They've always been there. The LED's are new additions. Some cars still have the older manual style number display on them where the operator simply scrolls the numbers by hand until his block is displayed, similar to the Neoplan buses. The interesting thing to check would be old photos of the Brill cars to see if they had them as well. I'm guessing since its part of the transit division that SEPTA just standardized the whole fleet by having every vehicle assigned a block number.
wagz wrote:Walt, I'm a current day Traffic Checker and we still do the same thing. Of course "corner checks" are rare these days, as we usually do "ride checks" where we get someone to cover every block on the route for the entire day. Unfortunately we're relegated mostly to the busses, but we do the Regional Rail routes every two winters.Some things don't change!
Joe Wagner
All I ever did was the "Corner checks" ( though this included one check in the subway----- the City Hall Camden Station of the then Bridge Line). I had heard of the "riding check" but our (part time) "crew" never did any of those. The two summers I worked as a traffic checker (1966 & 1967) we were preparing data for the September schedule change. Of course at that time the RRD was still part of the PRR and Reading Railroads, so there was never any possibility of checking any of those lines.BTW--the chief of the schedules division of the PTC ( and my actual boss) at that time was one George Wagner.