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There were rowdy customers. Lunch breaks were out of the question. Cowboy constables settled personal scores on a running trolley.

Staff and volunteers at the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum in Washington County got a glimpse of everyday life on the trolley in a treasure trove of Pittsburgh Railways Co. documents unearthed this month inside a former trolley barn in Rankin. The documents, from the heyday of trolley travel in the 1920s and 1930s, include daily logs called "run sheets," timetables, internal memoranda, accident reports, disability claims.

"What you see here is an excellent cross-section of the actual operations as related to the public as well as the internal process that was used in performing the service," said the museum's archivist, Edward H. Lybarger, of McMurray. "It's a wonderfully broad collection."

"It's like finding the King Tut's tomb in our case," said Scott Becker, the museum's executive director.

In one Aug. 16, 1932, memo, a Rankin-based manager tells his boss that a motorman was scolded for eating lunch on the job. A 1930s operation report tells about a worker pulling a child's ear to stop him from removing a light bulb from an illuminated sign. One executive instructs his superintendents in 1932 to scrutinize tokens because some trainmen were stealing them and substituting iron washers.

The documents -- all 30 boxfuls of them -- were discovered when contractors for Epic Metals Corp., which 40 years ago took over what was known as the Rankin Car House on Talbot Street, knocked down a false wall. Behind it was a walk-in vault bounded by a double-steel door and brick walls five layers thick.

"We thought there would be gold bars inside," said Stephen Potts, Epic's vice president of engineering who was present when workers found the steel-door vault on Dec. 3.

"The vault, I am sure, was designed originally for money," said Lybarger.

Inside, the papers were haphazardly shelved but remained in a pristine condition. The top layers were coated with jet black mill dust from U.S. Steel's Edgar Thomson Works a mile down the street. But papers have stayed crisp and intact, except for the occasional cigar burn marks. The nickel-coated steel paper clips had barely rusted.

Lybarger and museum volunteers are cleaning most of the documents in a warehouse a mile from the museum.

Volunteer Tim Jones, a computer network engineer from Lancaster, found the disability claim from a motorman "assaulted and beaten by a constable" who may have been the boyfriend of a woman who fell while running for a streetcar.

The Washington museum, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last September, reaped another bumper crop of artifacts this year. In the summer, the last surviving president of Red Arrow Lines, a suburban Philadelphia trolley company, bequeathed his collection of photographs and documents. A retired transit worker from Bethel Park found in his attic a 3-inch-thick trolley operations manual from the 1950s and gave it to the museum.

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