Τ

IT

BY

LOOKS like a nip and tuck race between the gasoline motor car and the electric locomotive to decide which will do most to give the steam locomotive the harder push toward the scrap heap. Day in and day out on branch lines of the Union Pacific Railroad near Omaha, and at other places, sleek steel cars, like sharp-nosed torpedo boats on wheels, slip along at from forty to sixty miles an hour, with passengers gazing out through air-tight windows into a smokeless atmosphere. They are gasoline motor cars, one type of many that have been adopted, or are being tested, on many railroads here and abroad.

One morning in the middle of November, 1906, passengers riding into New York on the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad, after clattering for thirty-five miles between rows of iron trusswork pillars that will soon bear trolley wires, saw in the Grand Central yards the new electric third-rail locomotives of the New York Central shunting out through trains for their trip up the bank of the Hudson. These motor cars and electric locomotives already in practical use hint at a revolution in transportation which has gone on in the last three years that is almost as notable as the substitution of the steam locomotive for the stage-coach.

It will be some time yet before the steam locomotive will cease to be the best and cheapest mechanical horse for the main trunk railroads; and the locomotive builders go on improving their steam freight behemoths and passenger flyers as if they were in business for all time. But within the last year alone, the changes to electric power begun on railroads with heavy passenger traffic, especially near great cities, have been so enormous, and the experiments with motor-cars have been pursued so swiftly and successfully-gasoline cars have already run from Philadelphia to Kansas City and from Omaha to Portland, Oregon, and back-that the transformation is already

advanced enough to foreshadow the decline of the steam locomotive.

Meanwhile the urban and interurban trolley lines are approaching from one side, as fast as the railroads are approaching from the other, the new type of train that will soon be carrying us and our mail, express, baggage and even much of our freight, swiftly, cleanly, and much more frequently than now, practically anywhere we wish to go. From 1890 to 1903 the street and interurban railways grew from 8,000 miles to nearly 25,000 miles, and the mileage has extended remarkably since 1903. This is nearly all electric line. The practical result of the novelties now being introduced on the railroads is that all this mileage, reaching all kinds of places inaccessible to the steam lines, is on the point of being so thoroughly welded into our huge railroad network that it will soon be indistinguishable for it will be equipped with similar cars and motive power and offer similar facilities. One decides even now by tossing a coin whether to go from Dallas, Tex., to Fort Worth, or from Indianapolis, Ind., to Fort Wayne on the trolley or the railroad-it makes so little difference. It will soon make less.

Electric trains, where the traffic is, or can be made, dense and steady; gasoline-driven trains where the traffic is light or uncertain; cars that will run either in trains or alone by their own locomotive power, so that a train may start for even a small number of people and so that empty cars need not be hauled when not required these are the novel machines that are opening a new era in transportation. They are just beginning to push the steam locomotive out of several important departments of work. Their results will soon show whether they can invade the field of long distance passenger transportation and long or short distance freight transportation, the two fields which the steam locomotive continues to dominate.

Why are the railroads being electrified? In Switzerland, in Italy, in Sweden, because coal is dear and waterfalls are cheap. In the United States and in England because trolley competition has become so menacing to the railroads and because the public, taught by the trolley lines that it is possible to travel without being forced to breathe smoke and collect cinders, have demanded relief from present railroad conditions, and the railroads have been disposed to heed. Millions of travelers entering and leaving New York City, have been obliged to suffer a very purgatory passing through a tunnel that led one man to say that if he should go to Hades he wished to go on one of the two roads that use the tunnel, because then he would be glad when he got there. When one morning, several years ago, a terrible accident took place in the mist and gas and steam and smoke of this tunnel, it became plain that relief must come soon. W. J. Wilgus, the fifth vice-president of the New York Central Railroad, insisted so vigorously that electric trains were feasible that he was given authority to install them.

Mr.

The New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad, which also uses the tunnel, could not be behindhand, and it, too, soon laid plans to use electric trains. Meanwhile the Pennsylvania Railroad, adopting its plan to tunnel the Hudson River and establish its terminal in New York City, could see no way of carrying passengers through a long underground bore except by electrical power. The necessity of undergoing a huge expense for electrical equipment naturally led the operating officers of these three great railroads to search for ways to make the installation pay. The only practicable way was to extend the electrified part of the line to the limit of surburban travel, and to make use of the advantages of flexible electric trains to give better and more frequent service, thus attracting more traffic. For it is a railroad axiom that the size of the "traveling public" does not depend any more on density of population than it does on convenient service which lures whatever population there is in a given section into the "traveling habit."

So the "Central" set to work electrifying the line from the Grand Central Station to the Harlem River with the intention of running the electric trains to Croton, 30 miles out on the main line, and to White Plains on the Harlem branch; and the "New Haven" began setting

up its posts for trolley wires with a view to electric train service ultimately for 61 miles to New Haven. The Erie, the Long Island, and other railroads entering New York naturally had to follow their competitors within the suburban zone. Study of the problem led to careful investigations of the comparative cost of electric and steam traction by railroad men, and to the building and testing of electric locomotives and cars. With a number of electrified railroads in operation abroad and with the railroads entering New York committed to electricity and with the advantages of electricity patent to the public-railroad officers in various parts of the country have now turned their attention to the possibilities of electrification. Small electric lines like the Lackawanna and Wyoming Valley, running from Scranton, Pa., to Wilkesbarre, and the Atlantic City and Shore Line are watched with interest, for they are equipped as the electrified steam roads will be for their surburban traffic, but these lines are highly developed interurban lines, and not remodeled steam railroads. They simply show that the interurban road, at its best, with freight and baggage facilitiesnot to speak of sleeping cars, and parlor cars such as are running in the Middle Westhave adopted the very form of train which the most advanced railroads are just arriving at. The example of the New York railroads is not likely to be generally followed by other steam lines on which conditions are ripe for the change until practice proves what kind of electrical equipment is best.

For a pretty controversy rages. The New York Central is spending $70,000,000 for a third-rail equipment using direct electrical current at low voltage. The New Haven is installing an overhead single-phase trolley system carrying an alternating current of very high voltage. The Pennsylvania is following the Central's plan and the Erie the New Haven's. From a position a short distance from the tracks, one could not tell that any change had been made in the Central's right of way except for the shiny brown tops of jumper connections which stand two feet high at intervals along the track, in contact with the live third rail. The New Haven line, on the other hand, with its parallel rows of tall iron posts, looks like the interior of the New York subway with the roof off. The locomotives are quite different, as the illustrations of this article show,

But perhaps the most significant difference is in the motors to be used.

An invention put out by the Westinghouse Company, about two years ago, and since then used successfully on an interurban railway an interurban railway between Indianapolis and Cincinnati, was a motor that solved one of the knottiest problems that have confronted electrical engineers. It was long ago found impracticable to send direct current over long distances on transmission lines, owing to losses from the wires. On the other hand, the alternating current, which can be transmitted long distances at a high voltage with little loss, has required the maintenance of transforming stations where it can be changed into direct current at low voltage to be used in motors-which means expense. If a motor could be built that could use the high pressure alternating current, this expense would be eliminated, for the alternating current could be sent directly from a single power house over a wire to any car on the line that used it. The Westinghouse Company produced such a motor and perfected it. On this alternating-current single-phase motor, which requires only a single trolley wire to feed it and which needs no other transforming device than can be carried in the locomotive itself, and the equipment that goes with it the New Haven road has staked the millions it is investing in its electrical installation. The Central is sticking to the General Electric Company's more conservative direct-current third-rail system with power house stations at intervals. The competition between these two huge radically different equipments will probably settle the form that the electrification of railroads will ultimately take.

ELECTRIC LOCOMOTIVE AND THE THIRD RAIL

Though the New Grand Central terminal has not yet been completed (fourteen blocks have been torn out of the heart of New York City to provide a commodious new entrance for the traffic the electric service is expected to produce), the New York Central has now 35 electric locomotives in commission. Those now in use are employed simply to take through trains through the tunnel. Suburban service will be furnished by electric motor cars much like those on the Boston Elevated Railway or the steel cars in the New York Subway. Many people have thought that suburban trains on the Central and on other roads would be drawn by the electric locomotives which haul the

through trains. It is doubtful, however, whether this mode of electrification would improve prevailing conditions, except in cleanliness. The real significance of the adoption of electricity is the introduction in suburban traffic of the cars like the familiar ones of Elevated and Subway and not different from the best cars on the most advanced interurban lines.

Their advantage is that every car, or almost every car, is a locomotive in itself. When many cars are made up into a train, the motors on all the live cars help in propulsion, though the control is held by the first, where the engineer has his post. The beauty of this equipment lies in its flexibility. The number of cars in a train can be made to vary with the traffic. Cars can be dropped off or added at any station. The practice of railroads has been to run trains at long enough intervals to give some assurance that they can be filled. With the new equipment there can be a much greater frequency, for at any hour of the day when few people normally wish to travel, a long enough train can be provided, or even a single car, for the few who do. At rush hours heavy trains can be sent out at frequent intervals. The swift acceleration of electric cars makes it possible to run many trains at high speed and yet make many stops. The Central now has one hundred and eighty-six of these independent motor cars, which will run to the end of the track now electrified and there be picked up by steam locomotives for their destination until the lines are equipped with the third rail up to the limit now planned. This limit will be twenty-four miles out from the Grand Central Station on the Harlem branch and twenty-eight miles out from Mott Haven Junction on the Hudson division.

Two hundred and eighty-five miles of track are being equipped with the third rail. An entirely new system of electrical signals is being installed. An army of men has been at work for more than three years remodelling the right of way and preparing the new Grand Central Station to receive the trains of both the Central and the New Haven. A huge excavation was dug covering an area of thirtynine acres on which twenty-five miles of track will be laid on two levels below the street, one level for express trains and one for locals. A new station has been built at Mott Haven Junction which will connect with two subway systems. Altogether there will be six new passenger stations in the electrical zone already

equipped, and there will be twenty-three new ones within the range of the suburban electric motor cars when the work is completed. The third rail is protected, and Mr. Wilgus believes that it will not be any more dangerous than any other form of electric installation. The whole huge remodeling of railroad and terminal will cost $70,000,000.

The electric locomotives for a time will draw trains only between the Harlem river and the Grand Central Station, but later will pick them up and drop them about 30 miles out. The locomotives themselves have been tested so many times that it is now clear what they can do. On a six-mile stretch of experimental track at Schenectady they were racing with steam trains more than two years ago and beating them, for they are capable of a speed running up to eighty miles an hour. They have a capacity of twenty-two hundred horse power. Some interesting tests were made recently to discover whether they could get up speed as rapidly as a steam locomotive. In the run in which conditions were similar to those which will prevail in actual work the electric locomotive walked away from the puffing steam locomotive, and in five hundred yards had secured a lead of a six-car train length. To show the advantage of the electric locomotive these facts were noted: The locomotive was thirty feet shorter than the steam locomotive, weighed seventy tons less, drew a load of fifty-one tons more, and reached a speed of fifty miles an hour a minute sooner, speeding along smoothly, and leaving, of course, no smoke. The steadiness of the electrical locomotives has surprised everyone who has ridden on one, for they do not "nose" the track as steam locomotives do, and they round curves with greater ease. The first experimental train ran into the Grand Central Station last September.

THE OVERHEAD SYSTEM

The New Haven road will operate both the motor cars for suburban traffic and electrical locomotives for the through trains between Stamford, Conn., and Woodlawn, whence the New Haven trains run into the Grand Central Station over the New York Central's tracks. A single power house on the bank of the Mianus River at Cos Cob, Conn., will furnish the elecat eleven thousand volts which provides the power for the whole twenty-two miles, without the intervention of transforming stations.

The trolley wire will be supported on steel

a

bridges every three hundred feet, though every two miles there are more massive structures called anchor bridges. These bridges, in addition to carrying the trolley wire, will support new system of signals. Both electrical locomotives and motor cars will be equipped with alternating current motors, which, however, will work on direct current too. When the trolley arms run off the wires on reaching the New York Central tracks, contact-shoes will at once engage the third rail. This motor equipment is the innovation the workings of which will be watched with huge interest. At the time of writing, the railroad expects to have the trains running by the time this article is published. The charges are estimated to cost more than $25,000 a mile.

car.

It is idle here to go into the controversy regarding the comparative merits of this equipment and the third-rail system. It costs more to build the trolley wire bridges than to lay the third rail, but on the other hand it costs more to build and run the transforming stations than to dispense with them. It is fatal to step on a live third rail if the insulation has worn off, but it also is bad to come in contact with a wire carrying eleven thousand volts of electricity if you happen to be a brakeman on top of a freight A terrible tragedy would ensue if a train. should crash into a trolley wire support and bring the wire down, but it would probably be equally disastrous if a derailed train should plough up the third rail. The comparative excellence of these two systems will have to be left for results to prove. In any event, by these innovations of two great railroads, coupled with the adoption of similar devices on other lines entering the city, New York will soon have a suburban service reaching far into the country on every side that will scarcely differ from the Rapid Transit service it now possesses in Subway and Elevated systems, except that the volume of traffic will not call for so frequent trains. The city limits will be practically wiped out.

The adoption of similar electrical devices in other places depends on the number of people who can be induced to travel. Essentially an electrified railroad is one on which locomotives, which are individual moving power-houses, are replaced by a single power-house which feeds the power to the trains. The initial cost of the electrical equipment is so great, and the expense of maintenance so heavy, that they are justified only where the volume of traffic is great enough

to employ the maximum production of the power-house. Thickly populated districts are the only ones thus far that furnish a great enough and steady enough traffic to do this. This holds true of places where the electricity must be produced from coal. The success of the Valtellina line and others in Italy and Switzerland show that electrical operation can be made cheaper than steam operation in regions where power-houses can be run by water power. Thirty-four miles of the Erie Railroad, for example, is to be electrified on the Rochester division with power transmitted 70 miles from Niagara Falls. Conditions are favorable for the electrification of the whole New York, New Haven, and Hartford system in the near future, for it runs in a populous territory well provided with water power. On the other hand, the electrification of a road like the Great Northern is so far in the future that one can scarcely imagine it, though it has been announced that Mr. Hill will equip with electricity a new line to run between Portland, Ore., and Seattle, Wash. The railroad men say: "Modern steam locomotives can exert a horsepower a day for every two pounds of coal burned in the firebox. No other equipment has yet proved itself capable of operating so cheaply on any railroad that runs infrequent heavy trains as most American trunk railroads do."

GASOLINE AND OTHER MOTOR CARS

Nor is the gasoline motor-car yet powerful enough to displace the steam locomotive. It is something of a marvel that machines like those now in service on the Union Pacific Railroad were built without a long series of halting experiments. They came into being, however, as imitations of motor-cars used abroad-a gasoline motor car was run on the Wurtemburg street railway as early as 1893-and much was learned from automobile practice. They are now making daily trips at Omaha, Neb., at Los Angeles, Cal., at Portland, Ore., between Houston and Galveston, Tex., and in other places, in one branch of railroad work only. If the electrical train is economical only on lines with heavy traffic, the gasoline motor-car thus far seems fitted only to lines where the traffic is light. The cars are used on the Union Pacific system to make one round trip a day over branch lines-between Kearney and Callaway, Neb., 65 miles, between Leavenworth and Lawrence, Kan., 68 miles, and on other such trips-to serve sparsely

settled districts, or to act as feeders for mair lines. This is the field of the self-propelled car. Requiring only a motorman, and an attendant, in the passenger compartment, a motor-car dispenses with the more costly crew of a regular steam train. It is ready to move at once without any waiting to get up fires, is indeed practically an automobile on rails. For comparatively short runs the motor-cars, even though they use gasoline at nine cents a gallon, compare favorably with steam trains in cost, though as soon as traffic grows so heavy as to require many well patronized trips a day the steam trains again are favored by railroad men. This has been found true in England where a number of lines have motor-cars-though the distances they cover are less than those traversed on the Union Pacific-and it is the conclusion arrived at from the experience of other American lines, the Delaware and Hudson and others, on which motor-cars are being tried. Mr. F. W. Hild, the chief engineer of the Southwestern Wisconsin Interurban Railway, has worked out the following comparison of costs under varying conditions:

Nor does the gasoline motor-car have things all its own way even in restricted service. Steam motor-cars and electric motor-cars in which a gasoline engine, instead of directly driving the wheels, generates electricity by which the car is propelled, are being tried to see if they are not cheaper and better. The Erie Railroad and the Canadian Pacific, for example, are experimenting with steam motorcars, and the Delaware and Hudson is now running a gasoline-electric car regularly between Schenectady and Saratoga, N. Y.

The gasoline cars of the Union Pacific, however, have had the longest trial in the United States, and it is on their performances that railroad men are now figuring. A committee of the American Master Mechanics Association which has made an investigation of motor-cars comes to the conclusion that for conditions