Tale of the Rails

Before somebody paves them over, it might be a good idea to show you these photos of bricks and rails running off South Braddock Avenue toward Frick Park.

They’ve been sitting there, just like that, for 60 years. But the hard men who stooped to lay the bricks and who wrestled the rails into the place toiled there more than a century ago, long before there were power tools.

The bricks and rails are more than merely old and peculiar—they tell a Pittsburgh story that bears repeating for each new generation of East End residents and commuters.

There haven’t always been Squirrel Hill Tunnels, you know, even though they’ve been obsolete since the day they opened—June 5, 1953. Prior to that, as the curve of the tracks in the photo demonstrates, travel from the eastern communities toward downtown Pittsburgh went around or across Squirrel Hill, not through a hole in its bowels.

It’s no coincidence that “Neighborhood Trolley” is a character in Mister Rogers Neighborhood. Trolleys once were everywhere in Pittsburgh. They were introduced in the 19th Century and were powered by electricity, before there were internal combustion gasoline or diesel engines. Pittsburgh, with its Westinghouse heritage, always has been an electric kind of town.

You still can see trolleys of a sort in the South Hills and Downtown, but that’s a different deal. That’s “light rail transit” and today’s sophisticated LRT vehicles run on dedicated lines where they can zip along or break down on their own, unaffected by cars, trucks, buses, bicycles and pedestrians.

In the trolley’s heyday, Pittsburghers called theirs “streetcars” (just like Tennessee Williams), and the clashing, clanging monsters did a whale of a job whizzing citizens about in an era when there were not two or three cars in every family’s garage.

The secret? Streetcars just didn’t care about rain or snow or ice. In hilly, twisty, wintry Pittsburgh, that was a major consideration. Streetcars -- about as complicated as a Lionel train -- just went, as long as there was power.

But there was a basic design problem that eventually doomed trolleys and rail lines like the one pictured here. Trolleys didn’t actually share the road with other vehicles. They hogged the road.

On four-lane thoroughfares, the trolleys always got the left lane. And on those routes, passengers boarded from fortress-like “safety islands” that limited the maneuverability of steered-wheel vehicles.

Streetcars also couldn’t go around vehicles that were disabled or parked in ways that blocked the rail line. Worse, for some reason, trolleys didn’t have horns. They had little dinky bells -- not unlike a kid’s bicycle.

If another vehicle was blocking the trolley, all the trolley operator could do was sit there and ding the little bell at the offender. The trolley and its passengers had no choice but to wait until the offending motorist showed up to move the blocking vehicle.

Beyond that, the trolley rails were a hazard for cars, bicycles and pedestrians when they become wet or icy. Motorists, of course, could drive along trolley rails but they did so at their own risk. Even in dry conditions the rails might fling a vehicle a foot or so to one side, often against the crude concrete curbs of the safety islands. In rainy and wintry conditions, a car might leap to the left, into opposing traffic.

Although the streetcars themselves were stylish in an Art Deco sort of way, the trolley infrastructure was grotesque. Ugly, rusty round steel poles were planted curbside every few dozen feet to support the overhead wires from which the trolleys drew current.

In good times, Pittsburgh Railways Company, the predecessor of Allegheny County’s Port Authority Transit, operated 666 streetcars, the third largest fleet in North America. It had 68 streetcar routes.

Pittsburgh Railways was formed on January 1, 1902, when the South Traction Company acquired operating rights over the Consolidated Traction Company and United Traction Company. The new company operated 1,100 trolleys on 400 miles of track, with 178.7 million passengers and revenues of $6.7 million for the first year.

Even so, Pittsburgh Railways was a fiscal loser, going into bankruptcy twice during the first half of the 20th Century and remaining shaky until PAT took over in 1959.

I care about these things because I used to ride streetcars as a little boy. Mom would take me Downtown on the 56 Greenfield for lunch at Kaufmann’s cafeteria. Later, I went to Central Catholic and rode trolleys all over the East End.

Plus, it’s in my genes. Joseph G. Schmitt, my maternal grandfather, was a streetcar mechanic for Pittsburgh Railways. Grandpa was a gigantic man, though he had only one arm. In his day, the children of immigrants didn’t play soccer after school, they worked. He was just a boy when he lost his right arm in the machinery of a commercial bakery, where he worked as a laborer.

But a one-armed giant could be an excellent mechanic and Grandpa had a fine career at the “car barn” on Second Avenue in Hazelwood. He died in 1951 at age 64 when I was just three. His daughter Clara, my mom, still is with us at age 89 and she gets misty if I drive her past the old car barn, now refurbished as a senior center.

Those last three paragraphs words are just my little slice of the story. If you find the big story of rails and streetcars compelling, there’s a wealth of history and photos available on-line. For starters try:

http://www.angelfire.com/ny/tramstop/history1.html

http://digital.library.pitt.edu/images/pittsburgh/pghrailways.html