THE MECHANICAL DEPARTMENTS
CARE AND REPAIR OF CARS AND ENGINES--THE LOCOMOTIVE CLEANED AND
INSPECTED AFTER EACH LONG JOURNEY--FREQUENT VISITS OF ENGINES TO THE
SHOPS AND FOUNDRIES AT ALTOONA--THE TABLE FOR TESTING THE POWER AND
SPEED OF LOCOMOTIVES--THE CAR SHOPS--STEEL CARS BEGINNING TO SUPERSEDE
WOODEN ONES--PAINTING A FREIGHT CAR--LACK OF METHOD IN EARLY REPAIR
SHOPS--SEARCH FOR FLAWS IN WHEELS.
To care for its rolling-stock the railroad creates two distinct functions
of its business. All the care of its permanent way, including tracks,
tunnels, bridges, comes under the control of the Maintenance Way
Department. Similarly, the Mechanical Department assumes control of the
cars and engines, sees to it that each is maintained to its fullest
efficiency, both by care in daily service and by certain visits to the
shops at regular intervals, for repairs, reconstruction, and painting.
To do all this requires a large plant, both in buildings and machinery. It
is distributed at every important point along the railroad. At terminal
and operating points, roundhouse facilities of greater or less extent are
sure to be located, and at the headquarters of each division these are
generally expanded into shops for the making of light repairs and to avoid
handling crippled equipment for any great distance. One large shop plant
is apt to suffice the average railroad for the heavy repair work. If the
road stretch to any extraordinary length, even this feature is apt to be
duplicated in order to concentrate this repair work as far as possible.
All this concerns the care and repair of the locomotive--which the
railroader quickly groups under the title "motive-power." To care for the
engines while they are in use out upon the line, to see to it that
engineers and firemen alike handle these mechanisms with economy and
skill, is a responsibility that is placed upon the road foreman of engines
of each division. He has supervision over smaller roundhouses but at any
of the larger of these structures there is a roundhouse foreman in direct
charge. The railroad long ago learned that its best economy rested in
having plenty of executive control. That has come to be one of the maxims
of the business.
There is a master mechanic in charge of the division shops and in many
cases he has authority over the road foreman of engines and the roundhouse
foremen. Then under him he has his various assistants, forming a working
force not at all unlike that of the average iron-working shop. All this
organism is gathered together under a superintendent of motive power, who
in turn may report to a general mechanical superintendent. This official
answers only to the general manager, or, in some cases, to a
vice-president to whom these functions of the care of the railroad are
delegated.
The proposition of the cars is generally treated quite apart from that of
the locomotive, and separate shops under the direction of a master
car-builder and his assistants are located at a few points upon the
system, where they may be of fairly easy access. Rough repairs (the
car-builders term these "light" repairs) to cars are carried forth at each
division yard. This work is almost entirely confined to the freight
equipment, and a good part of it goes upon "foreign" cars--cars that do
not belong at all to the railroad making the repairs.
This feature of the repair work is a direct result of an elaborate system
of interchange in freight equipment upon American railroads, in order to
prevent the breaking of bulk in the shipment of merchandise from one line
to another. Cars will break down when they are many hundreds of miles away
from home, and the railroad upon which they are operating at the time
carts them to the nearest temporary repair yard or to its own shops, makes
the necessary repairs, and charges for them in accordance with a scale
prepared by the national association of Master Car-Builders. This
necessitates a vast deal of bookkeeping and is only one of the many
complications brought about by our extensive plan of railroading in
America.
The railroad will probably build the greater part of its freight
equipment, although in these days of the supplanting of wood by steel in
car-construction the companies are apt to stand appalled at the cost of
the steel working machinery, and to buy their cars direct from the
manufacturers very much as they purchase their locomotives. Passenger
equipment is almost invariably secured in this way. It is a big railroad
indeed that seeks to construct for itself the huge travelling palaces that
the passenger of to-day has come to demand for his comfort. The repairing
and the painting of these elaborate vehicles is enough of a proposition in
itself.
* * * * *
To begin at the beginning, one first comes in contact with the mechanical
department as it comes into constant contact with the operation of the
railroad. This is the more quickly observed at the roundhouses, those
great circular structures that are a feature of the railroad section of
every important town. In England the "engine sheds," as they are there
known, are simple enough structures, housing a series of parallel tracks,
which are served by either a transfer table or switches. Such a plan is
pursued in this country only where space is at a premium--as in the heart
of some great city where realty is exceedingly high-priced; for the heads
of our railroads have held tenaciously to the easily operated turntable
and roundhouse scheme. The table, generally driven by electricity or a
small dummy engine, forms the centre, the roundhouse a segment of the
entire rim of the wheel. The great advantage of its simple design lies in
the fact that it is instantly possible to get at any one of the fifty
or more locomotives that it houses. It is this feature that has endeared
it to the railroad man for many years.
[Illustration: TRIPLE-PHASE ALTERNATING-CURRENT LOCOMOTIVE BUILT BY THE
GENERAL ELECTRIC CO. FOR USE IN THE CASCADE TUNNEL, OF THE GREAT NORTHERN
RAILWAY]
[Illustration: HEAVY SERVICE, ALTERNATING AND DIRECT CURRENT FREIGHT
LOCOMOTIVE BUILT BY THE WESTINGHOUSE COMPANY FOR THE NEW YORK, NEW HAVEN &
HARTFORD RAILROAD]
[Illustration: THE MONOROAD IN PRACTICAL USE FOR CARRYING PASSENGERS AT
CITY ISLAND, NEW YORK]
[Illustration: THE CIGAR-SHAPED CAR OF THE MONOROAD]
The locomotive that hauls the train goes to its "stall" in the roundhouse
directly after its work is done. Its crews, having finished their run,
desert it for the time being, and it comes within the charge of the
roundhouse foreman and his "hostlers." These old terms are reminiscent of
the days when the roundhouse was a real stable and its denizens flesh and
blood horses. Now the denizens of the roundhouse are iron horses, and in
their great size as they rest within their house they are indicative of
the progress that has been made in the design and construction of railroad
equipment.
On the way to the roundhouse, possibly on the way from it (the practice
varies on different railroads) the engine will stop at the ash-pit. It
will have its fires cleaned in a long pit that runs underneath a section
of track, and then pass on to the coaling-shed. The long pit at some
points is filled with iron buckets that run on wheels into which the ashes
are dumped and these are emptied by overhead crane apparatus into a nearby
line of empty gondolas, ready to be taken away to be disposed of.
At the coaling shed the tender is filled, some twelve or fifteen tons
being required if the engine is large; the water-spout fills the capacious
tanks, while the hostlers take good care to see that the sand-box is
filled, as a precaution against slipping on the next steep grade. Then on
to the turntable and the waiting stall, until ready to go out again upon
the regular service or extra duty. During that time it will be both
cleaned and inspected. The fireman may be held responsible for the cleanly
appearance of his engine above the running-board. Below that, the work
will be delegated to the roundhouse force. The fireman will probably feel
that it should clean all the engine. When he feels particularly aggrieved
over the matter it is time for him to meet one of the veterans of the
service, who will tell him of the days when the engines were gayly
ornamented with brass and light-colored paints, and the fireman's career
had added to it an endless campaign with his wiping rag against the
tendency of the bright-work to tarnish. There are some things that
decidedly favor the fireman of the present time.
There are not always sufficient roundhouse facilities at every point; the
traffic of our railroads has a way of constantly running away from the
facilities; and so there are many times when the engines must be housed in
the open. But the vigilance and the care upon them are never relaxed. The
railroad that is foolish enough to try to save upon the maintenance of its
motive power sooner or later pays a terrible price for its penurious
folly.
So it comes to pass that every engine makes a regular visit to the shops,
generally at periods of from ten to fourteen months, depending upon the
service in which it is engaged. On some of these visits, it will be pretty
completely dismantled, and a travelling crane running the full length of
the erecting shop will soon lift the heavy boiler from frame and wheels
and carry it down to the boiler-makers, with no more difficulty than an
automatic package carrier in a dry-goods store would have. There is a deal
of pride and rivalry between the men as to the facility and speed that can
be shown in taking an engine in hand, dismantling it completely, making
necessary repairs, setting it up again and placing it in service once
more. The men of the Erie shops at Hornellsville succeeded in doing the
trick a year or so ago in the remarkably short time of twenty-four hours.
In that brief time a locomotive came in from the road, bedraggled and
begrimed and marked "TBMF" for the benefit of the shop-men. "TBMF"
translated means "Tires, Boxes, Machine, Flues," so specifying the engine
parts to be repaired. In the slang of the repair shop the men say "To Be
Made Fast." These four requisites are the ones most necessary to make the
locomotive fit for from 50,000 to 75,000 miles of service before she
shall again turn into the shop. To make them in twenty-four hours required
some planning on the part of the Erie shop foremen at Hornellsville, and
yet it was only a few weeks after 1734 had come out of the Hornellsville
plant fit for revenue service in a single day and night, before the men of
the rival Susquehanna shop wished a chance at a contest of that sort.
"TBMF" generally keeps a locomotive in the shop for from a fortnight to
three or four weeks; the Canadian Pacific considered that it had done a
remarkable thing in effecting these repairs on a locomotive, with a
super-heater, at its Winnipeg shops in 57-1/2 hours. The Hornellsville
record was one most remarkable. But the Susquehanna shop men took 2018 in
off the road after 70,000 miles without repairs; took in the big puller at
7 o'clock in the morning, made the heavy "TBMF" repairs, and turned her
out for revenue service at 7:34 o'clock in the evening--thirteen hours and
thirty-four minutes. At midnight she was pulling a heavy through freight
west once again, and a most astounding record in American shop work had
been consummated.
* * * * *
The United States have few such towns as England possesses in Swindon and
in Crede, railroad towns in the distinctive sense that they were the
absolute creation of the railroad in the first instance. There is many a
town from one ocean to the other that has owed its stimulus and
development to the location of large railroad shops and terminals within
its boundaries, but the railroads have, as a rule, dodged the creation of
distinctive towns. Pullman, within the outskirts of Chicago, was a
monumental failure in this very sort of enterprise. It was designed and
built to accommodate the great car-building shops of that man who did the
most of all men to make luxury in railroad traffic--George M. Pullman; and
no greater care was shown in the construction and design of the works than
was given toward the stores, the churches, the schools, and the homes of
the workmen. Pullman was decidedly a model town; yet Pullman was a
failure. Other model towns of the same sort in Europe have been marked
successes, and that very thing may well serve to illustrate the difference
in temperament between the American and the European workingman. The
American resents too much being done for him; he is instinctively jealous
of his individuality.
Away back in the long-ago the Erie created a railroad town at Susquehanna
in the extreme north part of Pennsylvania. It built shops there and soon
after repeated the experiment at Hornellsville in the southwestern part of
New York State. The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad similarly developed
Cumberland, Maryland; and the Lake Shore, Elkhart, Ind. These are few of
many instances where a great railroad shop has served to develop a sizable
town. In some others they have developed important suburbs of large
cities, as the Lake Shore's plant at Collinwood, at the eastern edge of
the city of Cleveland; and the great shops of the New York Central at
Depew, in the outskirts of Buffalo, which were built when the plant at
West Albany could no longer accommodate the rolling-stock of a rapidly
growing system.
In Altoona, Pa., the United States possesses probably the only distinctive
railroad town of extent within its boundaries. Altoona was the creation of
the Pennsylvania Railroad more than half a century ago, and its progress,
carefully stimulated, has proceeded step by step in company with the
progress of one of the largest of American railroad systems. The mistakes
of Pullman have not been repeated at Altoona. If the Pennsylvania Railroad
has ruled the city in the hills, it has ruled it tacitly and tactfully at
all times. It has avoided even the appearance of paternalism, and the
growth of Altoona has been measured by the growth of the country, which in
its turn is measured with marvellous accuracy by the growth of the
railroad traffic. So a trip to Altoona and through its great shops will
be illustrative of the very best practice in the construction and
maintenance of a railroad's car and engine.
The Altoona shops are unusual in the fact that both locomotives and cars
of the highest capacity and finest type are built within them, in addition
to a great repair and refurnishing work being carried forward there at all
times. To do this work, the plant, employing during the seasons of
heaviest traffic something like 15,000 men--is divided into several
divisions that stretch themselves along the railroad tracks for about six
miles.
The first of these divisions consists of the foundries, devoted largely to
the manufacture of cast-iron car-wheels of every size and grade. Extensive
cupolas, core-rooms and moulding-floors are provided for making 1,000
car-wheels every 24 hours. There is the blacksmith shop as part of this
particular plant. The blacksmith is one of the handiest of men about a
railroad shop and one of the few to survive the almost universal
introduction of machine processes. There are also the machine and pattern
shops, together with a large foundry for the manufacture of castings for
cars and locomotives, having a capacity of 200 tons a day.
The second division of industrial activity at Altoona is the locomotive
repair shop. This is the largest of all the individual plants at that
point, employing about 5,000 men, and with its three- and four-story
structures built closely within a busy yard it is a veritable city within
a city. It has a capacity of about 1,800 reconstructed and repaired
locomotives a year and is a shop well calculated to fill any one with
respect.
The third division is the Junction shops, where the new locomotives are
built; 1,800 men are employed within it, and there men take the new
castings and forgings (most of the castings coming up from the giant
foundries that we have just noticed), and from them they create that
almost human thing, the railroad locomotive. When the locomotive emerges
from that shop it takes its turn upon the testing-table, the mechanical
experts place their final stamp of approval upon it, and at last it goes
out from the shop, under its own steam, to perform the great work for
which it was created.
The testing-table is one of the most interesting of Altoona's activities.
The engine is run upon a series of wheels that fit exactly underneath its
own; it is fastened snugly into place; connections are made with a score
of pipes and rods that fit upon its mechanism, and it starts off for a run
up over the division. It runs miles and miles, snorting furiously over the
hard grades and under the heavy loads it has to haul, and yet it does not
move even the finest fraction of an inch from that testing table. Its
mechanism throbs with energy, its wheels revolve at a fearful rate; yet it
is a helpless caged creature in a seemingly impotent energy, as the men in
charge of the test watch a dozen dials, notebooks in hand. The big driving
wheels turn only upon the friction wheels beneath them but the engineers
who are conducting the test can tell the speed at which the locomotive is
travelling--in theory--by the almost human needles upon the dial-faces.
There is more delicate scientific apparatus behind the engine. It is
stripped from its tender for this test, and by this apparatus the pull of
the engine upon the dead load of the train can be exactly estimated in
pounds and ounces. Nor is this all. The friction wheels underneath the
drivers are controlled by powerful water brakes, and by the regulation of
these brakes, strains or handicaps can be placed upon the engine exactly
similar to those of the grades it may have to reach over a heavy
mountainous stretch of railroad.
There is no guess-work about modern railroading. Many hundreds of
thousands of dollars are spent each year in expert scientific tests of
every sort, in the salaries of men who devote their entire time to this
work; and the railroads reap the benefits in many more hundreds of
thousands of dollars in operating economies. Railroading is a pretty exact
science; the big engine on the testing-table at Altoona is only one of a
host of evidences of the skill and genius that are being brought to bear
upon the operation of the great railroad properties of the country at the
present time.
This engine goes upon diet. Dr. Wiley down at Washington with his young
men sustaining themselves scientifically upon measured and selected foods
has something of the same method that is shown with the test engine up at
Altoona in the hills. Its supply of coal is carefully weighed and analyzed
by sample. An accounting of the amount consumed down to ounces is
carefully kept, the water supply is also examined and measured with great
care. When the test is finished and the big chaotive engine has covered
miles of theoretical grades with a long theoretical train hitched on
behind, the experts get busy with their pencils and begin to prepare the
reports upon which their chief may rely when he goes ahead to construct
another gross of 100-ton locomotives.
* * * * *
The car shops rank next in importance to the locomotive shops. The foreman
of this plant tells you casually that it has an annual capacity of 300 new
passenger cars and 3,600 new freight cars. It is a great plant of itself,
some seventy acres of ground covered with great construction buildings.
Some of these are in roundhouse form, for convenience in handling
equipment under construction; others are set side by side and easily
reached by use of a long transfer table.
The work of erecting the freight equipment is carried on quite separate
from that of the passenger car work. The almost universal use of steel in
the manufacture of every sort of freight car, save the box-cars, which
still have wooden walls and roof built upon a steel foundation, has made a
large steel-working shop a necessary adjunct of every car-building plant.
One of the most interesting features of the Altoona car-building plant is
a giant hydraulic press situate in the open, just outside of the
steel-working plant. This press brings a dead weight of 1,500 tons down
upon the sheet of steel that it receives. It is used in making the sills
of the freight-cars--"fish-bellies," the master car-builders call
them--and under that giant press a sheet of steel, one-half inch in
thickness and from thirty to forty feet in length, is bent into shape as
easily as you might bend a sheet of soft cardboard within your fingers.
The press makes many hundred "fish-belly" sills every working day, and it
pays its way.
The steel-working in this shop has been carried forth into passenger car
construction and a great shed given over for that work. Within it one sees
the gaunt frames of the cars that are to be, gaining shape, until at the
far end of the shop is a line of the cars, completed as far as the steel
workers can carry them, and ready to be swung by one of the ever-busy
switch-engines to the finishing shop, and then finally to the paint shop.
Even with the steel car coming into its own, there are still hundreds of
thousands of wooden cars in operation; and the construction of wooden cars
will not cease for many years. While steel as a raw material is not far in
advance of the cost of wood these days, the cost of fashioning it into
cars is still so excessive as to make it impracticable save in cases of
extremely profitable operation. One of the strongest points in favor of
steel in car-construction is that of the economy of its maintenance,
always a strong point with railroad men. The wooden car feels the wear and
tear of life upon the rail keenly; in the case of a wreck it is not to be
even compared with the steel car.
It should not be forgotten, though, that the railroads have many thousands
of wooden passenger-coaches still in service, and the substitution of
steel equipment for these has only just begun. The average life of a car
approximates twenty years, and the simplest of railroad economics demands
that these cars be retained for their active life. As they wear out steel
cars can be, and they already are being, substituted by the great systems.
This new equipment is being used at first upon the main lines and through
trains, where both speed and density of traffic demand the railroad's best
equipment. Gradually it will be spread to the trains and branch lines of
less importance.
With the wooden car still a factor in railroad equipment, the carpenter
has not yet lost his vocation in the shops. There is much of the coarser
work on the freight cars for him; in the elaborate passenger coaches,
dining-cars and other equipment of that class, the great mass of cabinet
work still demands the cunning of his hands. Here in the miscellaneous
carpenter-shop he is at work upon a seat frame for a day-coach, a shade
fixture, a broken chair from a dining car, a baggage truck from some
station; there is plenty of work for the carpenter around a car-shop.
It is a matter of pride with the railroad to keep its passenger equipment
bright and shiny and new of appearance. It is part sentiment and part good
business. For a railroad cannot hope to attract passengers with dirty,
unkempt, weather-beaten cars. So it is that the paint-shop is a large
function of the car-shop. American railroads may not go quite as much into
gaudy car decoration as do the railroads of England and continental
Europe. Each year the canons of simple good taste are driving the
car-designers to plainer models, but no expense is spared to make
car-surfaces, within and without, as bright and shiny as those of a
private carriage or an automobile.
So it is that a passenger coach spends from eighteen to twenty days in the
paint-shop alone, in its period of refurbishing. It is primed at first and
then it receives from three to five coats of surfacer. This is all
hand-work, requiring both strong muscles and infinite patience on the part
of the painters. Two or three coats of the standard color of the railroad,
by which its equipment is known distinctively, are given to the exterior.
Lettering and striping follow, then finally two coats of fine varnish are
flowed and rubbed to a high and brilliant polish.
The car is now ready for the dust and the dirt of the line. About every
year it will come back again for re-varnishing and at the end of about
eight years it will again undergo practically the same treatment within
the paint-shop as was given it at the beginning. It will come in rusty and
begrimed after many thousands of miles up and down the toilsome line.
Within three weeks it will emerge from the paint-shop fresh and radiant,
having obtained a new lease of life.
If the same process were to be applied to the freight equipment, the
paint-shop would be of almost unlimited size. But freight-cars are not
varnished. They are merely painted with the best of time-resisting
pigments, usually a dull and sombre red. The freight-cars literally go
through a bath in the paint-shop. Expert painters stand, like
fire-fighters, with a hose-nozzle in their hands. Through the hose the
paint is forced, gallons upon gallons of it; and when it is all over the
freight-car is a fine, even red, just like the painters themselves. The
lettering is a quick matter, with the use of stencils.
* * * * *
There remain two other great divisions of a central plant of this
sort--locomotive repair shops and car repair shops, for the needs of the
immediate divisions with their heavy traffic. These shops, extensive in
themselves, present no radical differences from the usual division shops
which a great railroad maintains at every division operating point in
order to keep its rolling stock in the best of order. They are used to
make light repairs. The master mechanic is a discerning man. He must know
and judge accurately when a disabled car or locomotive should go to the
company's main shops, when the repairs can best be made at the local
plant. It is one of the points upon which the economy of the shop system
depends.
On this matter of shop economy whole volumes might be written, and have
been written. In the beginning of shop practices there was little system
in these matters, just as the shop work was reckoned far below its real
importance. One of the earliest of real railroads was the Columbia &
Philadelphia--nowadays one of the main stems of the Pennsylvania's trunk
line--and it was from the beginning a railroad of quite heavy traffic,
double-tracked and reaching into a fat country. Yet a shop at Parkersburg,
halfway up the line, employing forty men in all, was considered quite
enough for the maintenance of equipment. If one of those early engines
broke down at either terminal, the engineer, the fireman and perhaps the
local blacksmith had to make their own repairs.
Nothing was standard, not even the sizes of such simple affairs as nuts
and bolts. Years of railroading have changed all this. The
master-mechanics and the master car-builders meet in annual sessions; and
by means of reports from their expert committees have been evolved
standards in every detail of rolling stock--standard materials, standard
compositions, standard sizes, even standards in nomenclature of railroad
apparatus down to the smallest parts.
Even with this assistance there still remains a mass of detail in every
railroad shop; and a large clerical force is one of its greatest
efficiencies. A sharp and accurate accounting is kept of the cost of
repairs upon each locomotive and car, even such general shop costs as gas
and heat are pro-rated against it. There is no time that the railroad
cannot tell to a nicety the precise cost of each unit of its equipment.
These units are not, in many roads, increased, without precise orders from
the board of directors or the executive committee of the board. In order
to get around this rule some niceties in reconstruction have been known. A
single timber of a worn-out freight car has kept the unit and the number
of the old car, and going into the new has prevented the creation of a
forbidden unit.
The system upon which cars and locomotives are numbered varies greatly
upon different systems. In some cases the first figures of the numbers
indicate the class and style of the car or locomotive, in others they mean
nothing. When a car or a locomotive is nigh worn out its number passes
from it and is given to some newcomer. The old servant has a neatly
painted "X" placed before its number. That "X" is its death warrant. In a
little time it leads the way to the scrap heap.
* * * * *
The men who labor in the railroad shops see little of the romance of the
line. Their work is much like that of the men who work in every sort of
large shop. Their responsibility is not less than that of the other
railroaders, the men to whom 150 or 300 miles of line and out-spread towns
are as familiar as the very rooms of their own homes. A flaw in the steel,
a careless bit of shopwork, may serve to derail the express at the least
foreseen moment, to cause disaster in the ringing way that every railroad
man sees at one time or another. It may not always be possible to trace
the responsibility for such an accident. But there is a responsibility,
and the men who work at forge or lathe, at press or planer feel that it is
there. They form no mean brigade of this great industrial army of America.
Such responsibility continues outside of the main shops to the smaller
shops, down to the roundhouse forces, by whose care and vigilance the big
locomotives are kept fitted for their important work; down still farther
to the car-inspectors, who, blue signal-lights in hand, creep through the
long freight-yards of a winter's night to strike the flaw in the metal, to
sound the note of alarm before the worst may come to pass. Some of these
last you hear in the night as you scurry across the country. As you rest
in your berth, and the express is changing engines at some division point,
you may hear the car inspectors coming along the train, striking with
their hammers against the wheels, listening intently for the false ring
by which they may detect trouble. If you trouble yourself to lift the
curtain of your berth, you may see them, a grimy crew, working busily with
their hammers, thrusting their torches in among the trucks to see that all
is well.
Responsibility for the safety in railroad operation does not cease at the
doors of the mechanical department.