PCC streetcar

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The PCC (Presidents' Conference Committee) streetcar (tram) design was first built in the United States in the 1930s. The design proved successful in its native country, and after World War II was licensed for use elsewhere in the world. The PCC car has proved to be a longlasting icon of streetcar design, and PCC cars are still in service in various places around the world.

Origins

The unusual name comes from the fact that the car was designed by a committee, formed in 1929, representing various electric street railways. The Electric Railway Presidents' Conference Committee, or ERPCC, was tasked with producing a new type of streetcar that would help fend off competition from buses and automobiles. The committee produced a high-performance design that was commonly used in the following decades. The cars were popular because of their distinctive streamlined design and smooth acceleration.

It turned out that, reputedly unlike many other things produced by committees, the PCC streetcar was a very good basic design. Many railways altered the car in various ways to fit their own needs, but most cars retained a standard appearance. The first batch of 100 cars was built in 1936; the Los Angeles Railway (LARy) was one of the first companies to purchase the units.

Pittsburgh Railways took "delivery of # 100, which was by most all accounts, the first delivered PCC car in the world"[link]. Production continued in North America until the early 1950s, with 4978 units built; thousands more PCCs and direct descendants were produced in Europe through the 20th century. The cars were very sturdy and many have lasted a long time. A handful still remain in service alongside modern vehicles, though most of the PCC cars functional today are operated by museums and heritage railways.

The early pre-World War II versions of these vehicles were known as air cars and used a belt-driven air compressor to open the doors and operate brakes. Later models were entirely electric, replacing the noisy compressor and air brakes with electrically-activated brakes on the motor shafts. Both pre-war and post-war cars use dynamic brakes to provide most of the stopping power. The air or electric brakes bring the car to a complete stop.

Manufacturing

PCC cars were initially built in the United States by the St. Louis Car Company and Pullman Standard. One example was built by Clark Equipment. PCC cars for Canadian cities were built jointly by St. Louis Car Co. and Canadian Car and Foundry in Montréal, Quebec. The PCC technology was exported to Europe, with La Brugeoise et Nivelles (now the BN division of Bombardier) of Bruges, Belgium building several hundred streetcars that saw service in Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent, The Hague (Den Haag), Saint-Étienne, Marseille and Belgrade (the latter city buying vehicles initially used by the Belgian Vicinal railways).

ČKD Tatra of Prague also bought a PCC licence, and built thousands of PCC based streetcars. Most successful was type Tatra T3, 13 991 units were sold worldwide, mainly in former eastern bloc countries. ČKD had begun marketing to the rest of the world until 2000, when the company faced a bankruptcy and reorganization. The tram business was sold to Siemens SKV, who discontinued these products in favor of Siemens-designed models.

Another Eastern European company producing PCC cars (though not licensed) was Polish Konstal in Chorzów, Upper Silesia. The Konstal 13N type was a copy of the CKD Tatra T1 and is still used in Warsaw. Newer Konstal 105N types, produced since 1973, had the PCC electrical set. After many modernizations, the upgraded type Konstal 105Na and later versions based on it are still produced (though with modern electronic equipment) by Konstal, which was bought by Alstom in 1997. 105Na generation cars are still used in all tram-towns in Poland.

The first PCC cars in Canada were operated by the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) in 1937. By 1954 Toronto had the largest PCC fleet in the world, including many purchased second-hand from U.S. cities that abandoned streetcar service following the Second World War. Although it acquired new custom-designed streetcars in the late 1970s and 1980s, the TTC continued using PCCs in regular service until the mid-1990s, and retains two for charter purposes. A number of different models of Toronto PCC cars are on display at the Ontario Electric Railway Historical Society museum, the Halton County Radial Railway, near Rockwood, Ontario. Several are in operating condition and rides are available to the public.

PCCs still in revenue service

North America

In North America, most PCC-based systems were dismantled in the post-war period in favor of bus-based transit networks. Of the rail transit systems that survived this period, most had replaced their PCCs with modern light rail vehicles (LRVs) by the early 1980s. A few sites have only recently concluded operation with PCCs:

• The Toronto Transit Commission used PCCs on its streetcar network alongside newer vehicles until the mid-1990s. It had the largest PCC fleet in North America.
• The Newark City Subway used them until upgrading to modern LRVs in 2001.
• The unique Tandy Center Subway in Fort Worth, Texas shut down in 2002. A shuttle between a mall and its parking lot, the system used a number of PCCs, but their exteriors were heavily modified in the 1970s, making them largely unrecognizable.

As of 2005, there are still a few places in North America where transit agencies employ PCCs in true revenue service (as opposed to short-run or intermittent heritage railway service). Of these, only one has been in service continuously since the PCC's glory days:

• The Ashmont-Mattapan High Speed Line in Boston is a light-rail extension of the MBTA's heavy Red Line. It runs from the Ashmont terminus of the Red Line to Mattapan, and runs PCCs exclusively.

Beginning in the late 1990s, several cities began to make use of historic PCCs to serve historic streetcar lines that combined aspects of tourist attractions and transit:

• The F Market Line in San Francisco, opened in 1998, runs along Market Street from The Castro to the Ferry Building, then along the Embarcadero north and west to Fisherman's Wharf. This line is run by a mixture of PCC cars built between 1946 and 1952, and earlier pre-PCC cars. (Although San Francisco had removed PCCs from revenue service when the city's light rail was transformed into the Muni Metro system in 1980, they had made occasional festival trips in the ensuing years before being returned to full-time service.)

• The Kenosha Electric Streetcar in Kenosha, Wisconsin has been operating five PCCs acquired from Toronto since 2000, although service has sometimes been intermittent because of funding issues. The Kenosha Electric Streetcar is unique among modern PCC operations in that that PCCs had not run in the city before 2000—the original rail system was shut down in 1932 before any PCC cars had been built. One of its cars is still painted in its original TTC colours, while the rest have been re-decorated in the liveries of several U.S. cities.

• SEPTA restored trolley service to the Route 15 Girard Avenue line in West Philadelphia in September 2005 after a 15-year "temporary" suspension of trolley service in favor of diesel buses. The line uses restored and modernized PCC cars painted in their original green and cream Philadelphia Transit Company livery, rather than SEPTA's white with red and blue stripes. The line runs from Haddington to Port Richmond down the median of Girard Avenue. It crosses both the Broad Street Subway and the Market-Frankford Line, and stops at the Philadelphia Zoo, among other landmarks. SEPTA had originally planned to run modern Kawasaki trolleys along the line once service was restored, but a combination of economics and a desire to help revive the Girard Avenue corridor with a more "romantic" vehicle led to the agency restoring the old vehicles for about half the cost of new cars. SEPTA uses Kawasaki vehicles on the rest of its trolley lines, including the Subway-Surface Green Line linking West Philadelphia with Center City.

• One of the PCC cars from the Tandy Center Subway has been restored and is in service on the McKinney Avenue Transit Authority in Dallas, Texas.

As many cities contemplate new transit projects, PCC-based streetcar lines are an attractive option as they are relatively low cost and can serve as a tourist attraction in and of themselves, especially on routes through historic city centers.

Europe

Pre-war tram networks remain largely intact in a number of European cities, and many still use PCCs as part or all of their rolling stock. Late-model PCCs remain in use in Belgium. The vehicles used in Antwerp and Ghent vehicles are metre-gauge, while those used in Brussels are standard gauge. One of the particularities of the Brussels PCC vehicles is that some of them have been equipped with bogies and electric motors acquired second-hand in the United States from decommissioned streetcars from Kansas City, Missouri and Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

The tram system of Sofia, Bulgaria was officially opened on January 1, 1901 with six lines totaling 23 km served by 25 trams and 10 trailers. Today, its tram system has 16 lines totaling 221 km served by 190 trams, some of which are Tatra PCCs. In Romania, Bucharest's extensive tramway network features a large fleet of Tatra T4R PCCs (comprising about 20% of the entire tramway's fleet - they were 131 T4R's; now, 8 of them were converted into 4 single-articulated Bucur trams: 2 were called V2S-T and the other 2 were called V2A-T). All T4Rs and Bucur trams operate on lines in the west of the city (because 122 out of 123 T4Rs belong to Militari Garage (Depoul Militari)... the 123rd T4R is a school-tram, assigned to Depoul Titan): 8, 11, 35, 47 and 48. They are generally run in pairs (except lines 47 and 48).

The cities Arad, Iaşi, Galaţi, Braşov, Botoşani, Cluj, Craiova, Oradea have also a large fleet of Tatra T4R or T4D(second-hand from Dresden, Leipzig, Magdeburg, and Halle - Germany).

Several tramways in the Czech Republic and Slovakia still use Tatra PCC cars, while many in Poland still operate Konstal PCCs. Some in the former East Germany also still use them, but many have been extensively modified.

See also

• Peter Witt streetcar
• Birney Safety Car

External links

• [PCC Car - The Industry Saviour?]
• [The PCC Car - Not So Standard]

References

• Carlson et. al. (1986), The Colorful Streetcars We Rode, Bulletin 125 of the Central Electric Railfans' Association, Chicago, Il. ISBN 0-915348-25-x
• Kashin, S., Demoro, H. (1986), An American Original: The PCC Car, Interurban Press, ISBN 0916374734

 

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