Right. That rerally started when Claytor ran the show. Should have been partt of the initial planning.
There is quite a bit of coordination with bus companies. For example, if you look at the Amtrak schedule for Michigan Service, you will see a number of Thruway connections that are actually bus company routes.
I agree with " Bottoms" that this coordinatred effort would have been a good statergy.
Not pushing up daisies yet Dude though family health issues (not mine) have contributed to my lack of taking an active part here on the Classic Trains forum. Thanks for welcoming me back.
Trinity River Bottoms Boomer
Good Lord! Joe, it's great to see you back on the forum!
When your other account disappeared I thought for sure you were pushing up the daisies.
Greetings from Alberta
-an Articulate Malcontent
Tampa was one of the first cities in post WWII America to loose it's streetcars. Dallas lost them in the mid-50s. Growing up on my grandparents small farm north of Big D in Farmers Branch my mother took me with her to St. Matthews Episcopal Church in Dallas every Sunday on Trailways. As a result, I grew up loving trains but also accepted the bus as well.
I still believe that from the beginning, Amtrak should have worked together with bus companies to provide Total Transportation in the US so people could get to almost every American city and town coast to coast and inbetween. It would have been a winner for the steel rail and rubber tire alike.
After all these years, there are still gullible people who eat up "The Great GM-NCL Streetcar Conspiracy". The big problem with said "conspiracy" is that it doesn't explain the situation for properties not operated by National City Lines such as Chicago Surface Lines, Milwaukee Electric Railway & Transport Co, etc.
Yeah, some people are like that .. live in the moments and the events.
I'll tell you what, if E.J. was handling the radio and the navigation on Amelia's round the world flight in 1937 she'd be alive today! Well, maybe...
So he's like Forrest Gump, always showing up at famous events and meeting famous people? :)
Well if you didn't fancy that picture how about this one!
Be nice! Navy guys wear white, haven't a clue what the orb thingie is.
Still kinda funny though, but you don't want to cheese off Mr. Klepper who did a swell job of cleaning up the photo.
What the hell is that -- Phoebe Snow on the early Lackawanna wireless, or some Byzantine saint?
"Gulflight' is famous in its own right .
Good reason for me to want that photo of the young E. Jay Quinby improved, so here it is:
Mike states:, interesting character that Quinby guy, who I never heard of until recently. Besides trains he was into radio and a steam boat calliope
With all this discussion of Quinby's polemic, I thought it might be valuable for those who haven't in fact read the document itself to get at least a taste of its 'flavor':
https://arthurgoldwag.wordpress.com/2011/03/31/commander-edwin-j-quinby-and-the-great-streetcar-conspiracy/
Commander Quinby was right about one thing, at least concerning Northern New Jersey, his own neck of the woods.
In his commentary I read where he dismisses greater versatility concerning buses, saying they're just going to follow the old trolley routes anyway. Present-day NJ Transit buses (in Bergen County at least) follow the same routes the now long-forgotten Public Service trolleys used to follow. I've got a history of the Public Service trolley system, complete with routes, and "lo and behold..."
In his book "Interurban Interlude" E.J. talks of the rise of the bus companies, and how they pirated trolley customers by traveling the post-WW1 improved roads which paralelled the trolley lines and showing up at trolley stops five minutes before the trolleys did. Public Service was losing so much business to the buses they said "The hell with it!" and bought the bus companies, which is probably what the bus company organizers had in mind to begin with.
I'm not old enough to remember the trolleys, but I sure remember the PS buses growing up. Man, did they stink! When I was in the car with my father he tried to get around those things as soon as he could!
Must have been burning sewage instead of diesel fuel!
Backshop-- Well don't preach that line in Toronto. The streetcar system is intact and goes everywhere and a new generation of streetcars is arriving as we speak . In case you think this is a Mickey Mouse city well it's the 4th largest in North America, surpassed only by Mexico City, the Big Apple and LA and surpasses Chicago and Houston.
In addition streetcars are making a decent comeback across the spectrum in major urban areas. It makes perfectly good sense.
As for Long distance trains, I see a good future yet, although most do not. It is inevitable.
Overmod Backshop It wasn't a conspiracy, it was common sense. Remember that Quinby was talking about a very different situation: where all the equipment and infrastructure was already 'in being', and where mandatory traffic increased to suit available capacity.
Backshop It wasn't a conspiracy, it was common sense.
Remember that Quinby was talking about a very different situation: where all the equipment and infrastructure was already 'in being', and where mandatory traffic increased to suit available capacity.
Yeah, good post Firelock. Old Quinby didn't stand a chance. Perhaps a few dedicated folks, academics and the odd politician read through all that but I cannot see your average citizen reading the whole thing. Besides, in the end, it's just an opinion really.
Regardless, I believe every word and he was a voice of reason in the darkness. Toronto definitely held against the tide. It is surprising to me that it was them and not Montreal that did so. I suppose Montreal being far more cosmopolitan at the time needed to show it's progressive nature, but damn, what a shame.
Overmod-- Really? You would rather a bus than a streetcar? Something is wrong here.
I just read through Commander Quinby's manifesto, or I guess a more proper term for it would be a "Jeremiad."
What a man! Like a good Navy man, he used words as effectively as torpedos or 16" shells.
Unfortunately, to use another old Navy term, his efforts were as effective as "Shoveling garbage against the tide." Too bad.
BackshopIt wasn't a conspiracy, it was common sense.
All the arguments GM made in the mid-Fifties for diesel bus use still apply nicely, and many of them apply to dedicated BRT as well. The only major difficulty comes with feature creep and inflationary cost in public-works construction, which makes bus "guideways" a relatively high percentage of light or even heavy rail of more nominal capacity. Since both autonomous operation and very-short-headway platooning are vastly easier on dedicated guideways than on regular roads and streets, I expect to see properly-enabled bus systems make some headway in 'filling the gaps' in regional planning.
The 'conspiracy' was in requiring sweetheart contracts for spare parts and certain maintenance items for the buses once a given entity had purchased them. You can usually assess the veracity of a 'streetcar conspiracy' source by seeing what they document GM as being "guilty" of.
In my opinion, too, a very substantial percentage of NCL conversions were mercy killings, or meaningful service improvements. I love trolleys, don't misunderstand me, but if I HAD to ride something that my job required be on time every time, there are often reasons those buses are a better option.
Maybe buses were cheaper and more versatile. You didn't need to lay and maintain track and caternary. You didn't need powerplants. You didn't need to lay track if you wanted to try a new route. It wasn't a conspiracy, it was common sense.
Remember that 'correspondence course' is really a euphemism for mail-order lessons. ICS carried this to a higher level by using "faculty" to carefully assess and comment on each individual student's responses as they progressed, this being a great part of the value of the 'correspondence course' over the type of 'sequential learning opportunity' that was just multiple handouts to read and exercises to complete.
I have wondered how the ICS model would have flourished if the school had recognized the possibilities inherent in the e-mail reflector model. That would have facilitated a much cheaper method of 'correspondence' and vastly reduced latency and overhead costs, and also provided much quicker and better detailed answers to specific areas of concern to particular students; it would also enable faculty to find and test areas of weakness in a particular student's knowledge, or attitude, and to determine dynamically a student's 'favored' methods of learning and cater to them more individually within a relatively fixed system of lesson planning.
Ah! the roads not taken. Anyone looking at the fate of the first "open" artificial-intelligence course floated a couple of years ago can easily determine better ways of fostering distance learning and encouraging interest in topic material; here we are nearly a fifth of the way through the 21st Century and there is still little assistance learning technological thinking, even though MIT courses have been available free on the Web for what is now I think decades -- that helped the likes of Abdul Qadeer Khan dramatically, but not too many American high-school students, even at supposedly good schools.
And don't kid yourselves, those were good correspondence courses 100 years ago.
They were all a lot of young men had to go with.
ICS was around for about 100 years, closing shop about 20 years ago. Go back to PopSci, PopMech, MechIllustrated, etc from 1920 to past 1970 and every issue will have an ICS ad. Many of the textbooks have been put online, including the 1908 and 1915 editions of Electric Railway Engineering.
I noticed that Mr. Quinby's education included " International Correspondence Schools in electrical engineering." I am trying to picture such a correspondence school.
Notably, San Francisco and Los Angeles have spend billions over the past 50-odd years rebuilding what they once had in the Key System and Pacific Electric.
Login, or register today to interact in our online community, comment on articles, receive our newsletter, manage your account online and more!
Get the Classic Trains twice-monthly newsletter