domestic autos of similar vintage, the Boeings were eventually replaced by more reliable Japanese imports. To keep things operating in the meantime, Boston refurbished some of its stored PCCs and put them back in service–the sturdy PCCs thus replacing the cars that were supposed to have replaced them.
Nothing quite that spectacular happened to the Pittsburgh trolleys. Beginning in the 1980s, the trolley lines were rebuilt into a modern “light rail” transportation system. The downtown street tracks were replaced by a subway, and the lines through the South Hills upgraded. The subway is now being extended under the Allegheny River to PNC Park, in what is hoped to be the first stage of a return of rail transportation to the north side of the city.
The last Pittsburgh PCCs ran in 1999; they’ve been replaced by modern “light rail vehicles” built by Siemens-Duewag which are faster, safer, more efficient, and just plain better by every objective measure than the PCCs.
They also have no soul and no personality.
If you want to ride a PCC, and I mean ride it on a real trip, not just take a joyride around a museum’s demonstration track, there are still a few places you can do that. PCCs are in daily service on the Ashmont-Mattapan rapid transit line in Boston and on Philadelphia’s Girard Avenue streetcar line. The Kenosha, Wisconsin downtown trolley uses five cars that originally ran in Toronto; each is painted for a different city which once ran PCCs.
The biggest and most interesting PCC fleet is owned by the San Francisco Municipal Railway, and used on the Market Street line. There are 27 PCC cars in service, each painted in a different scheme, and another 30 in storage or undergoing restoration. These trolleys are restored and maintained with the assistance of the Market Street Railway, a nonprofit organization which also helps with cable car preservation and runs the San Francisco Railway Museum.
I’ll leave you with some film of PCCs in St. Louis, Missouri in January of 1964. While the cameraman was obviously concentrating on the trolleys, it’s interesting to see the mix of old Detroit iron they shared the streets with. I noticed a “batwing” ‘59 Chevy at 0:30, a fastback Caddy “club sedan” at 1:00, and a gloriously garish ‘58 Buick at 2:10.
The drawings of SF Muni trolleys came from the Market Street Railway’s site. The photos of Pittsburgh streetcars came from two websites that concentrate on Steel City trolley history, Pittsburgh Railways and Pittsburgh Transit History. The latter site is maintained by Shawn Bennear, who used to be a bus driver for the Port Authority, and his affection for buses and trolleys is the sort of thing we here at Car Lust can relate to.
–Cookie the Dog’s Owner
