Off The Rails PGH: Crazy history from Pittsburgh's past - Volume One (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798184607979)

Most of it is true. The parts that aren't announce themselves by getting stranger.

Pittsburgh used to run on streetcars. One line - the old 42 through the South Hills - is the direct ancestor of the train people still ride today: the Red Line. Off the Rails gets off at one stop along that line at a time, and tells you what really happened there.

Three stories. One ride.

Silver Dollar Nose - In 1917, four men looked up from a bowl of soup at a coal-town bank that bragged in cast iron it could not be robbed. What followed was a botched holdup, an empty shotgun, a chase by funeral hearse, and more than $18,000 that walked out of Castle Shannon and was never seen again.

The Quiet and the Loud - A career burglar who believed locks were only a suggestion breaks into the wrong dark house in 1959 - and ends a July afternoon pinned to a green West End hillside while two hundred armed men, a machine gun, a helicopter, and half the city look on.

What Alexandria Knew (bonus track) - The line rides clean out of Pittsburgh and back to 300 BC, following one hard-won idea - the truth about the human heart - as it's discovered, buried for fourteen hundred years, and finally proven miles from where you're sitting.

True crime, local legend, and narrative history from the old corridor - for readers who like their facts strange and their Pittsburgh close enough to go stand on.

An Outbound Redline series.