Our Railroads To-Morrow Part 12

The steam railroad of the United States seemingly came to the pinnacle of its efficiency about twelve years ago. The steam locomotive about twelve years ago also reached its apparent ultimate size for any sort of practical operation--120 feet in length and a little over 800,000 pounds in weight. The width and height for many years past have been held by tunnel and other clearances pretty rigidly at ten and fifteen feet respectively. Finally at about 120 feet the practical limit of length also was reached; even then there had been created an engine that not only could not be handled upon the longest of turntables at the terminals, but even upon curves of fairly easy radius. Also the limit of the human fireman, the shoveling of from fifteen to eighteen tons of coal in from four to six continuous hours, had been reached.

These 120-foot locomotives were available only for long and almost straight stretches of track and for use without being turned, while a weight of 400 tons not only represented a real strain upon the bridges but a constant and a fearful pounding upon the very best of track. So here then in 1910 was the seeming height of the development of the American locomotive; a pinnacle scaled in a long endeavor to cut down operating costs to the utmost.

A seeming height it was. Was it in fact the real height of efficiency?

I doubt it.

The 400-ton locomotive was in the main the same locomotive that George Stephenson had first built and operated away back in 1827; it was but an enlargement of the _Stourbridge Lion_ that first had dug his heels into the iron at Honesdale, Pennsylvania, in 1829, and so proclaimed a new era in American civilization. A few things had been added, but they were very few. An engineer out in Sandusky, Ohio, put a bell upon the boiler, George Westinghouse came along about half a century ago with the air-brake, some one else devised the injector, there were some other very minor improvements--and that was all. Aside from these and a few very slight rearrangements of its working parts the American locomotive of 1910 was very much the same, even in appearance, as its ancestor, let us say, of about 1840. Eighty years is a long time. It ought to afford a large opportunity for development. Apparently it has not.

About thirty years ago some clever German engineers first devised a plan for bringing steam from the boiler into the cylinders at such an intense heat that its full energy would not be immediately dissipated upon entering them and the steam partly turned into water. Technically this last is known as "saturated steam." The superheated steam idea was a good scheme and an apparent economy. Yet it was ten or a dozen years before it penetrated to this side of the Atlantic--to be exact, it was just twenty years ago. I sometimes wonder that it got across even so quickly as that.

Our American railroad executives are not as a rule particularly alert to what is being done in transport in other lands. Europe has 14,000 applications of another locomotive improvement which is just coming to be used in our dear old U. S. A. So it goes. If a successful monorail installation were to be made in Patagonia, for instance, your average Yankee railroader would read of it in the columns of his beloved "Railway Age" and then smile patronizingly as he said:

"Very interesting, that. But of course it wouldn't do for us."

Our railroads, which long ago failed to work out any scientific scheme for the compensation of their employees, also failed to make an intelligent or organized study of the mechanical or scientific progress in their field.

The United States army has long possessed its "staff"--the extremely competent group of men who, detached from the grind and drill of daily operation or detail, make constant and exhaustive study of every sort of military possibility from the complex mechanism of the newest guns from Krupp or Schneider or Armstrong overseas to the right kind of shoe for the marching soldier. The railroads of this country should have such a "staff." Very few of them have ever even attempted such a forward-looking device. They have been utterly hidebound by their traditions, and in consequence they have suffered.

Contrast this att.i.tude with that of the automobile manufacturers of the country. In a situation that is nothing if not compet.i.tive, they have cooperated, almost from the beginning, and almost universally for the betterment of the machine itself. This plant or that, devising and perfecting a new kink for the improvement of the internal combustion or gasolene-engine, has thrown it into the common pot for the benefit of its compet.i.tors. I have known an automobile manufacturer to spend months on the perfection of a cylinder-block and then to drive it in mad haste over the Indianapolis Speedway, hour after hour, at more than a hundred miles an hour.

"Why was that necessary?" was the inquiry made of him. "You do not expect your cars to be put through any such grueling test as that?"

He laughed, as he replied:

"No, but some user of this car some day is going to get all but stuck in second speed on some stiff, muddy hill and if the valves act gummy he is going to have it in for this car."

Eventually this manufacturer had the valve working to his taste. When he had perfected it, in keeping with his agreement, he threw the new cylinder-block open for the use of his fellows. There was no secret about it, no patent; they were quite welcome to use it. And some of them did use it.

More than this, the automotive industry, as it now likes to call itself, is not content to let the individual manufacturer do all the work upon the development of the machine. It has centralized bureaus, technical experts, and engineers who are working all the time for the interests of the industry in general. The development of the marvelous Liberty motor of war days would not have been possible without such a centralized organization.

Such a plan never has been attempted in the history of steam locomotive development. There the individual manufacturers have gone it alone. And they are quite frank when they tell you that there is not the slightest financial inducement for them to carry forward a scientific work of development. Their output is sold generally in quant.i.ty lots--like potatoes, by the peck. And in the present-day poverty of many of their customers--comparative poverty at least--they a.s.sert that the margin of profit is held to a figure that permits of little or no "staff" work upon their part.

Now remember, if you will, that for eighty years the steam locomotive of the United States grew in size alone. Aside from the air-brake (which, in reality, was not a distinctly _locomotive_ improvement) hardly a single fundamental improvement had been made since the days of Stephenson to make a pound of iron and a pound of coal and a pound of water do more work. Yet with our super-sized locomotive reached, the operating geniuses of our American railroads demanded more power, and still more power. The longer train-load, and the heavier, apparently was their only way out of the demands that came down upon them from "higher up" for still more operating economics.

Then slowly and after a very great delay the railroad executives began casting about through their mechanical departments to inquire what, if any, progress was being made in intensive locomotive improvements, either overseas or else right here in America. The mechanical departments reported quickly. There really were several possibilities. Listed, these ran about as follows:

The superheater: That German device that we have just seen for bringing the steam into the cylinders at such an intense heat as not to permit it quickly to waste itself in water vaporization; a purpose accomplished chiefly by the use of special flues in the boiler through the entire length of which steam is twice pa.s.sed. That done, it comes into the cylinders superheated, and not saturated as in the old-time engine.

The brick arch in the fire-box: A sort of second cousin to the superheater. Its name to a large degree indicates its nature. An arch thrown across the forward end of the fire-box has a very marked tendency to insure complete combustion of the fuel before the heat reaches the flue-tubes of the boiler and hence achieves a great economy in coal or oil consumption. Its use came with the development of the maximum width of the fire-box in the newest types of American locomotives, which in turn was accomplished when the locomotive had been lengthened and a pair of trailing-wheels placed just back of its drivers.

The feed-water heater: An allied device for quickening the production of boiler steam and so effecting a further economy in coal consumption.

Perhaps the least tried and so the least established of all these devices.

The booster: In reality a miniature locomotive, attached to those two trailer-wheels just back of the drivers and giving to the biggest locomotive at its starting-point or other points of real stress the accelerating power equal to that which 50,000 more pounds of additional locomotive would be able to give. Yet the booster is as ingeniously geared from its cylinders to its driving power as the engine of a high-grade automobile and weighs but 3500 pounds all told--a mere nothing in comparison with the energy that it gives off. Its application and disconnection are almost automatic. The engineer, when he is in need of its a.s.sistance either at starting or upon a steep grade, puts its additional power into play by a quick twist of a tiny lever at his side.

"Humph," interrupted my friend the old railroader out in the West, "I suppose you think that we are going to get engineers of the caliber to handle all these fancy claptraps that you would put upon the engines?"

No, Old Railroader. Not for a minute. We have those engineers already in America; nine out of ten of the men who are handling our locomotives in the United States are quite capable of handling all these devices, and a considerable number in addition. Even overseas where, broadly speaking, the type of individual railroad employee is not supposed to be as high as in this country, the enginemen are to-day used to all these modern devices, the hall-marks of the really modern steam locomotive. A keen-minded American who has known and loved locomotives all his life went over to France not many months ago and rode in the cab of one of those high-speed engines that haul the heavy expresses of the Northern railway from Paris to Calais, 180 miles in three hours and thirty-five minutes--a remarkable daily performance,--and he had his eyes opened. In the first place the cab was immaculate. I might almost add "of course." I rode myself in the cabs of British locomotives after the Armistice. Had there been a war just ended over there across the narrow English Channel? The rolling-stock of the British railways certainly belied that fact. Their locomotives were clean, bright, freshly painted; they were not rusty, dirty, or leaky. They had upkeep, continuous upkeep even through the fifty-one heart-breaking, man-shortage months of the World War. That showed for itself.

The cab of the engine in which my friend rode from the Gare du Nord to the Calais pier was more than immaculate; it was intricate. There were levers here and levers there, gages high and gages low. It looked more like the control-board of a fair-sized steamship than that of a locomotive. There was a variable exhaust nozzle, a control here, a control there; the locomotive was itself a four-cylinder compound engine with all the improvements that we have just seen (and then some more)--and with 180 miles to be made in 215 minutes, which is faster than almost any American train goes to-day--faster by twenty-five minutes than the fastest train between New York and Baltimore (185 miles); faster by thirty-one minutes than the fastest express between New York and Providence (also 185 miles).

Somewhere between Paris and Amiens the fireman was taken slightly ill.

With hardly a word between the two railroaders in the cab they changed places. The fireman stood his intelligent trick at the throttle; for more than an hour the engineer fed the fire-box partly coal and partly briquettes. There was 15 per cent. of briquettes in the tender and a bonus to the engine-crew for any fuel saving that they made upon the run.

Moreover the names of the engineer and the fireman, printed upon neat, small, bra.s.s plates, were inserted in an especially showy place on each side of the engine-cab--a good deal as Mr. Underwood of the Erie once began naming his best engines after the men who habitually ran them, painting their names in large, conspicuous letters upon the engine-cabs, where in other days locomotives bore the names of presidents, governors, railroad directors, and others who sought a brief temporal glory. The French plan is best in that it permits flexibility in the a.s.signment of the locomotives; the American plan best in that it confers an even greater and more permanent distinction upon the engine-driver. I wish you could see old Harvey Springstead as I saw him about ten years ago on the first day he drove the _Harvey Springstead_ into the battered old Erie terminal in Jersey City. Warren G. Harding accepting a lovely sprig of flowers from the prettiest ten-year-old girl in Marion, Ohio, could not have been a prouder man.

When that fleet engine of the Chemin de Fer du Nord (French for the Northern railway) came to its first and final stop out of Paris upon the Calais pier, sixteen men attacked her with brushes and cloths and hammers and wrenches and what else I know not. Yes, sixteen. My friend counted them. And he later found that before the war-times there had been thirty-two. The fleet locomotive had a real inspection, while the little engineer and his fireman repaired to the near-by Cafe de la Gare and enjoyed their _dejeuner_ and their small bottle of wine.

Sixteen men went to that engine! Four would have been a goodly force for the average American roundhouse or terminal shed; and the engine probably would have waited two or three hours for its inspection. One of the crimes against the American locomotive is the lack of care and attention that is given it. Think, if you will, of an engine on one of our first-cla.s.s railroads being discovered so badly out of order in regard to the setting of its valves that a very few hours of repair work upon them brought an immediate saving of 25 per cent. in its fuel consumption! Is not that being penny-wise and pound-foolish?

I have digressed. And without apology. We were recounting the actual devices for the improvement of the steam locomotive: the superheater, the brick arch, the feed-water heater, the booster. None of these--in their essentials, at least--are patented devices. Any good locomotive builder can use them freely. He only waits the word of the purchaser of the locomotive. Neither is there any patented monopoly in the mechanical stoker. Two or three very good types already are on the market and if you wonder at their efficacy may I again suggest that some good warm summer's day you go down into your own cellar and shovel seventeen tons of coal across it--from one side to the other--in four or five hours. Sleep overnight--if you wish to complete the illusion, preferably on a rough, hard bed--and the next day shovel all the coal back again, in four or five hours. Then ask yourself, if you were a locomotive fireman would you feel that there was any real need for a mechanical stoker.

There is no monopoly, either, in the plans for subst.i.tuting more and more light reciprocating locomotive parts of alloy-steel in place of the old-fashioned heavy c.u.mbersome ones that hold their places, almost through tradition alone. Our American locomotive to-day is far too heavy. The automotive industry--the group of men who in real cooperation have perfected almost every detail of the American motor-car--again has pointed the way. If a balanced crank-shaft is valuable to a rubber-tired locomotive upon a concrete highway, should a device of similar ingenuity and value be accounted an impossibility upon the f.l.a.n.g.e-wheeled one of the steel highway? The possibilities of intensive development of the steam locomotive upon these lines alone seemingly are almost infinite. If Henry Ford, with not only the skill and experience of his own marvelously ingenious mechanical mind, but the expert staff that he has always at his elbow, can succeed in bettering the American steam locomotive radically, I think that the American public will be tempted to call him blessed indeed.

If Mr. Ford can only succeed in putting better bearings under our railroad-cars his name should be accounted as blessed in our railroad tradition. The axle-bearing of the average railroad-car in this country--particularly the freight rolling-stock--has neither been improved nor changed in more than half a century. It is virtually the same now as it was in 1860--a swabbing of cotton-waste and grease set in a box upon the axle-end, a device forever becoming dry and hot and blazing forth into flame. Contrast such an archaic thing with the axle-bearing of the modern motor-car or motor-truck. Ball-bearings, or, in the case of heavier vehicles, roller-bearings. A Detroit specialty concern installed these on a big Michigan Central box-car not many months ago, and two men pushed the car down a siding with no vast effort.

If these things can be done and have been done, why are they not being done to-day?

The answer is simple: tradition--hide-bound tradition--and cost. If I were to let my friend, the old railroad operator out there in the West, interrupt he would tell me that this last alone renders them quite out of the question. To which I should reply:

"If you were buying an automobile, would you rather have an automobile or a wheelbarrow?"

A few minutes ago we were discussing the electric locomotive in these pages. Without going into detail into its mechanical niceties we said that the average cost of one of these big units to-day is $150,000 to say nothing of proportionate cost of power-house and wires, without which, of course, it is quite useless. The average cost of the largest-sized steam locomotives to-day is anywhere from $40,000 to $75,000, which represents a real drop since the peak prices of the days of the war.

But this is not the point. The point is that the average railroad executive buys the electric locomotive upon the "say-so" of the manufacturer. If it cost $250,000 and he was convinced in his own mind that it was a necessity to him he would not stagger at the price or attempt petty economies by trying to buy it stripped of every efficiency device.

The average railroad executive does not buy steam locomotives that way.

Oh, no. He says:

"Give us ten million dollars' worth of new engines. I want them good engines, the best engines that you have ever built." And then adds: "How many do we get to the peck, anyway?"

Quant.i.ty, not quality. It is one of our besetting American sins. How much?

Not how good. How much? How big a number to be added to the next annual report in order to impress the stockholders? Nothing about refinements.

Nothing about quality.

The builder takes down his blue-prints--the same old engine that he has been building for ten, twenty, thirty years past. No staff has worked to perfect that old-fashioned machine. He figures rapidly. His opponents are figuring against him. And finally he shoots in his bid. The railroad can buy a lot of locomotives for ten million dollars; a goodly quant.i.ty for one tenth of that figure if it is not too fussy about the details.

After which will you wonder when I say that no steam locomotive in the United States to-day represents anything like the ultimate possibilities of the machine itself? That is not true of the electric locomotive, where the last unit turned out from the shops is almost sure to be the best ever built. Let me ill.u.s.trate.

It is now a good ten years since a most efficient pa.s.senger-locomotive was finished in this country--to turn out one cylinder-horse-power per hour from 16.5 pounds of water and 2.12 pounds of coal and weighing but 121 pounds per cylinder-horse-power. A few years later an equally efficient freight-puller was made, creating one cylinder-horse-power per hour from 15.4 pounds of water and 2.00 pounds of coal and yet weighing but 88.9 pounds per cylinder-horse-power. This was several years ago, please remember. Since then many, many locomotives have been built that were not nearly so good. Some of these have been retired to light service already.

Why?

Why are not these engines of 1910 not only being equaled but bettered by the engines of 1922? Why does it ever become necessary to sc.r.a.p locomotives, within half a century of their construction at any rate?

There is not one of their bearing parts that is not capable of infinite replacements, after which, it is a question of mere lubrication.

I saw not many months ago under the train-shed of the pa.s.senger-station at Tours, France, a copper-boilered locomotive of the Paris-Orleans railway which bore the date of her construction, 1857, proudly upon her neat sides. She still was an efficient little locomotive, handling a small job fit for her small size and handling it very well indeed. The oldest locomotive that I personally have known to be in constant service in the United States was an engine belonging to a paper company near Potsdam, New York, which had been built by the Taunton Locomotive Works for the Union Pacific railroad in 1860, and sold to the Central Vermont in the following year. Rebuilt several times, it still was in service in 1919. This engine is very much of an exception. A twenty-year-old engine in this country to-day is a veteran. The famous "999" of the New York Central, which in 1893 was exhibited at the Chicago Fair as the fastest locomotive in the world, in 1903 was handling a "plug" milk-train up in northern New York.