This is such old history as cannot be regarded as political, just historical.
To the mayor, to the city manager, to the city transit engineer, to the members of the Committee on Mass-transportation and to the tax-payers and the riding citizens of your city: You are entitled to this warning. The further you read through these pages, the more you will realize how much you need every word of it. http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon2/quinbyswarning/
THIS WILL OFFEND THE GUILTY,
BUT WILL ARM THEIR PROSPECTIVE VICTIMS
This is an urgent warning to each and every one of you, that there is a carefully, deliberately planned campaign to swindle you out of one of your most important and valuable public utilities, your Electric Railway System.
The purpose of this message is to spread before you the actual facts, the complete truth concerning a selfish, unscrupulous plan to double-cross the
Quite the Manifesto! Big Oil, Big Rubber, Big Auto won handily.
Unlike a Western, the good guys don’t always win. The Big Fix was in.
From California to Maine, Vancouver to Halifax. Small isolated pockets survived, with the exception of Toronto which kept it’s vast system intact somehow.
That wasn’t the end either, Railroad passenger service was next, then freight, and the Railroads went into severe decline and near extinction.
Well we all know this, and we were warned by voices, but few cared to do anything. As a society we made our choices and we abandoned rail in all forms, to the point of tearing down Pennsylvania Station. In fact people still argue in favour in eliminating streetcars, intercity services, even Amtrak. Madison Avenue brainwashing still goes on.
Streetcars and light rail are making somewhat of a comeback, it is sensible and reasonable. The battle continues at least somewhat 80 years later.
Not buying that one one iota. Only in North America, no where else in the world. Japan is a gazillion light years ahead in rail passenger AND produce a superior product in autos. Same thing in Europe.
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.
I noticed that Mr. Quinby’s education included " International Correspondence Schools in electrical engineering." I am trying to picture such a correspondence school.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 wasn’t replying so much to Quinby’s diatribe but rather to certain other posters who think we should still have streetcars today and that trains should still be the major long distance transporter of people. Those days are long gone.
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.
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!
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’:
