Comparative Book Review: PCC: The Car that Fought Back and An American Original: the PCC Car
In the 1980s, Interurban Press published a trio of books about the PCC Streetcar. One, PCC from Coast to Coast, is a pictorial history of their operation on the systems that operated them. The other two are histories of the Electric Railway President’s Car Committee and the family of streetcars that resulted from the ERPCC’s efforts. Online blurbs and descriptions of PCC: The Car that Fought Back and An American Original: the PCC Car are very similar. Though both are available secondhand at around the same price at time of writing, one might wish to select only one PCC history. Which one to choose?
The good news is that one can’t go wrong with either, and there is value in having both if desired. They both detail the challenges that the streetcar industry faced before the PCC, earlier attempts to solve them, the formation of the ERPCC, the testing and engineering work that went into designing the PCC streetcar, the PCC technology, car design and variations, adaptation to rapid transit vehicles, and the licensing and sale of the PCC technology around the world. Each is extensively illustrated with black-and-white illustrations showcasing both critical details of PCC designs as well as some of the streetcars in action across North America and around the world.
The authors have made some slightly different choices, however, which may make one work or the other more valuable for the reader depending on what they are interested in learning about. An American Original: the PCC Car has a brief history of streetcar design at the beginning of the book, which helps explain the reasons behind some of the challenges that the streetcar industry faced going into the 1920s, and provides a background for readers who are not particularly familiar with the history of streetcar innovations. PCC: The Car that Fought Back, on the other hand, assumes that the reader has some knowledge of the subject.
PCC: The Car that Fought Back offers more depth on the corporate history of the ERPCC and its transition into Transit Research Corp. (TRC). As the TRC and its relationships with its sponsoring electric railway systems and others affected the production and use of the cars, and its demise resulted in a transition to other, initially less-successful cars after production of the PCC ceased, this does add some value. The book also does offer some more detail on the technical design of the PCC car, as well as PCC competitors such as the Brilliner and the used car market of the period. The story of the Brilliner as an alternative to the PCC is particularly useful.
An American Original: the PCC Car, however, includes much greater detail on the use of the cars in specific cities, and the variations in the designs between cars purchased by different systems. The PCC car was generally a set of standard design components designed for a theoretical base car that could be adapted to the particular needs of each system. The variations that resulted are interesting in what they detail about the needs and usage in the systems that purchase them. (It should be noted that the authors of PCC: The Car that Fought Back are the same as PCC from Coast to Coast and a system-by-system analysis is in that book). An American Original: the PCC Car also briefly further describes the evolution of streetcar design after the PCC, which though now dated, is useful as many of the cars that replaced PCCs are now retired or being retired soon.
The selection between PCC: The Car that Fought Back and An American Original: the PCC Car may be best based on whether one wishes to purchase one book or two, as the former is intended as the first part of a two-book series with PCC from Coast to Coast, while the latter is written as a self-contained history of the PCC car in one volume. There is little, if any, overlap in illustrations between the two books, and both are well-written, detailed, and worth reading. If one has to pick just one of the books, hopefully the above details will help with the decision, but if not, one can’t go wrong with purchasing either (or both!).
