Hope for PCC's and Streetcars?

Another interesting article:

http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/ ... 1105sc.htm

While I've posted my thoughts about trolleys and transit in the various Route 15 forums here, it should be interesting discussion about the continued interest in the streetcar revival across the country. Philadelphia has at least thrown its "15 cents" in. While wishful thinking, you would think some car builder out there might be engineering a modern PCC that featured the low-floor boardings that buses do, but retain some of the charm and appearance of the PCC. Heck, they're reproducing Brill liners, why not PCC's?

That site is definitely umm, a bit out there, especially the stories contained on their homepage. I have to say I'm a bit surprised what looks like a staunchly right wing page would deign to write anything positive about transit improvements. Then again, back when the trolleys roamed most transit systems were rather self sufficient, it was the car which derailed all this and cast us into the maw of government funding for transit systems.

jfrey40535 wrote: While wishful thinking, you would think some car builder out there might be engineering a modern PCC that featured the low-floor boardings that buses do, but retain some of the charm and appearance of the PCC.

Why waste time and money going for a rehash of a horribly obsolete design with slight improvements when there are much better options out there? Sure the railfans will love it, but as the Rt15 shows it's unlikely the riders will really give flying f***. Siemens, Bombardier and Alstom all produce nearly 100% low floor LRVs. However, I strongly suspect that such vehicles would require SEPTA to pursue an extensive rebuilding of their trolley routes to correct things like single point turnouts and such which could cause problems with the no-axle trucks these LRVs use. Fortunately there is a happy medium, the Skoda Astra 3T, a fairly nice looking 66 foot long, 96 inch wide LRV which is something like 70% low floor and features only two bogies, both of which are powered and feature axles. As with so many eastern european designs from Tatra and Skoda the bogies are loosely based on the original PCC trucks from ERPCC/TRC. Tatra had the license for the PCC in Czechloslovakia, but I think Skoda was given carte blanche to reproduce parts from it. The bidirectional Astra 10T is already in service in Portland and Tacoma, and is slated to begin service in Washington DC, while the unidirectional Astra 3T serves 4 cities in the Czech Republic. For a mix of capacity, accessability and robustness you'd be hard pressed to find a better LRV than the Astra 3T, which provides nearly everything your low floor PCC would provide other than the trolley-jolly pleasing lines. By the time you pay to develop a new PCC you probably could have purchased 10 to 20 Astras for service on SEPTA's trolley routes.

Heck, they're reproducing Brill liners, why not PCC's?

Brillliners? The PCC-lookalike trolleys that Brill tried to market in the 1940s? Do you mean the trolleys that Gomaco is producing these days? Those are all mostly based on the older Brill designs for 'conventional' trolleys, and likely have been a success because their customers mostly seem to want to hearken back to days before the PCCs. Also a Brill-like trolley design is likely cheaper to produce in small batches. Unless you're going to go with composites and such a PCC is going to require a lot of shaped metal. That's fine if you're turning them out en masse, but the market just doesn't demand that and it'd cost too much to build PCCs using hand-shaped metal parts.

Why waste time and money going for a rehash of a horribly obsolete design with slight improvements

Who said the improvements had to be "slight"? Why does a trolley have to look like a spaceship?

it'd cost too much to build PCCs using hand-shaped metal parts

Sure in the 1940's they were hand shaped, but today a good shop like Bombardier has things like brakes and presses to mold metal into any shape you want. The automakers certainly don't have issues makeing bubble cars, why not for a trolley?

I'm not saying manufacturers should be churning out PCC lookalikes, but it would be nice to retain certain features (single headlight for example), while having modern features at the same time. Can't there be a happy medium between Classic streetcar and spaceship?

jfrey40535 wrote:Who said the improvements had to be "slight"?

I should have ammended that. I meant slight improvements over what is currently the state of the art in LRV/trolley/tram construction out of Siemens, Bombardier, Alstom, or even Skoda. Aesthetics aside, what would be gained by from an operational perspective in building a new low floor PCC which a Combino, Citadis, Flexity or Astra would not provide?

Why does a trolley have to look like a spaceship?

Because the spaceship look is at this point the cheapest, yet most aesthetically pleasing shape possible. It allows for slab-sides which are extremely cheap to build; large, flush fit windows (admittedly these likely add cost, but are worthwhile from an aesthetic perspective); and some composite parts to break up what otherwise would be a very boxy creation. The Europeans actually have a wonderful way of using the same frame to produce LRVs for different cities which manage to have different looks yet are all nearly mechanically compatible. The Alstom Citadis design in particular does this quite well, systems in Lyon, Paris, Bordeaux, Orleans, Montpellier, Grenoble, Nice, and many other cities use Citadis trams and in most cases they all look slightly different. Through modular parts Alstom can turn out an LRV specialized to a given customer with little difficulty. The Bordeaux Citadis have a surface mounted 3rd rail system to avoid 'ugly' overhead wires in a historical part of town, while the Nice Citadis have an NiMH battery system to provide power through a similar area. The Regio Citadis is a dual voltage LRV designed to work with both 750vdc and [email protected] for service in Kassel, Germany. If you brought it here to the states, got waivers from from the FRA, and tuned the transformer slightly you'd be able to run the damn thing up and down the NEC. If you had to point to a "modern PCC" the Citadis would be that and more in terms of the concept and execution of a standardized LRV to drive down the cost of infrastructure improvements. Siemens and Bombardier both offer the exact same range of products, but their (respectively) Combino and Flexity brands don't have quite as much emphasis on altering the aesthetics as the Citadis does.

Sure in the 1940's they were hand shaped, but today a good shop like Bombardier has things like brakes and presses to mold metal into any shape you want. The automakers certainly don't have issues makeing bubble cars, why not for a trolley?

No, back in the 1940s they WERE using those presses, dies, and such to turn out the PCCs. They were trying to produce a trolley which could be built through the same methods then being used to drive the cost of automobiles down to get away from the more labor-intensive trolleys being turned out by Brill, Birney and such prior to the PCC. Today unless you have a very large order the cost to produce that tooling just wouldn't pay off. As such you'd have to build the cars largely by hand and a hand-built PCC would be extremely expensive, what with the curved metal and such to be shaped and formed.

Additionally, most cities don't seem to be particularly picky about what trolleys they get for their vintage trolley line. They just want something which looks vaguely like the old pictures of the city, and call up Gomaco to do a replica Brill, Birney or other early design, most of which predate the PCC because many systems didn't make it to the PCC days. Only San Fransisco and Kenosha specifically run PCCs, and then San Fran has found the earlier Milan Peter Witts to be excellent cars in their own right, while Kenosha likely doesn't need any PCCs. Every other system in the country is quite happy to take their Brill-lookalikes from Gomaco and run them back and forth while pretending they have a light rail line.

I'm not saying manufacturers should be churning out PCC lookalikes, but it would be nice to retain certain features (single headlight for example), while having modern features at the same time. Can't there be a happy medium between Classic streetcar and spaceship?

What features would you retain? The tiny size? the tiny windows? The generally dark, cramped feeling? The hard to defog front windows? The PCC is a dead end and any attempt to resurrect it is just reinventing the wheel with a different hubcab. Dual headlights actually do serve a purpose, they provide a more even lighting area over which objects will not be caught in the blind spot of something placed before the single headlight. You don't see auto manufacturers going to single, center mounted headlights, so why would LRV makers want to do so?

Why insist on a PCC derived design which would cost millions to develop when there is an LRV design perfect for Philly which can be taken off the shelf and operated here? Aesthetics is a rather poor reason to go back and reinvent the wheel.

We do have the PCC-II "fleet." I tend to agree; might as well go with the modern equipment. For mass transit to succeed in America, it has to be clearly better than driving for at least some people, some of the time, or it will only ever be the province of the poor. To do that, we need rail based equipment, or at least outside-electric powered equipment to predominate (trackless trolleys). And as we've seen from Route 15, people would rather have it work than be pretty. Only the latest and best technology will really serve.

That said, the PCC-IIs can play a neat role. Just as Gondor in the Lord of the Rings (the books), they can keep alive the memory and glory of the past while still moving into the future. There'll always be a need for extra cars during special events or if too many regular cars are claimed by maintenance, and of course fan trips.

Theres a plan underway for Inekon (who partnered with Skoda to build the streetcars in Portland and Tacoma) to partner with an Oregon company to build Inekon-licensed streetcars in the US for the US market. Its very likely that if this happens they might build new streetcars for Philadelphia.
Just as a side note...Back in the 1970s Boeing Vertol planned to build a single ended LRV model in addition to the double ended LRVs they built for Boston and SF.

Iron Works plans to build prototype of streetcar

Iron firm forges streetcar desire

The Streetcar Builders: Inekon, Skoda, Dopravní Podnik Ostrava ... and Oregon Iron Works?

I have one of the Boeing brochures and the LRV was to have been any combination desired such as : Single or double ended, articulated or non-articulated.

The PCC body is as modern looking today as it was the day the first production model PCC took to the streets. If you don't like the small windows of the post-war, standee window type, you can always adopt a variation of the 1949 Red Arrow St. Louis Car bodies, which used the pre-war window type and the post war 30 degree windshield. I will admit that in terms of technology, the PCC is now obsolete ( after all, it HAS been almost 70 years since that first PCC was introduced), but no one has built a better car type since. Let's see how long the current LRV's last.
BTW there was absolutely nothing wrong with the Brilliner---- it just wasn't a PCC car. There weren't that many of them, making it too costly to maintain a fleet of "non-standard" cars when PCC's were in almost mass production. Nine of the ten double-ended versions acquired by the Red Arrow in 1941 lasted longer then the newer St. Louis PCC type Cars, ( the tenth, No. 10, was wrecked in 1963) and it was a Brilliner that made the last trip over the former Red Arrow rail system just prior to the introduction of the Kawasaki LRV's.

Also the MTA in 1951 had the Picture Window PCC design built which eliminated the gap between the standee and lower window.

Speaking of the Kawasaki LRVs, there's another issue to be dealt with here, specifically that of wheelchair/ADA access, a complete nonissue when the PCC was first designed. Eventually the waivers that are keeping the K-cars operating will run out, or the cars themselves will wear out, and the entire fleet is going to need replacement. Low-floor designs, which have been gaining market share on aesthetic grounds, are going to put high-floor models out of business because of the operational concerns that come with accessibility, as we're seeing on the 15 and the ugly-hack wheelchair lifts on the PCC-IIs.

As someone who believes strongly in the spirit of the ADA, I can't say I'll be terribly upset about this process; yes, it will mean no more PCCs, but that's about all of the nostalgia I can summon; who will miss the K-cars in the same way? I'm too young to have been directly promised flying cars, but I'll take an LRV that looks like a spaceship over a flying car any day.