Short Takes: A Graveyard in Ohio

F rom a distance, they looked like brightly painted buses in a pasture. Hippie- era outcasts. But getting closer, I thought of something else. Swinging off Interstate 70, I backtracked along country roads and found four PCCs on an abandoned spur near Hebron, Ohio.

Mark Reutter

Photos taken November 27, 2001.

To an untrained eye, a PCC trolley does look like an old Greyhound bus. But it’s actually the other way around. First introduced on the streets of Brooklyn 66 years ago, the PCC pioneered an aerodynamic styling that buses later mimicked. And, try as they might, buses never approached the PCC’s get-up-and-go.

Using a standard trolley wire for power, a PCC could accelerate from zero to 45 mph in 10 seconds. On a test run, a forerunner of the car went 97 mph.

The PCC—the acronym stood for the Electric Railway Presidents’ Conference Committee—was a creative response to the then-huge business of moving people around cities by surface rail.

Scientists and engineers used state-of-the-art technology to reinvent the slow and clunky streetcar. Automatic accelerator controls, welded cor-ten steel bodies, better trucks, better motors, better braking—all made the PCC a worthy urban cousin to the Zephyrs, Rebels, and Rockets rolling on the railroads. About 5,000 PCCs were built between 1936-37 and 1950 when the entire trolley industry began its death spiral.

The lettering on the cars in Ohio marked them as refugees from the Cleveland Regional Transit Authority. To see what was left of them, I made my way along the weed-choked embankment.

The interiors had taken a tremendous beating from countless beer parties, but amid the broken windows and ripped-out seating were Art Deco flourishes: the signature "eyebrow" openings along the upper walls, for example, and the deeply sloped, rakishly curved windshields by the front double doors.

Smooth and sleek, encased in their peeling red, white, and yellow wrappers, the cars stood valiantly against a hostile world.

What America trashed, the rest of the world embraced. The PCC was a boon for foreign manufacturers. Something like 25,000 of these cars were built after 1950 and run in cities from Antwerp to Volgograd.

All of which places us in the ironic position today of having to repurchase the fruits of our own engineering. Those "light rail vehicles" operating in Portland, St. Louis, San Diego, and elsewhere are little more than updated and boxier versions of the sturdy, streamlined PCC.

They come from builders like Siemens, CAF, Bombardier, and KinkiSharyo because no American company makes the stuff anymore.

We like to think of ourselves as canny when it comes to technology. But as seen from a farm field in Ohio, the PCC is a success story we carelessly, foolishly, tossed away.