Trolley Thursday 9/10/20 - The Philadelphia Transportation Company

 On average, streetcars have a normal service life of twenty years before a major overhaul, with only minor servicing needed to keep them on the up-and-up. Even the most futuristic light rail vehicles can seem outdated in such a short amount of time. But what happens when the mid-century hits, automobile ownership rises, and National City Lines comes knocking on your doorstep? Find out how it affected the city of Brotherly Love, the Philadelphia Transport Company (PTC), and more, on today's (late) Trolley Thursday!

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Taking Back the Transit

West Chester Street in the 1930s.
(Alamy Stock Photo)

When we last left the thrilling saga of the Philadelphia Rapid Transit (PRT), the failing company had been taken under consideration of the City Council. Years of violent strikes, expensive infrastructure projects, public distrust, and stagnating fares left the PRT a shadow by the time Thomas E. Mitten died in 1929. Philadelphia was going to have to take municipal responsibility of its transit system, especially since the Frankford Elevated nearly bankrupted the city and the new Broad Street Subway (built as a standard gauge line, which meant it was incompatible with the rest of the 5'2.5" gauge system) could not recoup its own losses, even with the highest fare on the system. By 1935, the city council convened in the midst of the Great Depression and decided to completely overhaul their city's massive multi-faceted mass transit system. Interestingly, though the city would plan much of the PTC's changes, they decided it should remain a private enterprise. This would later, of course, bite them really hard.

The PTC logo, flanked by four oval trolley tokens.
Clockwise from upper left: Delaware River Bridge Line,
Philadelphia & Camden, and two normal-printed tokens.
(Centpacrr)

When the Philadelphia Transportation Company assumed operations of the PRT on January 1, 1940, there was a massive problem. Not only was the PRT involved in the giant merger (itself a result of a giant merger), but it also folded in other independent streetcar lines (such as the Delaware River Bridge Line to Camden, New Jersey), small bus companies, and even other transit divisions such as the Suburban Transportation Company (popularly known as the "Red Arrow Lines", more on them later), Southern Penn Bus Company, and the Philadelphia & Western Railway (also known as the "Norristown High Speed Line", more on them later). With so many transit divisions under one roof, you'd think it was a nightmare to manage, and you'd be right. As later elaborated below, the enormous reach of the PTC left it vulnerable when other operating companies came to call. 

The PCCs Come to Town

A model of a St. Louis P1 PCC in 1938 "as-delivered"
PTC scheme, in striking silver with cream and a blue
beltline. The cars first worked the Route 53-Wayne Ave. Line.
(St-Petersburg Tram Collection) 

After the PTC established themselves at a new headquarters at 200 W. Wyoming Avenue, the company quickly got to work streamlining operations by first replacing much of their older rolling stock. In 1940 alone, 130 PCC streetcars from St. Louis Car Company were purchased, along with 50 "trackless trolleys"/trolley buses, and 53 motor buses. The first 20 A-34 Class PCCs arrived from St. Louis in 1938, one of the first production PCCs built, followed by 130 cars between 1940 and 1941. Despite WWII ending new streetcar construction starting in 1942 (as rubber, steel, copper, and vinyl were all essential war materials), cities like Philadelphia were able to appeal to the War Board to get essential employees to the steel mills and shipyards while circumventing the gasoline rations. 110 A-42 Class cars were built and delivered in 1942, and differed from the A-34 due to the painted metal bumpers, non-opening front windows with windscreen wipers, and plain vinyl seats with painted steel stanchions and railings inside. 

PTC A-42 No. 2598 in later green-and-cream livery (with no destination) somewhere in Philadelphia.
(Don Ross)

PTC A-47 2718 and A-48 2164 pose at Richmond and
Allegheny Yard, just prior to SEPTA ownership in 1968.
(Don ROss)

After the war, PTC invested heavily in both new and used PCCs, until by the 1960s, the company boasted 450 streamlined streetcars. The last new ones were delivered between 1947 and 1948, consisting of the new A-47, "all-electric" cars. Prior to these, PCCs cars used air brakes and pneumatic door motors with the only electric brakes being the automatic dynamics; now, the P3s could glide quietly as both the brakes and door motors were electrically-operated. A safety feature involved using the car's batteries (of which there were between eight and ten) to operate the brakes should the pole come off the wire, which meant the P3s could stop faster and shorter despite being bigger and wider. Other used cars were sourced from St. Louis and Kansas City after those systems were liquidated under National City Lines, and all 90 received extensive rebuilds between 1954 and 1955. This rebuild included new wider-gauge trucks, rebuilt motors, and redone interiors to match the existing fleet. At this point, the PCCs were put to work on the 49 streetcar routes all around the city, but while the cars were brand new, the attitudes of the workers were sorely stuck in the past.

The Wildcat Strike of WWII

Hog Island in 1919, bragging about how they launched
five ships in under one hour.
(National Museum of American History)

Even the new PTC could not escape the sins and strikes that plagued its predecessor, but while the PRT strikes of 1909 and 1910 involved fair worker's rights, the Wildcat Strike of 1944 was anything but fair or noble. As WWII ramped up production across the whole country, Philadelphia was seen as an important lynch-pin as its Hog Island Shipyard was not only the largest American shipyard in World War I, but also made the city the third largest producer of war materials in the country. With such a huge need came a huge population of workers, and nowhere was this more noticeable than the 50,000 African-Americans that moved to work and settle in Philadelphia by 1943. Not only were they finding work on Hog Island, but even PTC's high employment rates meant anyone could easily get a job as a conductor, motorman, or machinist, and this greatly offended the white workers.

White strikers take a jitney truck to-and-from work during the 1944 PTC strike.
(Temple University Libraries, Urban Archives)

In 1944, eight African-American workers were promoted by PTC to driver positions starting on August 1st. This meant higher pay as a motorman compared to a machinist or laborer, which meant shared wages with white motormen. Word quickly spread around the carbarns and workshops until the Pennsylvania Rapid Transit Employee's Union (PRTEU), represented by former president Frank Carney, motorman James Dixon, bus driver Frank Thompson, and Elevated motorman James McMenamin, announced to their union members to call sick in protest and bring the city to a complete halt. In response, other PTC workers voted to change their representation from the PRTEU to the more-progressive Transportation Worker's Union (TWU), which was backed by the much-larger Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). While PRTEU appealed to PTC to keep wages low and restrict the better-paying positions to white workers, the TWU challenged the discrimination policies that not only restricted those better-paying positions but also wanted to offer those positions as opportunities for other African-American employees. 

Carolyn Davenport Moore, at work as a notary public in Philadelphia.
(They Carried Us)

The NAACP soon got involved as well, with local leader Carolyn Davenport Moore heading a protest of 7,000 people against the PTC strikers. "If African Americans can fight for freedom," they asked, "why can’t they enjoy it here at home?" This racist strike was nothing new, as similar strikes occurred in Mobile, AL, and Detroit, MI, as well as on the Boston Metropolitan Transit Authority (better known as the MTA) and Portland, Oregon. Upon being notified of the strike, President Franklin D. Roosevelt accused the white strikers of violating the Smith-Connally Act (no workers involve in any war effort can strike, an act Roosevelt himself opposed as a progressive), but the workers shot back that since their union (the PRTEU) no longer represented the PTC officially, they technically were not breaking the law. They were acting in the interest of the PRTEU, they claimed, not the PTC as a whole. 

Motorman James Stewart, one of seven African-Americans
that became PTC motormen, receives training from his 
instructor on July 31, 1944. 
(Explore PA History) 

Annoyed with this blatant bullcrap, Roosevelt sent Major General Phillip Hayes and a small Army contingent to get the streetcars back on the move. Hayes attempted a threat to conscript any workers who remained on strike, but after over 6,000 white strikers voted to continue their activities, Roosevelt gave Hayes the permission to break the strike by force. 5,000 Army troops led the strikebreaking activities and the leaders were sent off for an overnight stint in jail. James McMenamin, one of the leaders, told the workers after release to get back to work and let the issue be decided by the courts, but upon his own attempt to get back to work, he, Thompson, Dixon, and Carney were all fired. The strike activities did not even last a week thanks to Major General Hayes, and the eight African-American motormen were able to work starting in September. By the end of 1945, nearly 1,000 African American workers were all payed motormen on the PTC, with more around the city recognizing this as a sign that they, too, could make a difference in their city and assert themselves above the racist status quo.

The Ten Year Plan

An except of the "Ten Year Plan" document, with
the Routes 6 and 13 on display.
(Philly Trolley)

As the PTC entered the 1950s and the post-war boom, management found themselves needing to bring their system up to date. The enormous glut of streetcar lines meant that motorists were staring to be stuck in traffic and many service redundancies were looking to be cut away. Dubbed the "10 Year Plan", this decade-long contingency involved replacing all but 14 streetcar lines with diesel buses and trolley buses, with 21 converted to trolley buses (including the busy and famous Route 15 - Girard Avenue), 6 replaced with motorbuses, and 7 abandoned altogether. The PTC was adamant that their entire system still depend on electric power, with the motor buses used to take over some of the older lines like the Route 6 - Glenside and the Route 38 - Baring-Subway. However, this contingency plan ended up just a paper scheme, as new management come 1955 would not only put an end to this but also an almost-end to Philadelphia's streetcars as a whole.

The Great American Streetcar Conspiracy

Yup. It's them.

Oh boy...

In 1968, PTC A-47 2180 Northbound on the Route 50-
Rising Sun-Olney line meets ACF-Brill trolley bus 228
on a private excursion at 7th Street and Snyder Avenue.
(David Wilson)

In 1955, the transit company known all over the United States for ditching streetcars and replacing them with GM buses running on Firestone tires and fueled by Standard Oil made its way into Philadelphia as a majority controller. Under them, a steady pattern of replacement and scrapping occurred between 1955 and 1958, and the numbers are simply staggering. In 1954, PTC operated 45 lines over more than 1,500 PCCs, heavy rail elevated cars, and miscellaneous maintenance-of-way equipment; by 1958, that number dwindled to just 11 lines and 984 cars were sent to the scrapyard. In their place, 1000 shining GM buses took their place. When taken into account, it's a terrifying number, but in the time this happened, automobile ownership was on the rise and street railways were increasingly unprofitable. It was only a matter of time before a company would roll in and scrap all the streetcars, but to have it through a company controlled by organizations with vested interests beyond "reliable public transit" is absolutely nefarious. And, regrettably, they got away with it.

The Final Years of the PTC

Newly-SEPTA'd A-42 No. 2564 trundles along the 
Route 47- Olney 8th & 9th line in late 1968.
(Mitchell Libby)

By 1964, the city of Philadelphia was through with privatized public transit. The scars left behind by National City Lines meant the remaining trolley lines were limping pitifully and those without cars were getting angry that the city was doing nothing about its public transit. The Pennsylvania State Legislature was already trying to figure out this problem by coordinating government subsidies into transit companies all around Southeast Pennsylvania through the creation of a new regional public transit authority. By late 1968, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) was set up to purchase all assets of the PTC and put it under regional control. The final paperwork was signed on September 30th that same year, and the final purchase price for the system was $47.9 million. ($352 million today.) At least the company crippled by National City Lines, and its remaining rolling stock, was now in good hands.

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Thank you for reading today's Trolley Thursday post! Resources for today include, again, Phillytrolley.org, as well as Hidden City Philadelphia's article on the 1944 Wildcat Strike and a 1968 newspaper article about the SEPTA's assumption of ownership. Next week, we look at the biggest interurban lines in Southeastern Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia & Western and the West Penn Railways. Until then, you can follow myself and my editor on Twitter or find our merch on Redbubble! If you're interested in a fun game to play, also check out my editor's board game, Coast to Coast! Until next week, ride safe!