Thread 2049412

We are the most walkable city in the USA
We have pretty good public transit for the USA

BUT something sad is when I go to cities like SF and El Paso and Dallas among others I see old Philadelphia trolley cars. Yes, it's well know Philadelphia's trolley cars are world famous and we sold many of them off to other cities when we dismantled some lines. I've seen them in person in these cities. It just makes me sad but also a bit proud my transit history is all over the country I guess.

I just want people to know that. That yes... Philadelphia trolleys are everywhere. It's a bitter sweet moment

Oh by the way... you didn't think pic related was Philly did you? Nope... that's El Paso with a Philadelphia street car. Imagine how that feels for Philadelphians.

>>2049412 (OP)
Those are just PCC cars which were the closest the U.S. came to a common streetcar design, and they ran in many cities besides Philly. It’s cool to see some of them still running there—outside of Boston, El Paso, Kenosha and SF you’ll only see them in museums. Brooklyn, shown here, had the first ones in 1936.

>>2049423
They are from Philly specifically. They purchased philadelphia's old cars. In SF they even have a historical plaque on the cars saying thank you to Philadelphia...

>>2049436
I don't care where they run, just nice some streetcars got saved

>>2049436
A lot of PCCs were sold secondhand to other cities. I think these Newark cars came from Minneapolis. Detroit sold hundreds of PCCs only a decade old to Mexico City and lost money in the deal as they agreed to deliver them in like-new condition and Mexico City livery but some were damaged in transit. While I prefer older styles, they’re a great work of Art Deco design which also influenced the Tatra streetcars found all over Eastern Europe.

>>2049412 (OP)
>Philadelphia's trolley cars are world famous
No they're not, PCCs are world famous, and those just happen to be PCCs from Philadelphia.

>>2049502
>Philadelphia has run electric streetcars since 1892, and some of its routes (like Route 11) have operated continuously for over 100 years.
>It's one of only a few U.S. cities to maintain a substantial legacy streetcar network—others being San Francisco and New Orleans.

Philadelphia is a world famous trolley hobby spot

>>2049517
>Philadelphia is a world famous trolley hobby spot
No it's not.

>>2049522
Yes it is.

>>2049540
Philly is a trolley Mecca but the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum is hours away near Pittsburgh, though well worth the trip. There’s closer trolley museums in Scranton, and Rockhill Furnace next to the East Broad Top narrow gauge steam railroad.
For model trolleys, the Philly area has probably the biggest group in the country, the East Penn Traction Club.

>>2049540
>AI slop
leave.

>>2049412 (OP)
>>2049423
Can you all in philly please take them back? We hate them here, they are a waste of money and generally are disliked. Underutilized, very limited routes, and get derailed by fucking baseballs.

>>2049573
>AI slop is bad for some reason. use google like a normal person and just click on the first result you see
KYS ChatGPT>>>>>Google

>>2049586
Where are you even from that baseballs are a common everyday hazard on streets? Brooklyn in the 1930s?

>>2049599
>Where are you even from that baseballs are a common everyday hazard on streets? Brooklyn in the 1930s?
There were so many trolleys in Brooklyn that they called the baseball team the Trolley Dodgers, later shortening it to Dodgers.

>>2049412 (OP)
I like the modern pantograph instead of the shitty "heritage" pole collector found on other vintage trams.

Philadelphia PCC in the “Gulf Oil” livery. They had some nice paint schemes, like the silver”Philly Cream Cheese” and a red white and blue bicentennial livery.

>>2049586
The El Paso ballpark was completed downtown roughly the same time as the streetcars were installed. You can google it, one of the cars got derailed by a baseball.

Pittsburgh had a massive PCC fleet at one time with a lot of interesting liveries.

Mustang stuck in the #36 route tunnel with a Philadelphia PCC trolley

>>2050052
this is the photo that gave Elon the idea for Loop

built for PCC

Pacific Electric double ended PCC. What other cities had these? I know Dallas had some that were sold to Boston.

Give me infinite money and I will revive the 56 along with the 53 and the 23 to Washington Ave as boondoggle heritage lines

A line of Detroit PCC cars on a railfan trip shortly before they were sold to Mexico City at a loss. They ran for years afterwards but many were destroyed in the 80s when an earthquake collapsed a carbarn.

>>2050344
San Francisco also had double ended PCCs.
iirc they also bought the last PCCs evar.

>>2049412 (OP)
>Oh by the way... you didn't think pic related was Philly did you?
No, I thought this would be a thread on the 1877 Philly rail strike, but you let me down.

There’s plenty of heritage lines and museums with rehabbed PCCs but Boston’s Mattapan-Ashmont line has been running these continuously since 1945, though they probably won’t be around much longer.

San Francisco #1040, the last of over 5000 PCCs manufactured

>>2050748
>they probably won’t be around much longer
Gay and cringe, Milan has Peter Witt trams from the late 20s in regular service

>dude why don't we have walkable cities!!
>90% white city of 2 million people in 1940
>30% white city of 1.5 million today
over a million whites fled the city

Really makes you think huh
Maybe if only they could have walked to the store, and taken the bus.. they would have stayed?

>>2051015
Streetcars on the St. Charles line in New Orleans are a century old and still running.

>>2051047
Why wouldn't they is a rational pretty way to do public transport, at small scale and not like a crazy stampede

>>2051098
>the big choo choo scare me :<

>>2051098
>>2051166
The St. Charles line is historical, one of the oldest transit lines in the world, dating back to horsecars in the 1830s, yet it’s not just a tourist meme. Everyday commuters use it as well as out of towners gawking at the Garden District and going to party in the French Quarter. Newer lines have retro style cars but the shops keep fabricating parts for those 1920s Perley Thomas cars.
To circle back to OPs post, at one time New Orleans tested out a Philly PCC and both systems share the same 62 1/2” “Pennsylvania Broad Gauge”.

The Pennsylvania Trolley Museum just rolled out the refurbished “Terrible Trolley” celebrating the Pittsburgh Steelers. Pittsburgh had a crazy variety of PCC liveries, some by the company but many as private commercial schemes.

>>2051176
Cool

>>2051251
Very lame

>>2049412 (OP)
>We are the most walkable city in the USA
Is Philly that much more walkable than any other major East Coast city?

Chicago had some big ass PCCs with shrouded wheel wells

Let's be honest: Who would voluntarily use public transit in these United States of America?

Americans need to "social distance" themselves in order to ensure they'll see the next day.
You don't have the populace to make public transit work out. And Europe is losing it as well thanks to 2015.
In the end only East Asia will remain, and the flood of Western refugees will ruin those sanctuaries of civilization and public transit as well.

>>2053268
>>>/pol/

>>2053303
This is not about Iryna Zarutska, it's about the state of American public transport.
How to make busses and trains safe again.
That's the absolute baseline, public transport has to clear for anyone with a choice to use it.

>>2053268
>Who would voluntarily use public transit in these United States of America?
Most don't. I currently live in Philadelphia and there's large numbers of people that only use rideshare services to travel. they don't walk more than 5 blocks and don't take any public transit.

>>2053268
luckily for me very few crackheads use the bus routes I use. Its mostly older people with suspended liscences

>>2049412 (OP)
Forget about Legacy vehicles you need to worry about SEPTA ceasing to exist right now lol

>>2053268
How is public transportation different from any other public space? Someone could just as easily get stabbed in a convenience/grocery store, gas station, or public restroom. Perhaps the problem is the stabbing, looting, and shooting, not the public places themselves. If you are afraid of such places, don't use them, or learn self-defense.

Let's be honest: Who would voluntarily use public transit in the People's Republic of China?

The Chinese need to "social distance" themselves in order to ensure they'll see the next day.
You don't have the living standards or work culture to make public transit work out. And Europe is losing it as well thanks to 2015.
In the end only America will remain, and the flood of Chinese suicidal refugees (China is the second largest source of immigration behind Mexico) will ruin those sanctuaries of civilization and public transit as well.

>>2053480
Stores generally have more security, especially in "certain" neighborhoods.

>>2053672
Lack of funding for high frequency service and security please understand

>>2053482
>Who would voluntarily exist in the People's Republic of China?
ftfy, the suicide nets are not for show

>>2053675
You know before 1965 there was little to no need for security on public transit, now the trains will need to have TSA checkpoints like planes to try and lower the crime rate on them.

Shark mouth PCC in Los Angeles in a wartime recruitment drive for transit workers

>>2053905
Air-conditioned sightseeing PCC in Washington DC

>>2053912
Did you mean to post a pic? The “Silver Sightseer”, preserved then lost in a museum fire.

>>2053915
Was that the fire that some autist started because he disagreed with the preservation efforts or whatever

>>2053915
>>2053912
I can't brain today I has the dumb

>>2053917
I know it was arson but didn’t know that. Train autistes are bad enough but trolley spergs are way out on the spectrum. Link has some photos but nothing specific about the fire.
https://ghostsofdc.org/2023/12/02/silver-sightseer-dc-streetcar/

>>2053918
No prob and you’re forgiven with the pic of the uniformed tour guide

https://www.dctrolley.org/blog/outoftown
Another DC PCC story. After the system shut down, some of the cars were purchased by a Ft. Worth department store to make a subway shuttle from their parking lots. The original mods they did made the PCCs look even more cool and futuristic, but later they made them boxy and lame. I spent time in Ft. Worth when I was a kid but didn’t know about this.

>>2049412 (OP)
Shure it is not just painted like Philly? Philly uses wide gauge trolley tracks instead of standard gauge.

Johnstown, PA was the smallest city to run PCC cars, up until the system went bus in 1960. Normally I’m not crazy about advertising on streetcars but I always liked the big Pepsi bottle caps.

>>2053920
DC losing its streetcars is one of the more painful ones, they had a good network until the end of the 1950s and it didn't even use catenary. So much potential to have kept them. Man.

>>2054004
I’m obsessed with electric conduit powered systems like DC, London and Manhattan. They evolved from cable car vaults with a narrow plow picking up both live current and the return. Picrel shows 42nd St. near Grand Central in Manhattan where two systems shared a short section of track but used two separate conduits.

>>2054072
Didn’t post pic

>>2054073
>two conduits
>one of them just changes position relative to the tracks

>>2053904
the sad thing is TSA checks on Transit would kill ridership. You are already at a disadvantage time wise compared to the car, TSA checks would kill the need to ride transit except for the most elderly fucks that can't drive anymore.
IMO the main issue is that the USA needs to start putting down physically violent criminals like it was done in Europe and still in the middle east to get rid of the public safety problem

>>2054153
The main problem with that is morality in the West at the moment is fucked up right now. Nobody knows what evil is and thinks evil is good.
i.e. Adultery and sexual immorality
At this point let's just hope anti humanist hack Russian and American Silos and start armageddon just let the human race die already

>>2054153
Post 9/11 in NYC they were doing bag checks at subway turnstiles for a while, just picking out random people and doing a cursory peek through your backpack—security theater. It did feel better though to have cops at every station and on the trains, not about terrorists who could never really be deterred, but for ordinary crime. Mass transit, packs of youths and mumbling schizos giving off an aura of menace can’t coexist.

Boston

>>2053672
Violence on SEPTA's metro is surprisingly rare, both at stations and in-car. The biggest problems facing the system are actually anti-social dickheads who light-up and play loud music, and homeless schizos that smell like shit. This could all be remedied if they'd enforced the fare and had more personnel at every station- doesn't even need to be transit police, just having a uniformed presence is often enough. Bonus for getting open gangways so train patrolling becomes easier and you don't just get designated schizo cars.

I think it's a shame the usa demolished all of their own history such as iconic historical buildings, neighbourhoods and scenic routes like the trolley lines for some of the most soulless looking generic slop imaginable and parking lots.
A lot of the charm of historical cities in Europe was lost to ww2 and I always find that regrettable. Not like you can't have a fancy downtown finance district and a nice and cozy historic old city center existing alongside eachother.
America pulled a Chinese great leap forward move because they got comsumed by their own greed for money and the automotive lobby.

>>2054930
Shut the fuck up. Stop derailing threads with public policy slop—that discussion belongs in /pol/

So should I make a weekend trip to philly before the entire system gets gutted to own the libs?

>>2054759
Oi m8 do you have a loicense for this much cozy?

>>2056738
Here, have another

>>2057025
it's a shame they demolished the old Ashmont station instead of just rebuilding it. the Cross transfer between the old Trolleys/Busway and the red line cars was cool as hell.

>>2057025
PCCs are so kino there's literally no other public transport vehicle that comes close

>>2057422
I could name a few, but they are not from Philadelphia.

>>2057429
And you'd be wrong.

>>2057422
I like older Edwardianpunk streetcars like this storage battery powered car but PCCs are Art Deco icons and even today it’s like their route sign should read THE FUTURE.

>>2049412 (OP)
That El Paso car is pretty chill, I ride it sometimes when bar hopping. Haven’t had any issues with homeless on it even though its free. Most people just use it when there’s a baseball/football game, and during the week some Mexicans use it to get to work. Didn’t know you guys used the same model up in Philly.

Before PCCs these were common in Philly—the 8000 series “Nearside” car

>>2057839
This type of car is called a Peter Witt car. It was conceived to have front entry and the conductor next to the middle door. That way people could get on right away but they'd have to pass the conductor eventually and pay the fare. This reduced dwelling times compared to the usual system of having people pay right when getting on.
Though not exclusive nor unprecedented features, the triple front window and low floor at the center door are typical features of the Peter Witt car. This type of cars was common all over north America, and variants were also built in Europe, most famously in Milan, Italy where many of those trams from the late 20s are still in daily regular service.
Pic related is a Peter Witt preserved in Toronto.

>>2051251
STILLERS GAHNTA
>>2051258
Ya mom's lame


Some Long Beach boys