THE LOCOMOTIVES AND THE CARS
HONOR REQUIRED IN THE BUILDING OF A LOCOMOTIVE--SOME OF THE EARLY
LOCOMOTIVES--SOME NOTABLE LOCOMOTIVE-BUILDERS--INCREASE OF THE SIZE OF
ENGINES--STEPHENSON'S AIR-BRAKE--THE WORKSHOPS--THE VARIOUS PARTS OF
THE ENGINE--CARS OF THE OLD-TIME--IMPROVEMENTS BY WINANS AND
OTHERS--STEEL CARS FOR FREIGHT.
From out of the fiery womb of steel comes the locomotive. We have already
told of the honor that is forged in the building of the bridge; honor of
no less degree has gone into the forging of the most vital and most human
thing upon the railroad, outside of man himself. That man has ever been
able to create and build the locomotive, a giant creature of some 200
tons, perhaps, built together with infinite care of some 5,000 to 7,000
parts, and these parts acting with the delicacy of the hair-spring of a
watch, almost passes ordinary belief. The wonder becomes even greater when
it is realized that this monster creature, set upon two slender rails, is
capable of pulling a 4,000 ton train, through every stress of weather and
over considerable grades.
To tell in detail of the locomotive in one chapter is short allowance to a
subject that fairly demands for itself a whole book, a technical mind for
the telling, and at least a fairly technical mind for the understanding; a
subject that in its history goes hand in hand with that of the railroad
itself. Yet the limitations of this book forbid a more lengthy
description.
We have already told of a very few of the earliest and most famous
American locomotives; the _Stourbridge Lion_, which Horatio Allen brought
to the Delaware & Hudson Company; the _Best Friend_, which was built in
New York City, and which went to Charleston, South Carolina, to be the
first American locomotive to run in the United States, the _De Witt
Clinton_, which awoke the echoes of the Hudson and Mohawk valleys in a
single day; and the _Tom Thumb_, built by Peter Cooper, which induced the
directors of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad to change their motive power
from horses to steam, and so opened a great new development for their
property.
A little while after Cooper's _Tom Thumb_ had achieved the astounding feat
of beating a team of horses in hauling a railroad coach, the directors of
the B. & O. offered a prize of $4,000 "for the most approved engine that
shall be delivered for trial upon the road on or before June 1, 1831; and
$3,500 for the engine which shall be adjudged the next best." It was
determined in this prospectus that "the engine, when in operation must not
exceed three and one-half tons weight and must, on a level road, be
capable of drawing day by day fifteen tons, inclusive of the weight of
wagons, fifteen miles an hour."
Three locomotives answered this generous offer. Of them but one, the
_York_, oftener called the _Arabian_, built at York, Pa., by Davis &
Gartner, and hauled to Baltimore by horses over the turnpikes, was of
practical service. Phineas Davis was a watch and clock maker, but he
succeeded in devising a locomotive that was the forerunner of the famous
_Grasshopper_ upon the Baltimore & Ohio. Better name was never given to a
locomotive, the rude and ungainly angles formed by rods and levers giving
a distinct resemblance to the long-legged bugs. Yet the Grasshoppers
served their purpose. In the late eighties, the _Arabian_ was still in
service in the Mount Clare yards at Baltimore. With a single exception, it
never had an accident or even left the rails. That exception was just
before the completion of the Washington branch, and Davis was a passenger
upon the engine. It was going at a fair rate of speed when suddenly it
rolled over upon its side in the ditch. No one was hurt, save Davis, who
was instantly killed. It seemed a strange caprice of Fate, for although
careful examination was immediately made, both of the engine and of the
track, no reason could ever be assigned for the accident.
In that same year, 1831, the _John Bull_, which was built by George &
Robert Stephenson & Company, of Newcastle-on-Tyne, in England, was
received in Philadelphia for the Camden & Amboy Railroad. As long as the
locomotive continues to serve the railroad the name of George Stephenson,
its inventor, must be indissolubly linked with it. The _John Bull_ was
easily the most famous Stephenson engine ever sent to the United States.
It has been shown at all our great expositions, and now occupies a
position of honor in the great Smithsonian institution at Washington. Of
these early engines, which it was found necessary to bring from England, a
volume once issued by the Rogers Locomotive Works, of Paterson, N. J., has
said:
"These locomotives ... furnished the types and patterns from which
those which were afterwards built here were fashioned. But American
designs soon began to depart from their British prototypes, and a
process of adaption to the existing conditions of the railroads in
this country followed, which afterwards differentiated the American
locomotives more and more from those built in Great Britain. A marked
feature of difference between American and English locomotives has
been the use of a forward truck under the former."
As a matter of fact, the English engines, built for use on long straight
stretches of line would never have served on the early roads in this
country with their steep and curving routes through the mountains. So, in
the latter part of the year 1831, John B. Jervis invented what he called
"a new plan of frame, with a bearing-carriage for a locomotive engine" for
the use of the Mohawk & Hudson Railroad, in which he introduced the
forward truck which is to-day a distinctive feature of American engines.
Its effectiveness was at once recognized, and its almost general adoption
immediately followed. Five years later, Henry R. Campbell, of
Philadelphia, had patented his system of two driving-wheels and a truck,
and the distinctive type of American locomotive was born.
In the development of that peculiarly successful type, great names have
been written into the history of American locomotive-building--the names
of such men as Rogers and Winans and Hinckley and Mason and Brooks and
Matthias Baldwin and William Norris; the last two both of Philadelphia.
Norris, after some interesting smaller engines, built the _George
Washington_ in 1835. This engine was not one whit less than a triumph. It
ascended the steep plane of the Columbia Railroad in Philadelphia, a grade
of 7-1/2 per cent, carrying two passenger cars in which were seated 53
persons. It came to a stop on that grade and started up again by its own
efforts. After reaching the summit, the engine was turned around and came
down, stopping once in its descent.
That was the only time that a locomotive ever essayed the Columbia plane,
and the performance of the _George Washington_ has not been attempted in
all these years save in the case of Latrobe's temporary line at Kingwood
Tunnel. The English newspapers of that day ridiculed the experiment,
pronounced it a Baron Munchausen story, yet in 1839 Norris sent an engine
overseas that successfully climbed the then famous Lickey plane, in
England. After that he was besieged by foreign orders, sending 16 American
locomotives to Great Britain in 1840, and, during the next few years, 170
others to France, Germany, Prussia, Austria, Belgium, Italy, and Saxony.
William Norris did his full part in giving Europe a measure of respect for
the growing nation across the Atlantic.
Matthias Baldwin, like Phineas Davis, of York, was a watch maker in the
beginning of his life. He lived long enough to lay the foundation of one
of the greatest of American single industries, to give his name to a firm
that has carried the fame of American locomotives around the world and
kept it alive in every nation of the earth. Baldwin's first locomotive was
built in 1832 for the Philadelphia, Germantown, and Norristown Railroad;
and that it was a good locomotive is proved by the fact that it performed
twenty years of faithful service upon that line. His second engine, built
two years later, went south to that famous old Charleston & Hamburg
Company. After that his works were regularly established, their head to
give his patience and untiring genius to the perfecting of the locomotive.
The history of Baldwin locomotives is, in an important sense, the history
of the industry in the United States.
It was not long before the pioneer engines were considered too small for
much practical value, and Mr. Baldwin was building a much bigger
locomotive for the Vermont Central Railroad. This engine, named the
_Governor Paine_ for a famous executive of that State, was delivered in
1848, and for it was paid the unprecedented price of $10,000. It had a
pair of driving-wheels, six and one-half feet in diameter placed just back
of the fire-box, a slightly smaller pair being placed forward. Baldwin
must have given full value, for it is related that the engine could be
started from a state of rest and run a mile in forty-three seconds. The
Pennsylvania Railroad ordered three of the same sort, and one of these
once hauled a special train carrying President Zachary Taylor at sixty
miles an hour. In weight, the locomotive was steadily increasing. In the
beginning, these engines weighed from four to seven tons each; by the late
forties engines of twenty-five tons each were being built for the Reading
Road, and these were regarded as monsters.
Year by year the locomotive was being perfected in all its details. The
cab made its appearance and was first opposed by the engineers, who
imagined that they would be badly penned in, in case of accident. The
Erie contributed the bell-rope signal from the train; we have already
heard of that first whistle on the locomotive of the Sandusky and Mad
River Railroad. The Boston & Worcester devised the headlight, so that time
might be saved by handling freight at night. More important than these
were the experiments by Ross Winans and by S. M. Felton that led to the
substitution of coal for wood as a fuel, and the development by Rogers at
his Paterson works of the link device, so necessary in stopping, starting,
and reversing the locomotive.
Gradually the size of the locomotive increased to 28 and 30 tons in the
late fifties. Finally James Milholland, engineer of machinery for the
Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, built in 1863 a pusher engine for coal
trains that weighed something over 50 tons. When folk saw that engine they
almost gasped, and wondered what the railroads were coming to. But the
wiser men kept silent. They knew that as long as bridges and roadbeds and
fine steel rails were increased in strength, the limit of size of the
locomotive had not been reached. The greater grip the locomotive has upon
the rail, the greater its pulling power, the greater its efficiency. Sheer
weight, and weight alone, gives that grip. It certainly takes a weight of
seven tons to give a grip of one ton upon a dry rail; in the case of wet
rails this ratio becomes ten to one.
Then wonder not that the locomotive steadily increased in size, that the
Moguls with six driving-wheels, and the Consolidations with eight, came
into vogue a few years after the close of the war, and that these kept
increasing in weight all the while. Height and width were and still are
rigidly limited by the clearance of the line. The locomotive must stand no
more than fourteen or sixteen feet high and from nine to eleven feet wide;
in length the problem only meets the genius of the designer.
But it is altogether possible that the limit of the size of the
locomotive would have been reached long ago if it had not been for the
coming of the air-brake. This most important assurance of the safety of
the railroad passenger came into its being in 1869, when George
Westinghouse, its inventor, was permitted to try it on a Panhandle train.
From the beginning of railroads the necessity for brakes was apparent, and
in 1833 Robert Stephenson patented a steam brake for the driving-wheels.
That same brake, with compressed air substituted for steam, is essentially
the Westinghouse device of to-day. But Westinghouse made the air do the
work of steam. After he had developed the idea he offered it to leading
Eastern railroads, but they one and all declined it.
Finally, he was permitted to place it on a Panhandle train, full assurance
having been given to the railroad officials that he would be personally
responsible for any injury done to their equipment. Four cars and an
engine were fitted with the new device and the train started forth from
Pittsburgh to Steubenville. On the way its progress was halted by a farm
wagon which was caught in the rail at a highway crossing. The engineer
whistled for the handbrakes in the good old-fashioned way but he knew that
he was too late. Then he thought of the air-brake. He had little faith in
the contraption, but he gave its handle a wrench and the train stopped ten
feet from the wagon. Several lives were saved and the air-brake was
proven. From that day forth it was simply a question of developing the
device to its fullest possibility, and Mr. Westinghouse has proved himself
able to do that very thing.
The air-brake was a fact. Steel had come into use for axles, driving-wheel
tires, frames, and every other vital or bearing part of the locomotive;
and the designers were again increasing its size. They passed the
_Consolidation_ and built the _Mastodon_. These were freighters--each with
ten drivers--drivers with tremendous gripping force. They went through
what M. N. Forney has called a "period of adolescence in railroad
progress," and in that period they experimented with huge driving-wheels
only to discard them once again. Then they built bigger engines than even
the _Mastodon_; the _Decapod_, with twelve driving-wheels; the _El
Gobernador_ which was built by the Southern Pacific at its Sacramento
shops in 1884, weighing, with engine and tender fully equipped, 113 tons.
Still the locomotive grows and its progenitors talk of the 500-ton
machine. They have recently built the Mallet articulated compound, which
because of its very great weight has splendid gripping force and is
especially adapted for pushing-service on heavy grades. The Baltimore &
Ohio, the Erie, the New York Central, the Great Northern, and the Santa Fe
have already become committed to this type of engine. The American
locomotive Company has just completed for the Delaware & Hudson several
Mallet articulated compounds that are among the most powerful locomotives
yet constructed. They were designed for pusher service, on heavy grades,
north from Carbondale on the main line of the D. & H., which average from
.81 to 1.36 per cent. Up to recently the heavy northbound coal traffic up
these grades has been handled by the use of two heavy pusher engines. A
single one of the new Mallets will do the work of the two pushers, and
therein lies the economy in their use.
These new giants are, in operation, two 8-wheel engines, with individual
cylinders, steam chests and supplies from a single boiler and fire-box.
The gripping power of 16 driving-wheels under the enormous weight of 223
tons can be imagined; the designers estimate it at the high figure of
forty-three tons. The exceptional length of these monster engines--a
fraction over ninety feet--is carried around the curves of mountainous
lines by an ingenious joint in their solid steel frames. This then is only
the latest of American engines; but not quite the biggest, for the Topeka
shops of the Santa Fe Railroad claim that honor with their new Mallets,
each 121 feet long and weighing complete 810,000 pounds. The 500-ton
locomotive does not seem so very far away when one comes to consider the
Santa Fe giants. These engines, which are operated in pushing freights
over the heavy grades in the Southwest, were built from two of the Santa
Fe's heaviest freight engines. They operate with equal facility in either
direction as there is not a turntable in the land which would come
anywhere near accommodating them.
[Illustration: ONE OF THE "DIAMOND-STACK" LOCOMOTIVES USED ON THE
PENNSYLVANIA RAILROAD IN THE EARLY SEVENTIES
PRAIRIE TYPE PASSENGER LOCOMOTIVE OF THE LAKE SHORE
PACIFIC TYPE PASSENGER LOCOMOTIVE OF THE NEW YORK CENTRAL
ATLANTIC TYPE PASSENGER LOCOMOTIVE, BUILT BY THE PENNSYLVANIA RAILROAD AT
ITS ALTOONA SHOPS]
[Illustration: ONE OF THE GREAT MALLET PUSHING ENGINES OF THE DELAWARE &
HUDSON COMPANY
A TEN-WHEELED SWITCHING LOCOMOTIVE OF THE LAKE SHORE
SUBURBAN PASSENGER LOCOMOTIVE OF THE NEW YORK CENTRAL
CONSOLIDATION FREIGHT LOCOMOTIVE OF THE PENNSYLVANIA]
In recent years, the rather graceful custom of giving names to the
classification of locomotives has been extended to the passenger
motive-power. In 1895, the Baldwins created the Atlantic type of
four-driver locomotive for high-speed service both on the Atlantic Coast
Line and on the Atlantic City Railroad, from Camden to the ocean--and the
name has stuck. The Brooks plant of the American Locomotive Company at
Dunkirk similarly developed the Pacific type for passenger locomotives
with six drivers instead of four. The Prairie type was appropriately
enough sponsored by the Burlington system. It is like the Pacific type
save that the forward or lead truck (the Englishman would blandly call it
the "bogey") has but two instead of the conventional four wheels.
Your locomotive-builder is apt to be more systematic about these types of
engine, and he falls back on what is generally known as Whyte's
classification. The basis of this simple system is in the number of wheels
of the engine itself. Each type is described by a series of three numbers,
the first of these being the number of wheels in front of the drivers, the
second the number of drivers, and the third the number of wheels to the
rear of these. The eight-wheel American type, the simplest for
illustration here, would thus be described as "4-4-0."
The trailer, which is described by the third number in this series, is a
recent addition to the locomotive family in this country. It came from
the constant lengthening of the fire-box, due to the necessity of
providing greater steam-power for engines of increasing weight and
cylinder capacity. When the fire-box began to overhang too far, the
trailer-wheels were introduced, and a device was affixed to the locomotive
by which they might receive its weight for hill-climbing purposes. This
last device has not proved particularly successful. But the trailer itself
has become a fixed device in locomotive construction. When the third
figure in Whyte's classification is a cypher it simply means that there
are no trailers. Similarly the first figure a cypher, indicates the
absence of a forward truck or even wheels, which is common in some forms
of switch-engines, where the weight is entirely concentrated on the
drivers for better gripping power upon the rail.
Such, in brief, is the development of the locomotive. It has been
development rather than change, for while some designers have fretted
about whether the engine's cab should be in the middle of the boiler or at
its end and others have recently developed the Walsheart gears upon the
outside of the engine frame, where it is of easier access than the
old-style links, the general design of the iron-horse remains practically
the same as that given it by our grand-daddies. They planned carefully and
they planned for the long years. The essential features of their designs
have not been questioned. It has simply been a problem of growth.
* * * * *
From out of the fiery womb of steel comes the locomotive. If you would
better understand the iron horse, find your way to any of the great plants
in which he is being built. Begin at the beginning in a factory, which
seems, with dozens of shops and great yards, to be almost a miniature
city. Begin at the draughting-rooms where each locomotive is given a whole
ledger page--sometimes two or three--for specifications. From those
specifications, the young draughtsmen take their instructions. They work
out their charts and elevations, their detailed plans; and the ink is
hardly dry upon their drawings before they are being whisked away to the
blueprint rooms. The blueprints are still damp, when in turn they are
hurried to the different construction shops of the plant.
You see these shops, one by one, in care of an expert guide. You see the
wooden patterns going to the blast furnaces at the foundries and to the
sullen tappings of the trip-hammers. You leave the blacksmiths and stand
for a moment--not long--under the terrific din of the boiler-makers. The
boiler, the great trunk of the locomotive, is built of steel plate--plate
that is the very pride of the rolling-mills. In some foreign lands, copper
fire-boxes are demanded; but the real American locomotive has these also
of steel.
The steel plates are rolled to form the boiler itself, flanged by
angle-workers into the square fire-box. Finally the boiler and the
fire-box are riveted together, section by section--made as fast by steel
thread as man's ingenuity can make them. Together they form a unit.
Another unit is being formed in an adjacent shop, the solidly welded steel
frame in which the boiler shall yet set, and to which truck and drivers
will be firmly fastened. Forward on this frame will sit the cylinders; in
another corner of this shop they are being made ready. Cast-iron still
remains the best material for the cylinders and the steam-chests. These
are cast in one piece and the rule holds good where there are two
cylinders, as in the case of the compounds. The cylinders, and steam-chest
for one side and half the "saddle" of the locomotive, upon which the
forward end of the boiler rests, are nowadays generally made in a single
casting. After that it is a simple enough matter to smooth down the outer
surface, bore the cylinders to perfect surfacing, and line the
steam-chests with a bushing that can be readily removed once it is worn
out.
The driving-wheels are an important detail of the construction of the
locomotive. They are made in rough castings--of steel for fast passenger
engines, and of iron for other forms of motive power--and are then made
true in giant lathes. The steel tires are shrunk on the wheels, a work of
astounding nicety; and in turn the wheels themselves are heated and shrunk
upon the axles--of the best steel that man can forge. To place these
wheels upon the axles is hair-line work. A 9-inch hub receives an axle
just 8.973 inches--no more, no less--in diameter. It is keyed and then
under the slight expansion of a gentle heat it is rammed upon the
axle-end. It goes on to stay, and stay it must.
From all these shops, a busy industrial railroad brings the different
parts to the great and busy hall of the erecting-shop, a vast place of
vast distances and filled always with the noisy clatter of great industry.
Here the different parts, which have been carefully built by skilled
artisans, are assembled into the finished whole. The cylinders and
saddle-halves are placed and firmly riveted together. Into the collar of
that saddle a giant overhead crane carefully sets the boiler and the
fire-box. They are quickly riveted to the upper flange of the saddle: the
locomotive is coming into a semblance of itself.
The cab is fastened into position; then the boiler-makers descend upon the
unfinished engine and place the 200 or more flue-tubes that run from
fire-box to smoke-box, just underneath the stack. They make every tube and
joint fast--put into the growing locomotive all the energy and all the
skill of good workmanship. When they are gone the giant crane again comes
noiselessly down along the ceiling. It reaches down, grasps the
engine-trunk, and swings it high aloft.
Down there, resting on real railroad tracks, are the driving-wheels and
the lead truck, carefully spaced in anticipation. The crane, lifting the
fifty tons of boiler and frame with no apparent effort whatsoever, places
its load squarely upon the wheels that are to carry it. Again the
mechanics are busy; the engine is growing into a solid unit. Upon their
heels follow testers, men who must look for steam or water leaks. They
work under a test of air, carrying lighted candles into every nook and
cranny of the giant. If the candle flutters, air is escaping, and the leak
must be found.
Finally comes the report "O. K." from the testing crew. The stacks, the
steam and sand domes, and the air-brakes are being made fast. The engine
is hurried off to the paint-shop. There it may find its companion in life,
the humble useful tender already awaiting it. It came direct from the
tender shop; for the appendage of the locomotive is no longer a specially
rigged flat-car but a solid steel plate construction built to carry some
9,000 gallons of water and about 16 tons of coal. Only a little time ago,
a New Yorker, scion of a wealthy and famous family of railroaders, proved
himself worth his oats by designing a tender of great practicability and
of great economy of construction.
When the engine emerges from the paint-shop it is gorgeous and
refulgent--brilliantly new. Unless it is going to foreign lands, when it
must be partly dismantled and crated, it will ride its own wheels to the
road which has purchased it. A string of new locomotives may be sprinkled
through a freight train--never coupled together--in charge of an inspector
from the locomotive company, who will bunk in one of the cabs and never
leave his charges until they have been receipted for. After that the
locomotive begins to bend to the work for which he was created. Unless he
is of a very unusual sort or was built for some very especial purpose, he
soon loses his identity. The days are gone when locomotives were
christened after the fashion of ships. There are too many of them. Each is
given the cold informality of a number, marshalled for service in a mighty
company.
Cars came as corollary to the locomotive. In the beginning the passenger
coaches were nothing more or less than old-time stage-coaches which had
been set upon wheels so flanged as to enable them to stay upon the rail.
So it was that the first cars built for the railroad followed stage-coach
models. It was a practical necessity from the first to draw more than one
small coach at a time, so the couplings and the bumper devices came as a
matter of development. Then came the day when an aspiring inventor grouped
several stage-coaches together on a single rigid frame and he had really
developed a form of railroad coach--a form which our English and
continental cousins still cling fondly to, in despite of its most apparent
disadvantages.
Four wheels quickly gave way to eight. In the early thirties, Ross Winans
developed a double-truck car for use on the Baltimore & Ohio. Compared
with anything that had gone before it was certainly a pretentious vehicle.
It was thirty feet in length, four-wheel trucks being attached at the
ends, very much after the present fashion. There were seats on the flat
roof, which were reached by a ladder in the corner, and the car itself was
divided into three compartments. A little later Winans tore out the cross
partitions in the car and introduced the end doors and the centre aisle,
thus establishing the American passenger coach of to-day. The Baltimore &
Ohio manufactured a number of these coaches at its famous Mount Clare
shops. They were known for years as the "Washington cars," probably
because they were the first run on the Washington branch.
If Winans had been able to establish his patent rights to the double-truck
car he might have reaped a fortune from its royalties alone. But when he
went to assert his right as an inventor, it was discovered that the idea
was not absolutely new. Gridley Bryant, in his old Quincy Granite
Railroad, just south of Boston, had used the device in crude form. The
four-wheeled flat cars which he had employed in bringing stone from the
quarries down to the dock were not long enough for granite slabs. He had
met that emergency by fastening two of them together with coupling-rings,
and thus in a way had created the eight-wheel car. So Winans lost his
patent although credit is given him for having really developed the
passenger car of to-day.
The form, once set, came quickly into vogue. In a few of the Southern
States, old-fashioned gentlemen followed the early English fashion of
having their private carriages attached to flat freight-cars whenever they
went on railroad trips, but even this was a passing fad. At that time
carriages were no novelty, and railroad cars were. They were stuffy little
affairs compared with the coaches of to-day, miserably lighted and heated
and ventilated, but Americans were very proud of them. The fashion that
made early locomotives gay with color, with brass and burnished metals of
other sorts, found full scope upon the passenger cars, both inside and
out. They were pannelled and striped, ornamented and lettered to the limit
of the skill of gifted painters. A coach, named the Morris Run, on the old
Tioga Railroad, which began running south from Elmira about 1840, was
decorated in red and green and yellow and blue and gilt and several other
colors. It would have made a modern circus band wagon inconspicuous. But
the day came when the brass stars and the red stack-bands began to
disappear with the names from the locomotives and in that day the railroad
cars became subdued in colorings. Some of the gay frescoes of the
interiors, typical of the taste of an earlier day, were in use within the
present generation.
While the "Washington cars" set a type, there was much yet to be
accomplished in the development both of the passenger coach and of the
freight car, and this much was chiefly in the line of the development of
safety devices. The old-time passenger rode in a very decent fear of his
life. Sometimes a loosened end of one of the "strap rails" would come
plunging up through the flimsy floor of the coach and impale some
unfortunate passenger upon its end against the ceiling; other times the
cars would go rolling off the banks and crashing into kindling-wood
against one another. They were lightly built contrivances, incapable of
standing any sort of shock or collision.
But improvements came one by one--better devices for coupling them
together, culminating in the modern automatic "jaw coupler," better
framing, better platforms, better trucks, improved hand-brakes; and after
them the now universal air-brakes made life safer both for the traveller
and the railroad employee. Finally came the steel-end vestibule; and where
cars have been equipped with this very comfortable device, telescoping in
collision, a very common and disastrous accident in which one car-shell
enveloped another, has been rendered impossible.
The car-platforms for many years remained a menace and a problem. An early
railroad in New Jersey sought to emphasize their danger by painting on an
inner panel of each car-door a picture of a newly made grave, surmounted
by a tombstone, on which was inscribed: "Sacred to the memory of a man who
stood upon a platform." The railroad used every method to keep its
passengers off the platforms at first. Afterwards they began to encourage
it and to devise means to promote a general intercourse between the cars.
The dining-car, of which much more in another chapter, was a prime factor
in this change of attitude on the part of railroad officers. Its use
necessitated passengers going the length of the train, a movement which,
in itself, was facilitated by the main design of American cars, as
differentiated from those of English railroads. When the English roads
began the universal use of dining-cars they had to revamp the entire plan
of their car construction and produce what are still known across the
Atlantic as "corridor trains."
To make such communication safe, George M. Pullman, the sleeping-car man,
set forth to devise a platform protection. Back in the fifties there had
been something of the sort on the old Naugatuck Railroad in Connecticut,
rough canvas curtains enclosing the platforms; but these had been built to
facilitate car ventilation, and failing in this, they were abandoned after
three or four years of trial. Pullman did better. He devised a platform
enclosure of folding doors and placed a steel frame at the end of his
vestibule that did more than merely protect passengers from the stress of
weather; these, of course, then served as effective anti-telescoping
devices. The Pennsylvania Railroad began the use of these vestibules in
1886 and they were soon universally adopted by American railroads on their
fast through trains.
After that a better vestibule was devised by Col. W. D. Mann, one that
extended the full width of the car. In fact the platform of the car had
practically ceased to exist, the structure being full-framed to include
its entrances at both ends.
After the vestibule came the steel car, introduced within the past ten
years for freight service, and within the past five or six for passenger
equipment. It has everything to commend it, save a slightly increased
original cost, which is more than compensated by economy of maintenance,
to say nothing of the intangible but certain raised factor of safety. It
is to become universal; the wooden car will become extinct upon American
railroads almost as soon as the present equipment is worn out and sent to
the scrap-heap.
Of the forms and varieties of railroad passenger coaches there are many,
and these will be described when we come to consider in a later chapter
the luxury of modern railroad travel. But the variety of passenger
equipment quite pales before that of the freight service. Flat-cars,
coal-cars, box-cars, grain-cars, live-stock cars--the list runs on into
catalogue form. There are refrigerator cars that are kept filled with salt
and ice or ice alone, precooled cars that are merely kept air-tight, and
ventilator cars employing a distinct reverse of that method; and up in
northern climates there are heater-cars which are kept warm by lamps or by
stoves and which are used for the transportation of fresh fruit and
vegetables in winter just as the refrigerator-cars and the precooled cars
are used for that same purpose in summer.
Almost all the safety devices that have been added to the running-gear of
the passenger equipment have been added to the freight equipment also, to
the great safety and peace of mind of the railroad employee. The car
itself remains the simple essential of the very beginnings of the
railroad. Its change has been a change in size, in weight, and in
strength.
The first freight cars of the very old railroad at Mauch Chunk weighed
1,600 pounds each, and were permitted to carry a weight or "burden" of
only 3,200 pounds. When the Boston & Albany first began using freight cars
30 feet long, it was so confused that it gave each end of the car a
separate number for convenience in billing and designating consignments.
Nowadays 40 tons is the right load for an efficient car, although they go
as high as 55 and 60 tons' capacity; the car itself may weigh
approximately half that figure.
Freight cars by hundreds of thousands go bumping all over the different
railroads of the land, and all the while they are getting bumped and
broken in accidents--large and small. In such cases they are hauled to the
nearest shop of the railroad upon which they are travelling and there
repaired at the cost of the road that owns them. In earlier days, the job
of master mechanic was no sinecure, for each road built its cars upon its
own plans and no two of these plans were alike. A simple broken part
necessitated the manufacture of a new part. It was a matter of great
confusion and expensive to every line.
The organization of the Master Car Builders, in 1867, solved that problem.
This organization, through committee, made first the freight car standard
and then the passenger standard. Axles, bolts, king-pins--every one of the
intricate car-parts--were brought to standard and numbered sizes. After
that all that a master mechanic had to do was to keep an assortment of
standard car parts in his store-room, and he could make reasonable repairs
to any car that travelled rails. The standardization has gone steadily
forward year by year; it has included a variety of things, even such
details as systematic numbering and lettering of cars. It is one of the
evidences of the constant bettering of the American railroad, the steady
effort to bring it to an economical and scientific basis.
Recently some of the railroads have made intelligent experiments, seeking
to devise a vehicle that should be both locomotive and car, and that
should be especially adapted for small side-lines, where traffic runs
exceedingly light. Some success has been found in the use of a passenger
coach, into which a gasolene engine has been introduced, and several of
these cars are in regular use in the West. Two or three of them have been
employed for three or four years on Union Pacific branches in and around
Denver. They render a possible solution for one railroad problem--the
problem of providing sufficient service for some branch where local
traffic is slight. The gasolene car requires but two men, as against a
minimum crew of five men for even the smallest steam passenger train. It
can be quickly handled, will make many successive stops readily, and
generally provides an efficient addition to the regular passenger
equipment. A few years ago it would have given the standard steam
railroads an excellent weapon against the constant encroachments of
paralleling electric roads through their good passenger traffic districts;
even to-day it offers a possible solution of the difficult problem of the
very small branch side-lines.