This Was Pacific Electric (Video)

[bennyp81]

Robert
User ID: 2037954 Oct 29th 11:02 PM

This was Pacific Electric

This video was released July 23, 2003 is one of the best documentaries I seen on the History of the Red Car. From
www.SkyCityProductions.com
Website overview:

{The only complete history of the world's greatest electric railway is now available on sparkling DVD or VHS.

A full 90 minutes tracing the rise & fall of the P.E. through film, stills, animated maps and interviews.}

The DVD has an extra 25-minute bonus, although both cost the same. Brent and I bought the last two copies out at the Orange Empire Railroad Museum, however we saw copies of this Video for sale at Travel Town in Griffith Park and also at the Gift Shop before entering the Huntington Library and Gardens.

The bonus material shows various locations around town today where the Red Car once ran. From Rose and Main in Santa Monica where a short section of track can still be seen to San Gabriel Valley and many point in between.

Learn the real reason why the Street Cars were removed from Los Angeles, and it is not GM. The lines were losing money, but not because of lack of riders. Removing the Red Cars caused businesses to fold in Glendale and Watts to get more depressed.

From the back cover of the DVD:

{The rails that invented Southern California

In 1902 Southern California was a collection of small farm towns. It was waiting for something to pull it together. That something was THE PACIFIC ELECTRIC.

This is the story of the rise and fall of "THE WORLD'S GREATEST ELECTRIC RAILWAY." It is a complete history starting in 1872 with L.A.'s first horse car line and continuing through to the last RED CAR in 1961. The story is told by EMMY WINNING PRODUCERS using RARE FILM FOOTAGE, HUNDREDS OF PHOTOGRAPHS, animated maps and extensive interviews.

BONUS MATERIAL includes a video tour of P.E. remnants, the bits and pieces that remain behind, fifty years after the last RED CAR ran in Southern California.

This Was Pacific Electric
Narrated by Stephanie Edwards
Produced by Christine Vasquez
Written & Edited by Thom Eberhardt}

=====

Side note:

Why are the Red Cars at San Pedro two different colors?

One shade was the P.E. color while the other was for the S.P. color.

In the planning stages for San Pedro Red Cars would be a Museum and Car Barn at the North end and also extend the tracks to Cabrillo Beach.

The San Pedro Red Car has gotten its first NIMBY complaint about the horns and bells!

Brent, Dennis and I were told that while they were building the Red Car line in San Pedro that Long Time residents came down and asked about the Red Cars, thinking they would never see them again and what they saw were "Ghost from the past" and left with tears in their eyes.

=====

Bob

Adrian Auer-Hudson
User ID: 0721754 Oct 30th 12:25 AM

May I endorse Robert's comments. I picked this tape up two weeks back. It is excellent. If you have any interest in Los Angeles and/or Railways this tape is for you.

A.

o.cummings
User ID: 0519814 Jun 30th 8:25 AM

I request order form for Pacific Electric videotape.

Bart Reed
User ID: 1606604 Jun 30th 1:08 PM

To order this tape, you need to copy and paste:
www.skycityproductions.com/purchase/
This will get the process going. Have your credit card ready, before you copy this link into your browser.

Þ--Þ--Þ

[Elson]

It's a great DVD. I bought a copy for a friend and another for myself

I even got to meet the filmmakers last year during an event at L.A. River Center sponsored by Friends of Atwater Village. They screened 30 minutes of the DVD there and I was sold.

[lastraphanger]

i own that dvd and i disagree with all of you
'' This was--not--- Pacific Electric''.........nope....
the doc. Taken for a Ride by by Jim Klein and Martha Olson
is shorter and much more to the point and 100% better
than ''this was pacific electric'' by the out of business
sky city productions dvd . the owner insists no one
did anything wrong destroying the pacific electric & pcc cars
in los angeles, no conspiricy of any kind ....nothing
he lets the oil companies and general motors ford etc...
totally off the hook with a free pass where on the other
hand Taken for a Ride by Jim Klein and Martha Olson....
www.newday.com/films/Taken_for_a_Ride.html
deals with this hands down in a trueful factual matter
sky city productions could not give a fig about public
transportation , they for sure do not care nothing at all.
but Jim Klein and Martha Olson do and thier film / video
is much better
you can see it for free at the lacmta library

[bobdavis]

The "GM destroyed Pacific Electric" belief has taken on some aspects of a secular religion. GM did participate in National City Lines, but NCL had little to do with PE. NCL did buy a few PE local lines in Pasadena and a few other cities in 1941, but I think PE was glad to be rid of these money losing operations, and passengers probably found buses with rubber tires and upholstered seats more comfortable than the 4-wheel Birney cars that PE was running. We can even go back to 1923, when PE (long before GM got into the bus business) bought a fleet of White Motors buses to replace several streetcar lines. In 1923 there was a major shortage of electric power in Southern Calif., and the tracks for these trolley lines needed heavy repairs or replacement. Let's go to the part of PE I'm most familiar with, the Monrovia-Glendora Line. Even as a boy (the line went bus in 1951, when I was 11 years old), I could tell that the tracks needed replacement badly, and all PE could afford was to send out some laborers with a pile of ties and replace those that had turned into kindling wood. Many years later I learned the the final "straw" was the Highway Dept. taking PE's route from downtown toward the San Gabriel Valley, Aliso St., for the Santa Ana Fwy. project. As early as 1925, there had been proposals for an elevated railway from the PE 6th & Main terminal to the east bank of the LA River to eliminate the slow street-running, but the plans were never carried out; in those days government assistance to electric railways were considered "Socialism"--very bad! and PE, already a money loser, couldn't get financing for the project. Add to this strong opposition from the LA Times, and nothing happened. PE found it much easier and cheaper (in the short run) to buy GM buses and scrap the remaining Northern District rail lines. GM did not have any ownership stake in PE; it was a subsidiary of Southern Pacific and SP kept some of the rail lines active for freight service. I was told that GM did have the advantage of in-house financing (GMAC) avoiding the use of equipment trust certificates. As it turned out, two years later PE sold its passenger operations to Metro Coach, which was allowed to abandon the remaining Hollywood/Glendale/Burbank lines using the Subway Terminal. (in 1958, MTA version 1.0 bought the last few PE lines and the last 5 LARy/LATL narrow gauge lines, all of which were all-bus by 1963.) There are many other aspects to this story that I won't delve into now, suffice it to say, blaming only GM and its NCL partners for the disappearance of most electric railway lines leaves out many cultural, economic, technological and political elements.

[lastraphanger]

My question to you is have you seen Taken for a Ride by Jim Klein and Martha Olson....
sky city productions is out of business and their website gone..
instead order this dvd .....

I can't beleive you let the oil companies and GM off the hook with a free pass
amazing

[bobdavis]

I'm not giving GM and the various oil companies a "free pass", indeed, there's a book I haven't read yet that accuses "the oil interests" of all sorts of dirty tricks, such as setting fire to Thomas Edison's lab back around 1915 when "they" thought Edison's battery research was getting too close to a storage cell that would make electric autos practical.

Then there are stories of Alfred P. Sloan of GM plotting to eliminate electric railways as early as the mid-20's. Be that is it may, we still have to consider: Many of the streetcar companies had built up a load of bad relations with the riding public and their work forces.

Streetcar strikes were often bitter and violent, and one traction magnate was famous for saying "the straphangers pay the dividends. When a larger and larger segment of the public could afford automobiles, and autos improved steadily over the years, the streetcar business was bound to suffer.

The whole process started about 100 years ago, when Ford introduced the "Model T". Today we mostly see them in parades, or in very old movies, but for many years, the "T-Bone" was the most common vehicle on the road. It was simple, rugged, and relatively easy for the owner to keep running. GM's entry is a bit further down the road.

Two things that GM did in the 20's, establishing the in-house credit subsidiary GMAC to finance cars on the installment plan, and pioneering the "trade in, trade up" business plan did much to promote driving as opposed to riding. A GM customer who was doing well might trade his Chevy for a Buick; the buyer of the used Chevy might sell his "Flivver" (Model T Ford) to a neighbor for a nominal sum.

This ever-widening flow of used cars was a major factor in the decline of both streetcars and bus lines. A special situation for Southern California with its mild climate: Old clunkers that would be hopeless in Buffalo or Chicago, would keep chugging along for years, running on junkyard and Pep Boys parts.

As late as the 1970's I was buying cars for $200 or less, and running them until something expensive broke. We should also consider that while transit companies or agencies have to pay their operators and mechanics union wages, the auto driver is (in effect) an unpaid chauffeur and (at least during the period of great decline in public transit) an amateur mechanic.

Although I use transit (most often the Gold Line) whenever I can, it's usually more convenient to drive, and as we have seen, the trend (at least from about 1925 to the mid-70's) was to make it relatively easy and cheap to drive. (The 1970's saw radical increases in fuel prices and tightening of pollution regulations.)

Some have likened the oil industry to dope dealers: Get people hooked, then jack up the price. Maybe a few drivers sold their cars, and bought bicycles and transit passes when gas topped $4.50 a gallon, but I didn't see that much decrease in traffic (note: I'm retired and when I had a "day job" in was only about five miles away on surface streets.)

After all, consider all the advantages of a car: It's available 24/7, it goes where you want when you want (although if too many others want to go to the same place at the same time, this advantage loses its charm), it has cargo carrying capacity, it usually has a stereo system that picks up news or plays your kind of music, it protects you from the weather except for short walks at either end--and my wife used to work in a place with a parking structure as part of the building--it could be raining and she only needed an umbrella at the home end of the commute.

Some writers refer to the supposed "love affair with the car"; for most of us, it's more a "marriage of convenience".

Among other problems dogging the electric railway industry: Difficulty in raising fares--there were obviously more transit riders than traction company shareholders in the old days, thus even though the costs of wages, supplies and repair parts rose over the years, getting the local government or the PUC to allow higher fares was a long, slow process. Two-man car laws-- Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and probably other cities required that streetcars have both a motorman and a conductor.

These laws were eventually repealed, and there were exceptions for special cases (e.g. Birney cars), but the damage was done. It obviously made sense to buy one-man buses when it came time to replace worn-out trolleys. This would be an even easier decision if GM offered GMAC financing terms, while it might be necessary to sell equipment trust certificates (probably at a higher interest rate) to buy streetcars.

In many cities, to local governments wanted to get rid of streetcar tracks; New York in the 30's being a prime example with Mayor LaGuardia being a notable advocate of banishing the trolleys.

Many electric railways failed long before the advent of National City Lines, just because their cars and tracks needed replacement (or at least serious repairs) and they just didn't have the money. New England used to have trolley lines "all over the place", but many of these were gone by 1930. There's a whole book chronicling the demise of nearly all the interurban electric lines. Here in LA County, we had the Glendale & Montrose; it was abandoned in 1930, mostly due to automobiles taking away passengers.

Let me throw in another item: In Great Britain, tramways started being converted to bus lines in the 20's and 30's, and the London trams were gone by the mid-50's, yet as far as I know GM had little or nothing to do with these abandonments.

[lastraphanger]

so according to you the doc ''taken for a ride'' had no good facts to offer
in the united states we are stuck with our cars and buses
while the rest of the world rebuilt thier trolley, transit and commuter lines
and is adding more but here we are just stuck with our cars too bad !!
i getting the mesage that we should rip up our blue green red and gold
lines too since the car and buses won & give up on rail transit here
too bad if you are transit dependant and dont own one because the
pacific electric is gone forever after we were robbed of it
hell no private owned line ever works anywhere any place
i still say you should see this doc 1st
Taken for a Ride by Jim Klein and Martha Olson....
www.newday.com/films/Taken_for_a_Ride.html

[bobdavis]

Rip out our new electric railway lines, no way! I even lent some useful support to getting the Gold Line built. I'm just saying that back when the PE and the LARy lines were abandoned, it seemed like a good idea to many people, including most of the "decision makers".

Where does "clever marketing" (on the part of GM, Firestone, et al.) end and illegal activity begin? The notorious anti-trust action against GM, was, according to an article in New Electric Railway Journal back around 1995, not about replacing trolley cars, but cornering the market for buses and operating supplies. The injured parties would not be St. Louis Car or Westinghouse, but White Motors, Flxible, Goodyear and Shell Oil.

According to one report, GM was required to sell their bus engines and transmissions to Flxible at cost. I once knew a man who had a 1960 Studebaker that had a Chevy V-8 in it; he told me that GM was selling Studie the engines in hopes of keeping them alive so GM wouldn't be accused of forcing them out of business. Now it looks like GM is on the "endangered species list".

How about another theory? A long time ago a co-worker told me his take on auto-oriented suburban sprawl: it was encouraged by "The Establishment" to get the working class away from the cities, where they might fall prey to "radical agitators". Get them into their own houses, with yards to take care of, get them into cars that need maintenance, keep them busy so they won't have idle time for the Commies to gather them in "masses". Sounds rather far fetched, but some people may believe it.

As far as the Pacific Electric being "gone forever": The Blue Line follows most of the Long Beach Line, the Red Line Subway follows parts of the LARy "V" car line, the PE Hollywood Blvd Line and the San Fernando Valley line.

Metrolink's San Bernardino Line follows segments of the PE San Bernardino Line, and once you get east of Baldwin Park, has more frequent service than the Red Cars did. The Expo Line follows the PE Santa Monica Air Line (which for its last several years only had one or two runs a day).

The Green Line serves territory that was mostly farm country when the PE was in its heyday, but for a mile or two it follows the track to Torrance.

Although the Gold Line runs on a former Santa Fe route, some of it parallels the original 1895 LA & Pasadena route, and the section near the Southwest Museum station parallels the LARy "W" car line.

Would it have been better to keep and rebuild some of the PE lines? I won't quote the whole text here, but on P. 409 of "The Electric Interurban Railways in America" by Hilton & Due there's a comment about how "--the Pacific Electric could have comprised the nucleus of a highly efficient rapid transit system--" and goes on to mention "SP's general lack of interest after 1924 in local passenger service, by the considerable public hostility to the company and by the management's failure to make an effort to modernize.

It is regrettable that government units did not take over the system in the mid-thirties, while it was still intact, rather than two decades later, and recognize the importance of the continued use of the rail facilities in the overall solution to the transportation problem in the area."

"O saddest words of tongue or pen: it might have been."

[lastraphanger]

i thought ''taken for a ride'' was the best doc. i have ever seen & much better than 'This Was Pacific Electric'

[bobdavis]

I suppose the "GM is Evil" partisans had a certain bitter satisfaction when that company filed for bankruptcy recently. My question for those who believe the material in "Taken for a Ride" is the gospel truth is: "So what are you going to do about it?" Digging up stories from 50 or 60 years ago won't help us today. Are you writing to your Representative and Senators advocating higher fuel taxes? Have you spoken out at Metro meetings?