rslitman wrote:BuddCar711 wrote:The Reading Silverliner IIs did not have lavatories.
Why am I not surprised by this? No Silverliner III's for Reading, and now I learn that there were no bathrooms on their Silverliner IIs.
Why do most Silverliner V runs have four-digit numbers that start with 9? Yes, the bias continues even today.
I'd like to apologize to everyone, especially Scotty269 and nomis, for spouting off without thinking about the reason for some of these differences.
I wasn't in the Philadelphia area during the Reading and Pennsylvania days. I only knew the Reading name from the Monopoly game board. The Pennsylvania Railroad, of course, was also on this board, too. I knew the Pennsylvania Railroad name, as well as a third Monopoly board railroad, the B&O, because they both operated in the Washington, DC, area, where I grew up. (I don't know much about the fourth Monopoly board railroad, the Short Line, although I took a bus with the Short Line or Short Lines name from Port Authority in NYC to upstate NY once or twice in the 1970s and wondered if this was the same company.)
Just the fact that the Pennsylvania Railroad reached Washington, while the Reading Railroad didn't, should tell me something about the relative success of these two lines, as well as their different needs. I don't know if the Silverliner IIs and IIIs that are still running today ever were in service to such Pennsylvania Railroad destinations as Washington, Harrisburg, and New York City, but if they were, that certainly goes a long way in explaining why they had to be equipped with bathrooms. Even if these particular cars weren't, it may have just been standard operating procedure for the Pennsylvania Railroad to have bathrooms on all of their cars.
And if they did use the Silverliners well beyond where SEPTA runs today, that may also explain why they had to order the Silverliner IIIs later in the 1960s, while Reading stood pat with their collection of IIs.
Soon you will need to be in your 60s in order to remember the 60s.