CAF car no. 4322 in the subway between Gateway and Wood Street. Someone put a lot of effort into decorating it: all the interior lights were replaced with alternating red and green, all the poles and grip rods were covered with spirals of electrical tape, and stick-on Christmas decorations were all over the windows. Whoever is responsible should get a raise and a promotion. In fact, whoever is responsible should be in charge of Pittsburgh Regional Transit.
A two-car Red Line train stops at the inbound Hampshire safety island on Broadway in Beechview.
An inbound two-car Red Line train stops at the Fallowfield station in Beechview. The leading car is in the new chain-of-circles livery; the trailing car is in the older checkerboard livery.
Central Beechview has one traffic signal, but it’s a very complicated one, regulating traffic on Broadway, Beechview Avenue, and Hampshire Avenue—and also the streetcars.
Yes, that streetcar was still in the intersection when the light turned red. But are you going to argue with the streetcar?
Many streets in the Pittsburgh area used to have a median where the streetcars ran in a separate right-of-way: Center Avenue in West View and Brookline Boulevard in Brookline are two examples. Broadway in Dormont is the only one where the streetcars still run in the median. We could also count the Silver Line through Bethel Park as a broad instance of the same kind of development, although the streets between which the trolleys run have different names.
We have seen Ruth before, but here are all three of the ladies on Broadway in Dormont. They form a group, with Ruth facing the other two across the street. Ruth and Thea are identical; Esther is different, but matching in scale, colors, and materials.
For some reason giving small apartment buildings women’s names was popular in Dormont. If old Pa Pitt had been naming these, he would have kept to a consistent Old Testament theme. Perhaps Ruth, Esther, and Hulda?
The pictures of Ruth were taken in November of 2022. Obviously, the only way to get the sun on all three buildings is to come at two different times.
Two 4300-series CAF cars pass at Fallowfield station in Beechview.
A two-car Blue Line train comes in from Wood Street and heads out under the Allegheny to North Side; a Silver Line car departs for Wood Street. You can see the video at full resolution on its Wikimedia Commons hosting page.
The video is obviously hand-held. There are some very sophisticated video-stabilizing algorithms in our video-editing software, but the parade of identical square windows in a moving trolley makes them panic and jiggle the picture all over the screen, so we give you the video without stabilization.
Above, the First Avenue subway station (which is an elevated station, but it’s on the part of the line we call the “subway”) from First Avenue. Below, a CAF 4300-series Blue Line car comes in from the Panhandle Bridge.
