Our Railroads To-Morrow Part 13

It now has been retired as a sort of museum-piece.

Why are our steam locomotives sc.r.a.pped in this way? Why are they not built universally for their highest possibilities of development? Why are they not given the mechanical refinements that experience has shown well worth while?

Once again: tradition and cost.

The first of these some day is to be eliminated. And as for the second; listen to my friend, the dear old practical railroader out there in the West. I much doubt if he will ever be able to finish reading the preceding paragraphs. But should he succeed in completing them, I antic.i.p.ate receiving a telegram--a letter never would be prompt or emphatic enough--which will read something after this fashion:

"Now, what are you doing again? Don't you know that to put in all these darn phool [softened to calm the feelings of the telegraph operators]

contraptions in our railroading would cost a national debt or two--of the old days? How can the railroads, strapped, without money to-day, go into these things?"

I shall not respond by telegraph. I have no Western Union frank. But I shall sit down and write my good old tempestuous friend that in my own humble and uneconomic opinion the best way to economize is to introduce methods that lead toward economy. When the Lackawanna system spent about $14,000,000 a few years ago in rebuilding and perfecting about forty miles of its main line between Scranton and Binghamton, it was said by some clever people that only a road as extremely wealthy as it was could go into such frills. Well, last year the operating economies effected to that company by this improvement, and by this improvement alone, came to about 12 per cent. of the expenditure, while the money itself, was obtained at 4 per cent. I should like to ask Mr. Underwood, of the always almost-bankrupt Erie, if that carefully managed property would not have been in receivership and helpless a full decade ago, if it had not been for his great grade revisions on his main line east of Youngstown, Ohio?

And Mr. Daniel Willard, of the Baltimore and Ohio if it is not true that the superheaters on but 1000 of that railroad's 1600 locomotives are not already saving it more than 750,000 tons of coal a year?

To save money upon our American railroads it frequently becomes necessary to spend it, and to spend it generously, but always wisely of course.

We measure expenditures properly by the results. An improvement to a locomotive costing as much as $10,000 to buy and even as much as that to maintain each year is a good investment, is it not, if it saves $50,000 a year? The superheater, the arch, the booster, and the feed-water heater together vastly increase the power of the steam locomotive. To gain their equivalent in the locomotive itself, the average Mikado-type freight-puller of eight big drivers and with extra length boiler-tubes--nineteen or twenty feet--would have to have not less than fourteen driving-wheels and boiler-tubes of the almost incredible and impracticable length of thirty-six feet. Is that graphic enough for the layman to understand? Can you understand this about the booster alone?

Take a reasonable stretch of level railroad division, say 125 to 175 miles. It is good low-grade line and an engine of even moderate capacity ought to handle a 3000-ton freight-train over it easily, if it were not for that nasty little hill half-way down the line. A chain is no better than its weakest link. A railroad division is no easier than its stiffest hill. This particular one means that the maximum train-load on that division may never exceed 2700 tons.

Now we put the booster on--that little miniature locomotive for the trailing-wheels that we saw a few minutes ago, built like an automobile engine and having the same gritty driving power. When the engineer comes to that nasty hill, in goes the booster and up goes the 3000-ton train over the hill, just as easily apparently as if it were coasting on a down-grade.

The most famous pa.s.senger-train to-day in America, if not indeed in the whole world, is the Twentieth Century Limited, running between New York and Chicago, 969 miles in a flat twenty hours. It began twenty years ago as a single train of moderate length--about seven or eight Pullman cars and a diner. To-day it almost always consists of at least two sections, each of ten to twelve heavy steel diners and Pullman sleepers. In figures, the weight increase is close to 216 per cent. The train easily might make the run through to Chicago in eighteen hours as it did at the outset if safety and other conditions permitted. The energy of the locomotive is not the limiting factor.

Now how has this been done? How has the typical locomotive of the Twentieth Century been so improved as to keep the train that it hauls up in the top notch of American pa.s.senger carriers? The answer is easy: by the constant application of every proved device for the improvement of that machine. The New York Central, which operates this train, does not often stand convicted of a lack of mechanical progress. Come to figures, once again: A certain well-known railroad, which is thoroughly sold on the idea of the improved locomotive, in the last twenty-five years has steadily increased its average tonnage per train by from 400 to 1700 tons over the old-time figures. Its maximum is now close to 3200 revenue tons.

In this same quarter of a century this railroad shows 233 per cent.

increase in the weight of the train and 66 per cent. increase in the average speed. To-day it thinks nothing of hauling a 5000-ton train at a steady rate, uphill and down dale, of twenty-five miles an hour.

Our steam locomotive is a laggard? Only when you do not give it a fair opportunity to show its real worth.

If all our other railroads were as progressive in this as the two that I have just instanced, there would be no reason for this detailed attention to the problem. Unfortunately they are not.

A moment ago I said that two things had held back the development of our steam locomotive--tradition and cost. Have I not now settled the question of cost, as far at least as it may be settled in these pages, by showing the great economies to be effected in the use of an efficient engine--economies, roughly speaking, averaging 25 per cent. in the operation of the locomotive? Now come to the problem of tradition.

The extreme easterly forty-five miles of the main New York-Boston line of the New York, New Haven, and Hartford railroad was, up to thirty-four years ago, a separate railroad, the Boston and Providence, extending between those two cities. From the old Park Station in Boston down to the station in Providence and back again--ninety miles--was a day's work for one of its locomotives. On some of its suburban runs the engines did even less. They were pampered bits of mechanism.

Last year I rode from New York to Cherbourg in the giant steamer _Olympic_ and spent many hours in what is the finest engine-room upon all the seven seas. The tireless engines, the racing shafts, never ceased their impetuous speed for six days and for six nights. If necessary, and if the fuel had been available, they might just as easily run on for twenty-six days and twenty-six nights or even longer. It all comes to proper lubrication and attention, and nothing else.

A twenty-four hour continuous test of an automobile is as nothing; a five hundred or a thousand-mile test of its engine without resting, these days, a mere child's sport. You do not think after you have driven your own car ninety miles that you must rest it before you set it in service once more.

If you could not drive it upon necessity twice or three times that distance without resting it you probably would feel like selling it.

Yet there are many ninety-mile engine-runs left in the United States to this day; some of them, like those between New York and Philadelphia, are matters of operating convenience that cannot easily be changed. Tradition holds others. One hundred and fifty miles still remains a typical division in the minds of many conservative railroaders. And a real boast upon the part of the progressive manufacturers of the electric locomotive is that their machines can easily cover two such typical divisions without either rest or inspection. But it should be borne in mind that when the inspection finally is made it must be like that at Calais, of the most thorough sort.

Very recently the New York Central inst.i.tuted the experiment of combining as a single engine-run the former two runs between Albany and Buffalo, 300 miles. The Santa Fe has cut its separate runs from Chicago to the Pacific coast from twelve to six. There seems to be no very good reason why the New York Central should not run the locomotive from Harmon, at the outer limit of the New York electric zone, right through to Chicago, 946 miles--or two engine-runs on the Santa Fe between Chicago and Los Angeles, 2246 miles. Down in the Southwest the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas railway already has a 700-mile run, and is preparing to install a 1000-mile one.

It is simply a question of proper rewatering and refueling facilities.

Obviously the crews could not make runs such as this. I have known an engineer to take a special through from New York to Buffalo on the Lackawanna or the Erie--a little more than 400 miles in either case--and not relinquish the throttle for the entire distance. But that was a stunt.

I am talking of regular performance day in and day out.

It is easy enough to change the crews however at distances of approximately 150 to 175 miles. But there is no reason why the engine should be changed. If an 11,000-horse-power ship racing two 250-foot shafts can keep it up continuously for six days and 3000 miles there is no reason on earth why a well-equipped locomotive should falter at the same performance.

The steam locomotive a laggard?

There is no inherent reason whatever why he should be a laggard unless men themselves so desire. The paths for his possible development have not been followed to their ends. Men this very day are engaged in plans for the placing of a third cylinder in his mechanism; the possibilities of the brick arch, the superheater, and the hot-water feed now have brought his steam production up ahead of the mechanism that consumes it. The opportunity is rife for the further perfection of this mechanism.

In England, right up to the present time, and for many of his earlier years in this country, the steam locomotive in builders' phrasing was "inside-connected," the cylinders and driving-rods being placed within the frame and under the boiler. Gradually this type of engine was abandoned upon this continent. Despite the trimness of its appearance--your foreigner always lays great stress upon the appearance of his locomotive--the important driving mechanism was so hidden as to render it comparatively inaccessible for repairs. And so we came here to placing the entire driving mechanism upon the outside of the locomotive, where it could be easily reached and taken down.

There is a movement to-day toward the creation of a locomotive which shall be both inside and outside-connected. There is hardly room for two cylinders within the frame. There certainly is room for one. And with the retention of the two outer cylinders there presently will be created a locomotive which, with all its improved steam-creating powers to boot, will quickly take highest place both in speed and energy. More operating economies will be effected, new records established.

The steam locomotive a laggard?

Is not the question now fairly answered?

CHAPTER XI

THE GASOLENE-MOTOR UNIT AND ITS POSSIBILITIES

In the twelve months of 1921 service was abandoned upon 1626 miles of standard steam railroad in the United States--much of it permanently abandoned. Of this, 217 miles, or very slightly less than that of 1920, was not only abandoned, but the track was taken up and the equipment sold.

In addition to all of this the various regulatory commissions had authorized the abandonment of 191 more miles of line, and applications were pending for the sc.r.a.pping of still another 575 miles. Once fairly important roads, such as the Colorado Midland and the Colorado Springs and Cripple Creek (one fourth of the abandoned mileage was within the State of Colorado) and the Missouri and North Arkansas, are included within these totals, while to them are added a host of small railroads, lines twenty-five to forty miles in length or less. Unimportant? Yes, to you and me, when we go hurrying across the country in the Limited, but not infrequently of very large importance to the communities that they aim to serve.

The position of the short-line railroad in our rail transport debacle is even worse than that of his bigger brothers. Even in the prosperous days before our entrance into the World War he was constantly involved in difficulties. Even then the motor-truck was beginning to make serious inroads into his earnings. So wonder not that he hailed the advent of McAdoo and government control as a possibility of real salvation. Yet how false a hope that was was quickly shown when the director-general of the United States Railroad Administration refused bluntly to bother with these roads--there are close to a thousand of them--in his unified rail transport structure. He said that they were not necessary to the successful prosecution of the war. And that settled it. Nor was this all.

The last blow came when, with the reroutings of freight that came as an inevitable result of Federal control, the small railroads across the land began to lose the little hauls that frequently were given them by friendly freight traffic officers. At that many of them quit. More and more of them have been quitting ever since. In a few cases local pride has served to keep them alive; I can think of the Kanona and Prattsburg, a little eleven-mile line up in western New York which to-day is being operated by a group of farmers and village people who already are wondering if it would not be wiser to sell their locomotive and sc.r.a.p the thin iron link that holds them to the outer world.

Where these little roads are alive they are breathing heavily. The little locomotive, purchased second-hand from the big railroad, which had used it almost up to the point of worthlessness, the battered cars, the bridges and trestles so long suffering from a lack of proper maintenance as to render it positively unsafe to run heavy cars over them, all are gasping for their very breath. In truth the short-line railroad is sinking into a state of coma.

And so is the rather typical branch line of its bigger brothers. In the abandoned mileage reports of the Interstate Commerce Commission for the last few years are included the feelers and the feeders of some pretty important railroad systems across this land. In these cases the track and the equipment have been maintained, to a fair degree of safety at least.

And a fair degree of traffic also has been doled out to them. Yet they are as vulnerable to the short-haul compet.i.tion of the motor-truck upon the highroad as the separate and highly individual short-line roads.

It is but fair to add that it probably is well that many of these short-line roads and little branches of the bigger roads should be abandoned. A considerable number of them never should have been built in the first place. But others that have gone and are going are essential to their communities. And these should be saved.

They can be saved. They can be made profitable, even against the inroads of the motor-truck.

There grew up in the later days of the World War--when, as we have seen, traffic congestion upon our railroads came close to the breaking point--a demand that the motor-truck, still an infant toy, come into the breach. It came and, I think, saved the day--gloriously, as the novelists always like to put it. We saw the day when the much-advertised Lincoln highway, not only from New York to Philadelphia but for several hundred miles further west, was crowded with emergency freight traffic, some of it fairly long-haul traffic. So were the other important highways not only of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, but of New York and Connecticut and Ma.s.sachusetts and a half-dozen other States as well--as the pleasure motorist of to-day, picking his way around and past the holes and ruts made by the war-time motor-traffic, very well knows. In the flush of that traffic problem many wondrous new motor-freight routes were established. Some of them were planned elaborately. A tire-maker in Akron, finding it next to impossible to get any prompt service to his branches and his patrons in New England, inst.i.tuted a motor-truck service for the 900-odd miles over to Boston, laid down a schedule for the six-day trip, and then lived up to it, summer and winter, with a precision that few American freight or pa.s.senger-trains had made for many and many a month before. Some enthusiasts, with this practical example as a text, let their fancies fly to the fullest extent.

They shouted for the long-distance hauls. In fact it was said not more than two or three years ago that four or five years would see regular motor-truck fast freights established from New York or Boston to points as far distant as Chicago or St. Louis or Kansas City.

To-day we know that these were flights of fancy. Out of a dozen through motor-truck routes established for the ninety-mile run between New York and Philadelphia, only a very few have survived until to-day. The same proportion holds true elsewhere in the more congested sections of the land, particularly those sections subject to the ravages of a hard wintertime. Yet upon the other hand a very considerable portion of the business community still seems to be at the rather definite conclusion that the motor-truck is to replace the railroad for freight hauls up to a hundred miles or less, while old-time railroaders for years past have been frank in saying that a freight-car did not even begin to make money until it had hauled its goods at least forty miles, and to-day the modern generation of operators will put this figure at eighty miles. Up to a distance somewhere between these figures--and undoubtedly far nearer eighty than forty--the vast city terminal charges of the American railroad nullify the profit of the haul itself. In due time I shall come to a detailed consideration of these questions of freight terminals in our large cities. Consider now that the motor-truck, to a very large extent at least, is freed from this terminal problem. That is a long point in its favor.

At the present time approximately 2,000,000 ton-miles of freight are being transported in this country each year by motor-truck; and five years hence it is estimated that this figure will have risen to 60,000,000 ton-miles.

It is understood, of course, that the arbitrary and comparative figure of the ton-mile is reached by multiplying the number of tons actually handled by the number of miles that each shipment actually goes.

These figures are taken from an admirable article in a recent issue of the "Atlantic Monthly," by Philip Cabot of Boston. Referring to the overuse of the highways of New England by the motor-truck, Mr. Cabot says:

Every abuse carries its penalty. The penalty for this abuse of our roads will be a heavy one, which the taxpayer must pay. The Commonwealth of Ma.s.sachusetts has spent more than $25,000,000 of the taxpayers' money in road construction, much of which has already been ground to powder under the wheels of the five-ton truck; and the damage must to-day be repaired at perhaps double the former cost. Our State tax has mounted in recent years by leaps and bounds; the contribution of the truck-owner to road construction is so trivial that most of the burden will fall upon the taxpayer, on whose now overloaded back a huge additional levy is about to fall at the very moment when he is expecting relief. And make no mistake as to who must bear the burden. The old notion that a tax could be pinned upon one cla.s.s has vanished into thin air. We now realize that it is not the capitalist who pays the tax, or the manufacturer. It is the man in the street who pays the tax, in the increased cost of everything he buys.

He pays the bill for every waste of public money.