Good photo that certainly captures a time and a place. Regarding the SEPTA PCC, one of a couple of hundred pre-WWII "air-electric" (no-standee window) PCC cars that SEPTA operated at least into the 1980s, does anybody know why only one or many two cars of this type were acquired by trolley museums and preserved? By the time SEPTA took them out of service, it's not as if there were any other transit systems still operating St. Louis-built air cars, the original revolutionary product of 10 years of industry research, which, in many aspects of styling, were more graceful than the postwar cars that are more angular and not as rounded or flowing in design, IMHO.

I suppose it has something to do with the Philadelphia area (of all places!) not having a viable trolley museum that could have amassed multiple examples of these cars (with some for parts) the way that the Seashore Trolley Museum in Maine collected various types of Boston PCCs. I suppose somebody will say that SEPTA (and PTC before that) ran the cars into the ground; the bodies and frames were rotted by the salt used on the streets every winter, etc. No doubt. But there are all kinds of examples of ancient streetcars being brought back to life after serving as chicken coops for decades, and I'm sure Brooklyn PCC 1001, the "first production model," wasn't in much better shape when the Branford (now Shoreline) Trolley Museum in CT acquired it in back in the '50s. Besides the Trolley Valhalla-Penn's Landing-Glassboro-Bucks County whatever museum, there are plenty of others in Pennsylvania that could have acted. Seashore, a museum with an international scope, or one of the Connecticut or Ohio museums, might have added one to their collections. Many of these museums jumped years later when postwar PCCs that SEPTA had done them the favor of rebuilding in the '80s came on the market.

On a different topic, I have to strongly disagree with earlier comments about over-the-air digital TV. Based on my personal experience in Hartford, CT, digital TV is a joke. We went from getting about 11 watch-able analog stations to three or four, depending on the set. And the stations we do get, which have their transmitters 10-15 miles away (at most), cut in and out all the time. I'm assuming the over-the-air stations cut their power when they shut off their analog signals and are letting cable do their work, in which case I'd have to question the wisdom of must-carry rules. I'm glad to read that somebody somewhere has had a good experience with over-the-air digital. There are a few interesting sub-channels, but when you can't receive a single ABC affiliate (the case here, since they're in New Haven and Springfield, Mass.) such eccentric gains don't compensate for what's been lost.