The Modern Railroad

A model American railroad station—the Union Station of the New York Central,
Boston & Albany, Delaware & Hudson, and West Shore railroads at Albany

The classic portal of the Pennsylvania’s new station in New York

The beautiful concourse of the new Pennsylvania Station, in New York

“The waiting-room is the monumental and artistic expression of the
station,”—the waiting-room of the Union Depot at Troy, New York

The Pennsylvania terminal also departs radically from the other great terminals in its track arrangements. The twenty-one parallel station tracks, with their platforms, are placed in a basement forty feet below street level. In fact, the great building is divided into three levels. At the street level are the broad entrances, the chief of these forming itself into a broad arcade, lined with shops that cater particularly to the demands of the traveller. On this floor are also the railroad’s commodious restaurant and lunch-room.

On the intermediate plane, or level, the real business of the passenger prefatory to his journey is transacted. The concourse, the great general waiting-room, with its subsidiary rooms for men and women, the ticket offices, and the telegraph offices are there gathered. From the roomy concourse, covered in steel and glass after the fashion of the famous train-sheds in Frankfort and Dresden, Germany, individual stairs and elevators lead to each of the track platforms. A sub-concourse, hung directly underneath the main structure, is reserved for exit purposes only, and serves to separate the streams of incoming and outgoing passengers. The north side of the station is separated and reserved for the use of the Long Island passengers, chiefly commuters.

The theory of operation of the station is simplicity itself. A Pennsylvania through train from the West, after discharging its passengers and baggage, will not be backed out of the train-house, but will continue on through the station, under more tunnels and another river, to the storage yards just outside of Long Island City. Similarly, trains made ready for a long trip at the yards will proceed empty under the East River tunnels to the big station, where they will receive their outbound load. This is the theory of the station, an operating theory which makes it in part like a giant way-station and saves much terminal congestion. The Long Island trains and a few short-line Pennsylvania express trains will be turned in the station. These are the exception.

Of interest fully equal to that of the new Pennsylvania Station, is the construction of a new Grand Central Station upon the site of and during the use of the old. The Grand Central Station, used by both the New York Central and the New York, New Haven, & Hartford Railroads, has been for many years New York’s great gateway to the east as well as the north and west. It has developed a great suburban and a great through traffic since the construction of the first station—away back in 1871. Temporary relief was gained in the early eighties by the construction of an annex to the east of the original station. Still further improvement was gained ten years ago by tearing out a series of ill-arranged public rooms and substituting for them the single beautiful waiting-room that has proved so great a delight to travellers. Now that waiting-room is about to be demolished in the face of plans for the newer and greater Grand Central.

The building of the new station has offered tremendous problems to the engineers, for it has demanded a complete reconstruction within extremely limited area, while not placing hindrances in the way of the constant operation of one of the world’s greatest terminals. Coincident with the rebuilding of the new station has come the substitution of electricity for steam on the terminal lines of its two tenants, the New York, New Haven, & Hartford, and the New York Central & Hudson River Railroads. In order to work the three-mile tunnel through Park Avenue and the sole entrance for trains to the station at greatest capacity, it was found necessary to extend the yards of the new station far north of those of the old. This work, alone, has necessitated the acquisition of whole city blocks of tremendously valuable real estate and the excavation of several million cubic yards of rock and earth.

To accomplish the work of reconstruction and still enable the station to handle its great traffic without serious interruption, serious forethought and definite plans of action were found necessary. The plan was developed by constructing a temporary building of brick and plaster covering a vacant city block in Madison Avenue, at the west of the station. Into this temporary structure a branch post office, an important adjunct of the Grand Central, was moved from the extreme eastern side of the terminal. Excavation for the new terminal began at its eastern edge and at that edge the first portions of the new structure have been completed. A waiting-room was then established in temporary quarters, the last vestiges of the old Grand Central removed, and the main front and centre of the new station fabricated. Similarly, as the excavation has progressed from the east to the west side of the terminal, the great bulk of the traffic has been gradually shifted from the old high-level to the new low-level.

The new Grand Central complete will have its main train-shed devoted to through traffic. A second train-shed of similar arrangement and of slightly smaller dimensions will be constructed underneath the main shed for suburban traffic, and a single head-house will serve both floors. The head-house will have as its chief architectural feature, a concourse of mammoth proportions. The lesser features of the new Grand Central will contribute to make the new terminal, built upon the site of the historic old, one of the world’s greatest gateways. The fact that steam locomotives are absolutely prohibited from entering either of the two new stations on Manhattan Island makes these the cleanest railroad terminals yet built.

So not only have our railroads begun to build great stations; they are to-day building really beautiful stations. An age in which the American demands the exquisite and the monumental in his architecture, palatial homes, palatial shops, palatial hotels, demands that the railroad station be something more than the mere expression of a commercial utility. Stone, the sturdy and durable building material of all the ages, has become the expression of these buildings from without. Within, they are gay with rare marbles and mural paintings. There is nothing too fine for the railroad passenger terminal of to-day in the United States.

When the master fancy of the architect, Richardson, designed the splendid stations at Worcester and Springfield, as well as a host of smaller attractive stations along the line of the Boston & Albany Railroad, the beginnings were made. More recently this rising American desire for beauty and good taste has shown itself in such elaborate and artistic structures as the stations at Albany and Scranton. The last step has come in the designing of the palatial terminals in Chicago, in Washington, and in New York City. It would take a bold prophet to anticipate what the next step might be.

CHAPTER VII

With the freight it is entirely a different question. The problem of trucking is one of the great problems of each of our large cities, and, in order to eliminate this as far as possible, the railroad, under the stimulus of competition, will establish freight stations at each point where any considerable volume of traffic is likely to originate. These stations will consist of a freight-house, for handling package-freight (your traffic expert calls this “LCL,” meaning “less than carload”), and wagon yards for carload lots. Perhaps there will be two freight-houses, one for inbound, the other for outbound traffic. The wagon yards will have to be ample for the accommodation of a host of trucks and drays as well as for the long rows of freight-cars.

In addition to these stations, each large manufacturing plant is apt to be a freight station of itself, with a private switch running to its shipping-rooms and storage sheds; and in even a moderate-sized American city there may be from 300 to 500 of these sidings in active daily use. So much for the general commodity freight. Then there are the special commodities.

Coal, for instance, is a freight business of itself. It is not handled in the regular stations of the railroad, but in specially designed pockets and storage sheds, which may be located at from one or two to half a hundred different accessible points about the city. One begins to see, after a little while, why the railroads now seize with avidity each opportunity to gain lines through the hearts of our cities. Each line gained means some appreciable relief toward the taking up of a traffic burden that increases yearly.

It is most probable that the freight terminals of the city will have to accommodate much more traffic than that which originates or terminates there. Important lines of other railroads may intersect at that point, and the handling of interchange freight is a busy function of the terminal scheme. It may be an important point for lake, river, or ocean traffic; and in such a case, the industries at docks and docking facilities of every sort form other busy functions. There will be coal or ore wharves, elevators, and car-floats to enter into the scheme.

So you see the railroad’s freight terminal in any large city is like the fingers of its extended hand. The long tendons reach into every productive centre, gathering and distributing at from a dozen to fifty points, aside from the private sidings. It is obvious that these must be caught together somewhere; and generally upon the outskirts of an important traffic city the railroad creates an interchange yard where this freight, incoming and outgoing—100 trains a day, perhaps—is gathered together and sorted with system and regularity, very much as the post office sorts the letters and the mail packages.

To examine more closely this working of a modern freight terminal scheme, let us take a single plant of a single system. The great operation by which the Pennsylvania Railroad catches up and delivers its freight in the metropolitan district around New York is typical, and will illustrate.

The Pennsylvania works with at least 24 freight stations, in addition to a great number of private sidings from its lines as they pass through Eastern New Jersey. These stations handle the freight of Manhattan Island, Brooklyn, Jersey City, Hoboken, Newark, and smaller centres; but in addition to them there are vast docks at which foreign steamers berth, lighterage facilities for both foreign and coasting steamers, and a tremendous freight interchange with the railroads running to the north and east. The coal business is there again, a separate institution with many piers and pockets; there is a group of bulky elevators that rise above the smoky, busy Jersey shore, the whole going to make a sizable freight terminal. There are coal pockets, piers, elevators, and a local freight station at Jersey City (the railroad men know it as Harsemus Cove), and another much larger plant at Greenville on the west bank of the upper harbor, almost behind the Statue of Liberty. This last plant is just now awaiting its greatest development. The Pennsylvania Railroad, through its ownership control of the Long Island Railroad, is building an encircling line, 4 and 6 tracks wide, around Brooklyn, and crossing its passenger terminal yards at Long Island City. This encircling line—the New York Connecting Railroad it is called—will be continued by a splendid bridge over the East River to an actual connection with the New Haven system reaching up into New England. When this is done, one of the bugaboos of the freightmen—the slow and ofttimes dangerous movement of barges and car-floats through the East River, past the entire length of Manhattan Island—will be ended. Greenville will become the distributing point for the bulk of New England freight that comes and goes from the south and the west through New York.

Even at the present time Greenville is a freight point of considerable magnitude. Go out to Waverley, the great sprawling interchange yard that reaches from Newark almost to Elizabeth along the edge of the Jersey meadows, and watch the through trains come from Greenville. They rank well to-day with the traffic that comes from Harsemus Cove already; and Harsemus Cove is soon to be as nothing.

Waverley is more than a mere junction. It was in the first instance the neck of the bottle where the double-track line from Greenville, the main line from Jersey City and Harsemus Cove, and the cut-off freight line that carries through traffic around the heart of great and growing Newark, united to form the main line of the busy Pennsylvania Railroad. Being a gateway by natural location the railroad sought to make it a gateway in reality. A big assorting or classification yard was built there for outgoing freight, and another for the incoming. Storage tracks were added and one of the great transfer houses of the country—but of that, more in a moment.

The business day ends at the many freight-houses along the waterfront of Manhattan and Brooklyn at four o’clock in the afternoon. At that hour, the railroad refuses to accept any more freight for the day, car-doors are closed and sealed with rapidity; in a short time the long and clumsy floats are being hauled by pert little tugs toward Harsemus or Greenville. There is not much loafing at either of those points along about supper-time. Switching crews show feverish activity in snatching the cars from the floats, and yardmasters bend themselves nervously toward forming the long trains that are to go rumbling toward the west throughout the night.

Stand in the switch-tower at Waverley, and you will begin to cultivate a wholesome respect for the freight traffic that comes out from a great city at nightfall. A through train from Greenville is billed to Pittsburgh, and only hesitates long enough at Waverley to take the switch-points at that busy junction with care. Three minutes behind it is a through Chicago train from Harsemus Cove, and it goes stolidly through the gateway yard without pausing. You wonder why they keep an expert yardmaster and half a dozen switching crews at Waverley. Within five minutes you wonder no longer. They are beginning to get the unassorted cars from the terminals, cars that are bound for more than a score of States. The work of sorting begins. The night yardmaster is a general, and he has an army of lesser officers in the field. You can trace them through the night, as, lanterns in hand, they are running along the trains (these are pulling in from the waterfront every five minutes now), cutting out cars, adding cars, vamping and revamping the freight traffic of the night.

This track receives through freight for Philadelphia, the next for Pittsburgh, the third for Cincinnati, the fourth for Washington and the points diverging therefrom. So it goes. When the assorting process has been in progress for more than an hour at one end of the classification tracks, there are long trains of cars upon them ready to run solid to some large city or important distributing point. After that it is a simple enough matter to bring engines and cabooses and start the trains through. Then the sorting of the cars is begun again and continues until the freight receiving points and the freight interchange points in the metropolitan district have been swept clean for the night.

The transfer-house repeats the assorting process, only upon a smaller scale, for it handles package freight—“less than carload.” It is a long structure, stretching its way down the yard and served by 8 to 10 long sidings and unloading sheds. It takes the “LCL” stuff coming by night from the connecting railroads and from the metropolitan freight-houses, and a little after midnight its workers begin the sorting of this great mass of matter, from 200 to 500 carloads a day.

Here is a really great phase of railroad energy. We find our way to a gaunt freight-house, to whose door no truck has ever backed, and which is hemmed in by many rows of sidings and of sheds. In this building one of the busiest functions of the whole transportation business goes forth by day and by night.

You ship a box—sixty pounds to one hundred pounds—from Wilkes-Barre, Pa., to Berlin, Wis. Here comes another box from Watertown, N. Y., to Norfolk, Va. A third is bound from Easthampton, Mass., to Chillicothe, O.; a fourth from Terre Haute, Ind., to Plainfield, N. J., and so on, ad infinitum. You can readily see how in such cases the railroads have a problem in freight that closely approximates that of the Government mail service. Ten thousand currents and cross-currents of merchandise rising here and there and everywhere, and crossing and recrossing on their way to destination, make a puzzle that does not cease when the rate-sheet experts have finished their difficult work.

If all the freight might be expressed in even multiples of cars the problem would not be quite so appalling. But your box is a hundred pounds weight, or less, perhaps—“LCL” anyway. From its destination it goes with other boxes in a car to the nearest transfer point. At the transfer house the car in which it is placed is drilled quickly into an infreight track, seals are broken, doors opened, and re-assorting begins. The transfer-house is roomy and systematic. If it were anything less it would resemble chaos.

But the chief freight points of that particular system and its connecting points have regular stands, upon which nightly are placed cars bound for these points. Each city (in the case of a large city each freight-house), each transfer point, has a number, and its through car stands opposite that number. When the infreight arrives and is unloaded piece by piece, a checker, who is nothing less than an animated guide-book, gives each its proper number, and it is promptly trucked off to the waiting car. It is mail-sorting on a Titanic scale.

Nor is this an absolute order. Certain towns demand an occasional through car from time to time, and a car must be assigned number and place at the transfer-house against such emergencies. Sometimes there is more than enough freight to fill the car allotted to any given point, and then one of the switching crews must drill that out and find another empty to replace it. Beyond that, the yardmaster’s superiors are all the time demanding that he show judgment in picking the cars to be filled.

When a freight car gets off the system to which it belongs it collects forfeits from the other lines over which it passes, if they do not expedite its passage; this the railroaders know as “per diem.” The great trick in operating is to keep per diem down; and so the “foreign” cars, so called, must be promptly returned to their home roads.

“We load out of the transfer-house a through car over the Northwestern from Chicago every day,” the man who has this yard in charge explains. “It’s up to me to have a Northwestern empty for that when I can. When I can’t, I do the best I can.” He scratches his head. “Perhaps I’ll use a Canadian Pacific, and so get her started along toward home. If not, something from the Sault; just as I am going to start that New Haven car over toward Connecticut to-night. If I were to send that New Haven car out beyond Washington there’d be trouble, and I’ve got to dig out something empty from the Boston & Maine to take that stuff over to Lowell. Mos’ generally, though, when we’ve got a turn of Western stuff, I’ve got my ‘empty’ tracks stuffed full o’ them New England cars.”

We mention something about the transfer-house being a mighty good thing.

“It’s a necessary evil,” says our guide, correcting us.

He starts to explain. “See here. The X——, over in its Jersey City transfer-house, got near a carload of that fancy porcelain brick through from Haverstraw las’ week, and that young whelp of a college boy that’s hangin’ round there learnin’ the railroad business gets it into his noodle that it’s somethin’ awful, awful for that stuff to be goin’ through to Middle Ohio in a Maine Central box, an ‘LCL’ at that. So out he dumps it into a system car right here an’ now, and saves his road about one dollar and fifty cents per diem. Of course they pay about one hundred and thirty-five dollars for damages to that brick in the transferrin’. But the boy’s all right in the transfer-house. If he was out on the engine he might blow up the biler.”

Here is another great railroad yard—this almost filling a mighty crevice between God’s eternal hills. This is within the mountain country, and the gossip that you get around the roundhouse is all of grades. You hear how Smith and the 2,999 pulled seven Pullmans around the Saddleback without a pusher; how some of the big preference freights take four engines to mount the summit; the tales of daring are tales of pushers and of trains breaking apart on the fearful mountain stretches.

Randall is yardmaster here, and Randall is the opposite of the layman’s picture of a yardmaster—a slovenly, worn, profane sort of fellow. Randall does not swear; he rarely even gets excited; his system of administration is so perfectly devised that even in a stress he rarely has to turn to work with his own hands. With him railroading is a fine, practical science. He will tell you of the methods at Collinwood, at Altoona, at Buffalo, at Chicago—wherein they differ. He is cool, calculating, clever, a capital railroader in addition to all these.

Something over a million dollars’ worth of passenger cars
are constantly stored in this yard

A scene in the great freight-yards that surround Chicago

The intricacy of tracks and the “throat” of a modern terminal yard:
South Station, Boston, and its approaches

You speak of his yard as being overwhelmingly big. He answers in his deliberate way:

“We’ve more than 200 miles of track in this yard; something more than 2,000 switches operate it.”

Then he takes you down from his office, elevated in an abandoned switch-tower, and looking down upon his domain. He explains with great care that, his yard being a main-line division point and not a point with many intersecting branches or “foreign roads,” its transfer-house is inconsequential. The same process that goes forward with the package-freight in the transfer-houses, Randall carries on in this yard with cars. These operations are separated for east-bound and west-bound freight and each is given an entirely separate yard, easily reached from the group of roundhouses that hold the freight motive power of that part of the system. Randall’s, being an unusually large yard, further divides these activities into separate yards for loaded and empty cars on the west-bound side. No east-bound “empties” are handled over his road.

We follow him to the nearest operating point, the west-bound classification yard for loaded cars. In the old days this was a broad flat reach of about 20 parallel tracks, terminating at each end in approaches of lead of “ladder” track. Upon each set of 3 or 4 tracks a switch-engine is busy in the eternal classification process. In these more modern days you may see the “hump” or gravity-yard, although you will still find skilled railroaders who are prejudiced against its use. In the hump-yard half of the work of the switch-engines is done by gravity. This new type of railroad facility has an artificial hill, just above the termination of the parallel tracks where they cluster together, and upon this hump one switch-engine with a trained crew does the work of six engines and crews in the old type of yard.

A preference freight rolls into the receiving yard for the west-bound classification. Its engine uncouples and steams off for a well-earned rest in the smoky roundhouse. A switch-engine uncouples the caboose that has been tacked on behind over the division, and it is shunted off to the near-by caboose track, where its crew will have close oversight of it—perhaps sleep in it—until it is ready to accompany some east-bound freight a few hours hence.

Blue flags (blue lights at night) are fastened at each end of the dismantled cars, and the inspectors have a quarter of an hour to make sure if the equipment is in good order. If the car is found with broken running-gear it is marked, and soon after drilled out from its fellows, sent to the transfer-house to have its contents removed, to the shops for repairs, or the “cripple” track for junk, if its case is well-nigh hopeless.

With the “O. K.” of the car inspectors finally pronounced, the train that was comes up to the hump, and the expert crew that operates there makes short work of sorting out the cars—this track for “stuff” southwest of Pittsburgh, this next for Cleveland and Chicago, the third for transcontinental; and so it goes. Two lines of cars are drilled at the same time, for just ahead of the switch-engine is an open-platform car, known as the “pole-car,” and by means of heavy timbers the “pole-man” guides two rows of heavy cars down the slight grades to their resting-places.

The cars do not rest long upon the classification-yard tracks. From the far end of each of these they are being gathered in solid trains, one for Pittsburgh, another for Cleveland and Chicago, the third transcontinental, and so on. Engines of the next division are being hitched to them, pet “hacks” brought from the caboose tracks, and the long strings of loaded box-cars are off toward the West in incredibly short time.

Of course there are some trains that never go upon the “classification” at Randall’s yard. There are solid coal trains bound in and out of New York, of Philadelphia, and of Boston, that pass him empty and filled, and only change engines and cabooses at his command. There are through freights, bound from one seaboard to the other, from the Far East to the Far West, that do likewise. But the majority of the freight movement has the sorting out within his domain, his four humps are busy day and night with an ordinary run of traffic, and you shudder to think what must be the condition when business begins to run at high tide.

“We get it a-humming every once in a while,” he finally confesses. “We had one day, a little time ago, when we received 121 east-bound trains in twenty-four hours, more than 3,200 cars all told. That meant, on an average, a train every 11½ minutes. That same day we got 78 west-bound freights, with more than 3,600 cars. That meant nearly 7,000 cars handled on the in-freight in twenty-four hours, or a train coming in to me every 7½ minutes during day and night. They don’t do much better than that on some of the subway and elevated railroads in the big cities; and I haven’t said a word about the trains and cars we despatched—just about as much again, of course.”

Through yards such as these there are incoming streams of merchandise, equal at least to the outgoing, passing through classification yards in carload lots and the great transfer-houses in “LCL.” These streams must be kept separate and from clogging one another or themselves. Cars must carry loads whenever they are moved—“empties” are the bogy-men of the superintendents of transportation—and cars from “foreign” systems must be quickly returned to their home roads. The yardmaster at a busy freight point has his own worries. His puzzle is unending. To it he must bend the bigness of a big mind, he must be prepared to handle the unequal volumes of traffic that pass through his domain with an equal skill: in dull times he must seek to keep his plant working under conditions of rare economy; when the freight rises to flood tide, he must fight in harness to prevent the freight from congesting. The word “failure” has been stricken out of his vocabulary by his superiors.

It takes a high grade of railroader to serve as yardmaster.

CHAPTER VIII

We have already told of a very few of the earliest and most famous American locomotives; the Stourbridge Lion, which Horatio Allen brought to the Delaware & Hudson Company; the Best Friend, which was built in New York City, and which went to Charleston, South Carolina, to be the first American locomotive to run in the United States, the De Witt Clinton, which awoke the echoes of the Hudson and Mohawk valleys in a single day; and the Tom Thumb, built by Peter Cooper, which induced the directors of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad to change their motive power from horses to steam, and so opened a great new development for their property.

A little while after Cooper’s Tom Thumb had achieved the astounding feat of beating a team of horses in hauling a railroad coach, the directors of the B. & O. offered a prize of $4,000 “for the most approved engine that shall be delivered for trial upon the road on or before June 1, 1831; and $3,500 for the engine which shall be adjudged the next best.” It was determined in this prospectus that “the engine, when in operation must not exceed three and one-half tons weight and must, on a level road, be capable of drawing day by day fifteen tons, inclusive of the weight of wagons, fifteen miles an hour.”

Three locomotives answered this generous offer. Of them but one, the York, oftener called the Arabian, built at York, Pa., by Davis & Gartner, and hauled to Baltimore by horses over the turnpikes, was of practical service. Phineas Davis was a watch and clock maker, but he succeeded in devising a locomotive that was the forerunner of the famous Grasshopper upon the Baltimore & Ohio. Better name was never given to a locomotive, the rude and ungainly angles formed by rods and levers giving a distinct resemblance to the long-legged bugs. Yet the Grasshoppers served their purpose. In the late eighties, the Arabian was still in service in the Mount Clare yards at Baltimore. With a single exception, it never had an accident or even left the rails. That exception was just before the completion of the Washington branch, and Davis was a passenger upon the engine. It was going at a fair rate of speed when suddenly it rolled over upon its side in the ditch. No one was hurt, save Davis, who was instantly killed. It seemed a strange caprice of Fate, for although careful examination was immediately made, both of the engine and of the track, no reason could ever be assigned for the accident.

In that same year, 1831, the John Bull, which was built by George & Robert Stephenson & Company, of Newcastle-on-Tyne, in England, was received in Philadelphia for the Camden & Amboy Railroad. As long as the locomotive continues to serve the railroad the name of George Stephenson, its inventor, must be indissolubly linked with it. The John Bull was easily the most famous Stephenson engine ever sent to the United States. It has been shown at all our great expositions, and now occupies a position of honor in the great Smithsonian institution at Washington. Of these early engines, which it was found necessary to bring from England, a volume once issued by the Rogers Locomotive Works, of Paterson, N. J., has said:

As a matter of fact, the English engines, built for use on long straight stretches of line would never have served on the early roads in this country with their steep and curving routes through the mountains. So, in the latter part of the year 1831, John B. Jervis invented what he called “a new plan of frame, with a bearing-carriage for a locomotive engine” for the use of the Mohawk & Hudson Railroad, in which he introduced the forward truck which is to-day a distinctive feature of American engines. Its effectiveness was at once recognized, and its almost general adoption immediately followed. Five years later, Henry R. Campbell, of Philadelphia, had patented his system of two driving-wheels and a truck, and the distinctive type of American locomotive was born.

In the development of that peculiarly successful type, great names have been written into the history of American locomotive-building—the names of such men as Rogers and Winans and Hinckley and Mason and Brooks and Matthias Baldwin and William Norris; the last two both of Philadelphia. Norris, after some interesting smaller engines, built the George Washington in 1835. This engine was not one whit less than a triumph. It ascended the steep plane of the Columbia Railroad in Philadelphia, a grade of 7½ per cent, carrying two passenger cars in which were seated 53 persons. It came to a stop on that grade and started up again by its own efforts. After reaching the summit, the engine was turned around and came down, stopping once in its descent.

That was the only time that a locomotive ever essayed the Columbia plane, and the performance of the George Washington has not been attempted in all these years save in the case of Latrobe’s temporary line at Kingwood Tunnel. The English newspapers of that day ridiculed the experiment, pronounced it a Baron Munchausen story, yet in 1839 Norris sent an engine overseas that successfully climbed the then famous Lickey plane, in England. After that he was besieged by foreign orders, sending 16 American locomotives to Great Britain in 1840, and, during the next few years, 170 others to France, Germany, Prussia, Austria, Belgium, Italy, and Saxony. William Norris did his full part in giving Europe a measure of respect for the growing nation across the Atlantic.

Matthias Baldwin, like Phineas Davis, of York, was a watch maker in the beginning of his life. He lived long enough to lay the foundation of one of the greatest of American single industries, to give his name to a firm that has carried the fame of American locomotives around the world and kept it alive in every nation of the earth. Baldwin’s first locomotive was built in 1832 for the Philadelphia, Germantown, and Norristown Railroad; and that it was a good locomotive is proved by the fact that it performed twenty years of faithful service upon that line. His second engine, built two years later, went south to that famous old Charleston & Hamburg Company. After that his works were regularly established, their head to give his patience and untiring genius to the perfecting of the locomotive. The history of Baldwin locomotives is, in an important sense, the history of the industry in the United States.

It was not long before the pioneer engines were considered too small for much practical value, and Mr. Baldwin was building a much bigger locomotive for the Vermont Central Railroad. This engine, named the Governor Paine for a famous executive of that State, was delivered in 1848, and for it was paid the unprecedented price of $10,000. It had a pair of driving-wheels, six and one-half feet in diameter placed just back of the fire-box, a slightly smaller pair being placed forward. Baldwin must have given full value, for it is related that the engine could be started from a state of rest and run a mile in forty-three seconds. The Pennsylvania Railroad ordered three of the same sort, and one of these once hauled a special train carrying President Zachary Taylor at sixty miles an hour. In weight, the locomotive was steadily increasing. In the beginning, these engines weighed from four to seven tons each; by the late forties engines of twenty-five tons each were being built for the Reading Road, and these were regarded as monsters.

Year by year the locomotive was being perfected in all its details. The cab made its appearance and was first opposed by the engineers, who imagined that they would be badly penned in, in case of accident. The Erie contributed the bell-rope signal from the train; we have already heard of that first whistle on the locomotive of the Sandusky and Mad River Railroad. The Boston & Worcester devised the headlight, so that time might be saved by handling freight at night. More important than these were the experiments by Ross Winans and by S. M. Felton that led to the substitution of coal for wood as a fuel, and the development by Rogers at his Paterson works of the link device, so necessary in stopping, starting, and reversing the locomotive.

Gradually the size of the locomotive increased to 28 and 30 tons in the late fifties. Finally James Milholland, engineer of machinery for the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, built in 1863 a pusher engine for coal trains that weighed something over 50 tons. When folk saw that engine they almost gasped, and wondered what the railroads were coming to. But the wiser men kept silent. They knew that as long as bridges and roadbeds and fine steel rails were increased in strength, the limit of size of the locomotive had not been reached. The greater grip the locomotive has upon the rail, the greater its pulling power, the greater its efficiency. Sheer weight, and weight alone, gives that grip. It certainly takes a weight of seven tons to give a grip of one ton upon a dry rail; in the case of wet rails this ratio becomes ten to one.

Then wonder not that the locomotive steadily increased in size, that the Moguls with six driving-wheels, and the Consolidations with eight, came into vogue a few years after the close of the war, and that these kept increasing in weight all the while. Height and width were and still are rigidly limited by the clearance of the line. The locomotive must stand no more than fourteen or sixteen feet high and from nine to eleven feet wide; in length the problem only meets the genius of the designer.

But it is altogether possible that the limit of the size of the locomotive would have been reached long ago if it had not been for the coming of the air-brake. This most important assurance of the safety of the railroad passenger came into its being in 1869, when George Westinghouse, its inventor, was permitted to try it on a Panhandle train. From the beginning of railroads the necessity for brakes was apparent, and in 1833 Robert Stephenson patented a steam brake for the driving-wheels. That same brake, with compressed air substituted for steam, is essentially the Westinghouse device of to-day. But Westinghouse made the air do the work of steam. After he had developed the idea he offered it to leading Eastern railroads, but they one and all declined it.

Finally, he was permitted to place it on a Panhandle train, full assurance having been given to the railroad officials that he would be personally responsible for any injury done to their equipment. Four cars and an engine were fitted with the new device and the train started forth from Pittsburgh to Steubenville. On the way its progress was halted by a farm wagon which was caught in the rail at a highway crossing. The engineer whistled for the handbrakes in the good old-fashioned way but he knew that he was too late. Then he thought of the air-brake. He had little faith in the contraption, but he gave its handle a wrench and the train stopped ten feet from the wagon. Several lives were saved and the air-brake was proven. From that day forth it was simply a question of developing the device to its fullest possibility, and Mr. Westinghouse has proved himself able to do that very thing.

The air-brake was a fact. Steel had come into use for axles, driving-wheel tires, frames, and every other vital or bearing part of the locomotive; and the designers were again increasing its size. They passed the Consolidation and built the Mastodon. These were freighters—each with ten drivers—drivers with tremendous gripping force. They went through what M. N. Forney has called a “period of adolescence in railroad progress,” and in that period they experimented with huge driving-wheels only to discard them once again. Then they built bigger engines than even the Mastodon; the Decapod, with twelve driving-wheels; the El Gobernador which was built by the Southern Pacific at its Sacramento shops in 1884, weighing, with engine and tender fully equipped, 113 tons.

Still the locomotive grows and its progenitors talk of the 500-ton machine. They have recently built the Mallet articulated compound, which because of its very great weight has splendid gripping force and is especially adapted for pushing-service on heavy grades. The Baltimore & Ohio, the Erie, the New York Central, the Great Northern, and the Santa Fe have already become committed to this type of engine. The American locomotive Company has just completed for the Delaware & Hudson several Mallet articulated compounds that are among the most powerful locomotives yet constructed. They were designed for pusher service, on heavy grades, north from Carbondale on the main line of the D. & H., which average from .81 to 1.36 per cent. Up to recently the heavy northbound coal traffic up these grades has been handled by the use of two heavy pusher engines. A single one of the new Mallets will do the work of the two pushers, and therein lies the economy in their use.

These new giants are, in operation, two 8-wheel engines, with individual cylinders, steam chests and supplies from a single boiler and fire-box. The gripping power of 16 driving-wheels under the enormous weight of 223 tons can be imagined; the designers estimate it at the high figure of forty-three tons. The exceptional length of these monster engines—a fraction over ninety feet—is carried around the curves of mountainous lines by an ingenious joint in their solid steel frames. This then is only the latest of American engines; but not quite the biggest, for the Topeka shops of the Santa Fe Railroad claim that honor with their new Mallets, each 121 feet long and weighing complete 810,000 pounds. The 500-ton locomotive does not seem so very far away when one comes to consider the Santa Fe giants. These engines, which are operated in pushing freights over the heavy grades in the Southwest, were built from two of the Santa Fe’s heaviest freight engines. They operate with equal facility in either direction as there is not a turntable in the land which would come anywhere near accommodating them.