There has been enough of denunciation against the present general
method of warming and ventilating railway cars. It produces no effect
on the corporations who could, if they would, adopt appliances that
would not burn people to death in cases of accident, nor regularly and
persistently poison them with bad air.
There is no lack of ways and means; the problem is simple and easily
solved; nay--a not very extensive search through the Patent Office
records will show that it has been solved already; perhaps not in the
most practical and perfect manner, but still solved so well, as, were
it not for corporation cupidity, would greatly add to the comfort and
safety of passengers.
The real problem is how to compel corporations to recognize the
fact that the public has rights they are bound to respect. It is the
disregard of these rights that fills our cars with smoke, dust, and
exhalations, and puts box stoves full of hot coals in the corners,
ready to cook the human stew whenever a frisky car shall take a
notion to turn a somersault. The invention needed is a conscience for
corporations--an invention, by the way, scarcely less difficult
than the one advertised for in our last issue, namely, a plan for
preventing the sale of intoxicating liquors and tobacco in New Jersey.
The _Railroad Gazette_, imitating the English ideal of prolixity in
discussion, for which _Engineering_ has recently patted it on the
back approvingly, treats us, in its issue of February 11th, to a page
article, to be continued, under the title of "Warming and Ventilation
of Railroad Cars." In this article the writer takes the ground that
people in general are ignorant of the effects of pure air, and not
being able to "see the foulness," they "therefore do not believe
it exists." It is quite possible they may not be able to see the
foulness, but if in the majority of railroad cars run in this country,
they are not able to feel it in gritty, grimy accumulations on skin
and linen, and smell it in suffocating stenches which serve, with
sneeze-provoking dust, to stifle anything like comfort, their skin
must be thicker, their linen more neglected, and their noses less
sensitive than those of the majority of fellow travellers it has been
our fortune to be cooped up with for a day's railroad journey.
The _Railroad Gazette_ makes this wholesale charge of ignorance
and insensibility the excuse for an essay on the physiology of
respiration, mostly extracted from Huxley's "Elementary Lessons in
Physiology," and therefore excellent in its way, though having a
somewhat remote bearing upon the subject as announced in the title of
the article. We trust that before this journal concludes its series of
articles thus commenced, it will tell how to breathe into the breasts
of the corporations which choke us in their human packing boxes,
something resembling the soul which they are universally acknowledged
to be destitute of. When this is done, carbonic acid, ammoniacal
smells, organic exhalations, smoke, and dust, will be invited to shun
the interiors of railway cars, and comparative comfort will descend
upon the peregrinating public.
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