Trolley Thursday 10/14/21 - Pittsburgh's Mount Washington Tunnel Disaster

Despite the 1910s being the "Golden Age" of street railway development and operation, where it seemed everyone and their mother had a streetcar line, it was still a very hazard-fraught period as the companies were still learning how to make their streetcars safer through trial and deadly error. After all, it was just last week where we learned that New York City's worst subway disaster basically gave us the "deadman" pedal as we know it as late as 1918. Unfortunately, that kind of technology could have also saved another runaway streetcar that went down in local infamy as one of the worst streetcar crashes in the Alleghenies. On today's Trolley Thursday, we peer into the annals of the Pittsburgh Railways as we look back on the 1917 Mount Washington Transit Tunnel Terror.

Trolley Tuesday 9/22/20 - The Pittsburgh Railways

Pittsburgh has always been an important industrial hub for both steel and freight in Pennsylvania, and the gateway west into Ohio and the rest of the country. Beyond the giant steel mills and coal mines, Pittsburgh was also home to one of the largest street railways in the state with the third largest fleet of PCC streetcars in America (a devilish 666 cars). However, events conspired to all but wipe out the system through an unstable ownership, multiple bankruptcies, and failed returns that retired some of the first revenue-earning PCCs in the country for normal light rail. The long and troubled history of the Pittsburgh Railways is a story that deserves to be remembered.