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The second Pennsylvania train leaves thirty minutes later and follows the main line of that much-travelled highway all the way to Pittsburgh, which it reaches just at noon. Other railroads out of New York start fast newspaper and mail trains just before dawn and combine regular passenger facilities with them--the Lehigh Valley despatching a flyer at 2:00 o'clock from the old Pennsylvania terminal in Jersey City for the populous northeastern corner of Pennsylvania and the so-called Southern Tier of New York State. The Lackawanna reaches a somewhat similar territory by its fast express, which leaves Hoboken at 2:30 o'clock.

A similar cluster of mail and newspaper flyers starts out of Chicago early each morning--east over the Lake Shore, the Michigan Central, and the Pennsylvania, south over the Monon and the Illinois Central, and west and northwest over the Northwestern, the Rock Island, and the Santa Fe. Other great cities follow the same programme in lesser scale--there are many important fast-mail trains that make their departures from initial terminals throughout all the daylight hours and late into the evening. A regiment of mail-cars make their way over the face of the land on fast through expresses of every sort. The postal service is a business of magnitude within itself.

The Postmaster General's report for the year ending June 30, 1910, gives a clear conception of its magnitude. He showed then that there were 176 full railroad post-office lines, manned by 1,736 crews of 8,332 clerks. There were also 1,392 compartment railroad post-office lines--lines in which a portion of a baggage or smoking-car is partitioned for the sole use of the postal service--manned by 4,085 crews of 5,407 clerks, 18 electric car lines with 20 crews and 22 clerks, and 55 steamboat lines with 98 crews and 86 clerks. Of the cars built for the exclusive use of the railroad mail service, 1,114 were in use and 206 held in reserve, while 3,208 of the compartment cars were in use, 559 of these being held in reserve. In addition, the Post-office Department operates 25 trolley mail-cars.

Great progress has been made in the substitution of steel mail-cars for wooden ones--a real step forward when one pauses to consider the dangerous position in which the mail-cars are placed in most trains. The records of the Post-office Department are filled with stories of heroism on the part of mail-clerks in saving, both the extremely valuable merchandise that is given to their care, and vastly more valuable human lives. The list of the post-office employees who have met death while on duty in the railroad mail service is not a short one.

But the railroads are cooperating with the Government in giving the finest type of steel cars to its mail service,--sixty of these are already in use on the Pennsylvania system,--for, as we stated at the outset of this chapter, the transportation of Uncle Sam's mail is no slight function of the modern railroad. The big operating men across the land are constantly bending their heads with those of the post-office officials toward the betterment of that transportation.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE MECHANICAL DEPARTMENTS

CARE AND REPAIR OF CARS AND ENGINES--THE LOCOMOTIVE CLEANED AND INSPECTED AFTER EACH LONG JOURNEY--FREQUENT VISITS OF ENGINES TO THE SHOPS AND FOUNDRIES AT ALTOONA--THE TABLE FOR TESTING THE POWER AND SPEED OF LOCOMOTIVES--THE CAR SHOPS--STEEL CARS BEGINNING TO SUPERSEDE WOODEN ONES--PAINTING A FREIGHT CAR--LACK OF METHOD IN EARLY REPAIR SHOPS--SEARCH FOR FLAWS IN WHEELS.

To care for its rolling-stock the railroad creates two distinct functions of its business. All the care of its permanent way, including tracks, tunnels, bridges, comes under the control of the Maintenance Way Department. Similarly, the Mechanical Department assumes control of the cars and engines, sees to it that each is maintained to its fullest efficiency, both by care in daily service and by certain visits to the shops at regular intervals, for repairs, reconstruction, and painting.

To do all this requires a large plant, both in buildings and machinery. It is distributed at every important point along the railroad. At terminal and operating points, roundhouse facilities of greater or less extent are sure to be located, and at the headquarters of each division these are generally expanded into shops for the making of light repairs and to avoid handling crippled equipment for any great distance. One large shop plant is apt to suffice the average railroad for the heavy repair work. If the road stretch to any extraordinary length, even this feature is apt to be duplicated in order to concentrate this repair work as far as possible.

All this concerns the care and repair of the locomotive--which the railroader quickly groups under the title "motive-power." To care for the engines while they are in use out upon the line, to see to it that engineers and firemen alike handle these mechanisms with economy and skill, is a responsibility that is placed upon the road foreman of engines of each division. He has supervision over smaller roundhouses but at any of the larger of these structures there is a roundhouse foreman in direct charge. The railroad long ago learned that its best economy rested in having plenty of executive control. That has come to be one of the maxims of the business.

There is a master mechanic in charge of the division shops and in many cases he has authority over the road foreman of engines and the roundhouse foremen. Then under him he has his various assistants, forming a working force not at all unlike that of the average iron-working shop. All this organism is gathered together under a superintendent of motive power, who in turn may report to a general mechanical superintendent. This official answers only to the general manager, or, in some cases, to a vice-president to whom these functions of the care of the railroad are delegated.

The proposition of the cars is generally treated quite apart from that of the locomotive, and separate shops under the direction of a master car-builder and his assistants are located at a few points upon the system, where they may be of fairly easy access. Rough repairs (the car-builders term these "light" repairs) to cars are carried forth at each division yard. This work is almost entirely confined to the freight equipment, and a good part of it goes upon "foreign" cars--cars that do not belong at all to the railroad making the repairs.

This feature of the repair work is a direct result of an elaborate system of interchange in freight equipment upon American railroads, in order to prevent the breaking of bulk in the shipment of merchandise from one line to another. Cars will break down when they are many hundreds of miles away from home, and the railroad upon which they are operating at the time carts them to the nearest temporary repair yard or to its own shops, makes the necessary repairs, and charges for them in accordance with a scale prepared by the national association of Master Car-Builders. This necessitates a vast deal of bookkeeping and is only one of the many complications brought about by our extensive plan of railroading in America.

The railroad will probably build the greater part of its freight equipment, although in these days of the supplanting of wood by steel in car-construction the companies are apt to stand appalled at the cost of the steel working machinery, and to buy their cars direct from the manufacturers very much as they purchase their locomotives. Passenger equipment is almost invariably secured in this way. It is a big railroad indeed that seeks to construct for itself the huge travelling palaces that the passenger of to-day has come to demand for his comfort. The repairing and the painting of these elaborate vehicles is enough of a proposition in itself.

To begin at the beginning, one first comes in contact with the mechanical department as it comes into constant contact with the operation of the railroad. This is the more quickly observed at the roundhouses, those great circular structures that are a feature of the railroad section of every important town. In England the "engine sheds," as they are there known, are simple enough structures, housing a series of parallel tracks, which are served by either a transfer table or switches. Such a plan is pursued in this country only where space is at a premium--as in the heart of some great city where realty is exceedingly high-priced; for the heads of our railroads have held tenaciously to the easily operated turntable and roundhouse scheme. The table, generally driven by electricity or a small dummy engine, forms the centre, the roundhouse a segment of the entire rim of the wheel. The great advantage of its simple design lies in the fact that it is instantly possible to get at any one of the fifty or more locomotives that it houses. It is this feature that has endeared it to the railroad man for many years.

[Illustration: TRIPLE-PHASE ALTERNATING-CURRENT LOCOMOTIVE BUILT BY THE GENERAL ELECTRIC CO. FOR USE IN THE CASCADE TUNNEL, OF THE GREAT NORTHERN RAILWAY]

[Illustration: HEAVY SERVICE, ALTERNATING AND DIRECT CURRENT FREIGHT LOCOMOTIVE BUILT BY THE WESTINGHOUSE COMPANY FOR THE NEW YORK, NEW HAVEN & HARTFORD RAILROAD]

[Illustration: THE MONOROAD IN PRACTICAL USE FOR CARRYING PASSENGERS AT CITY ISLAND, NEW YORK]

[Illustration: THE CIGAR-SHAPED CAR OF THE MONOROAD]

The locomotive that hauls the train goes to its "stall" in the roundhouse directly after its work is done. Its crews, having finished their run, desert it for the time being, and it comes within the charge of the roundhouse foreman and his "hostlers." These old terms are reminiscent of the days when the roundhouse was a real stable and its denizens flesh and blood horses. Now the denizens of the roundhouse are iron horses, and in their great size as they rest within their house they are indicative of the progress that has been made in the design and construction of railroad equipment.

On the way to the roundhouse, possibly on the way from it (the practice varies on different railroads) the engine will stop at the ash-pit. It will have its fires cleaned in a long pit that runs underneath a section of track, and then pass on to the coaling-shed. The long pit at some points is filled with iron buckets that run on wheels into which the ashes are dumped and these are emptied by overhead crane apparatus into a nearby line of empty gondolas, ready to be taken away to be disposed of.

At the coaling shed the tender is filled, some twelve or fifteen tons being required if the engine is large; the water-spout fills the capacious tanks, while the hostlers take good care to see that the sand-box is filled, as a precaution against slipping on the next steep grade. Then on to the turntable and the waiting stall, until ready to go out again upon the regular service or extra duty. During that time it will be both cleaned and inspected. The fireman may be held responsible for the cleanly appearance of his engine above the running-board. Below that, the work will be delegated to the roundhouse force. The fireman will probably feel that it should clean all the engine. When he feels particularly aggrieved over the matter it is time for him to meet one of the veterans of the service, who will tell him of the days when the engines were gayly ornamented with brass and light-colored paints, and the fireman's career had added to it an endless campaign with his wiping rag against the tendency of the bright-work to tarnish. There are some things that decidedly favor the fireman of the present time.

There are not always sufficient roundhouse facilities at every point; the traffic of our railroads has a way of constantly running away from the facilities; and so there are many times when the engines must be housed in the open. But the vigilance and the care upon them are never relaxed. The railroad that is foolish enough to try to save upon the maintenance of its motive power sooner or later pays a terrible price for its penurious folly.

So it comes to pass that every engine makes a regular visit to the shops, generally at periods of from ten to fourteen months, depending upon the service in which it is engaged. On some of these visits, it will be pretty completely dismantled, and a travelling crane running the full length of the erecting shop will soon lift the heavy boiler from frame and wheels and carry it down to the boiler-makers, with no more difficulty than an automatic package carrier in a dry-goods store would have. There is a deal of pride and rivalry between the men as to the facility and speed that can be shown in taking an engine in hand, dismantling it completely, making necessary repairs, setting it up again and placing it in service once more. The men of the Erie shops at Hornellsville succeeded in doing the trick a year or so ago in the remarkably short time of twenty-four hours.

In that brief time a locomotive came in from the road, bedraggled and begrimed and marked "TBMF" for the benefit of the shop-men. "TBMF"

translated means "Tires, Boxes, Machine, Flues," so specifying the engine parts to be repaired. In the slang of the repair shop the men say "To Be Made Fast." These four requisites are the ones most necessary to make the locomotive fit for from 50,000 to 75,000 miles of service before she shall again turn into the shop. To make them in twenty-four hours required some planning on the part of the Erie shop foremen at Hornellsville, and yet it was only a few weeks after 1734 had come out of the Hornellsville plant fit for revenue service in a single day and night, before the men of the rival Susquehanna shop wished a chance at a contest of that sort.

"TBMF" generally keeps a locomotive in the shop for from a fortnight to three or four weeks; the Canadian Pacific considered that it had done a remarkable thing in effecting these repairs on a locomotive, with a super-heater, at its Winnipeg shops in 57-1/2 hours. The Hornellsville record was one most remarkable. But the Susquehanna shop men took 2018 in off the road after 70,000 miles without repairs; took in the big puller at 7 o'clock in the morning, made the heavy "TBMF" repairs, and turned her out for revenue service at 7:34 o'clock in the evening--thirteen hours and thirty-four minutes. At midnight she was pulling a heavy through freight west once again, and a most astounding record in American shop work had been consummated.

The United States have few such towns as England possesses in Swindon and in Crede, railroad towns in the distinctive sense that they were the absolute creation of the railroad in the first instance. There is many a town from one ocean to the other that has owed its stimulus and development to the location of large railroad shops and terminals within its boundaries, but the railroads have, as a rule, dodged the creation of distinctive towns. Pullman, within the outskirts of Chicago, was a monumental failure in this very sort of enterprise. It was designed and built to accommodate the great car-building shops of that man who did the most of all men to make luxury in railroad traffic--George M. Pullman; and no greater care was shown in the construction and design of the works than was given toward the stores, the churches, the schools, and the homes of the workmen. Pullman was decidedly a model town; yet Pullman was a failure. Other model towns of the same sort in Europe have been marked successes, and that very thing may well serve to illustrate the difference in temperament between the American and the European workingman. The American resents too much being done for him; he is instinctively jealous of his individuality.

Away back in the long-ago the Erie created a railroad town at Susquehanna in the extreme north part of Pennsylvania. It built shops there and soon after repeated the experiment at Hornellsville in the southwestern part of New York State. The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad similarly developed Cumberland, Maryland; and the Lake Shore, Elkhart, Ind. These are few of many instances where a great railroad shop has served to develop a sizable town. In some others they have developed important suburbs of large cities, as the Lake Shore's plant at Collinwood, at the eastern edge of the city of Cleveland; and the great shops of the New York Central at Depew, in the outskirts of Buffalo, which were built when the plant at West Albany could no longer accommodate the rolling-stock of a rapidly growing system.

In Altoona, Pa., the United States possesses probably the only distinctive railroad town of extent within its boundaries. Altoona was the creation of the Pennsylvania Railroad more than half a century ago, and its progress, carefully stimulated, has proceeded step by step in company with the progress of one of the largest of American railroad systems. The mistakes of Pullman have not been repeated at Altoona. If the Pennsylvania Railroad has ruled the city in the hills, it has ruled it tacitly and tactfully at all times. It has avoided even the appearance of paternalism, and the growth of Altoona has been measured by the growth of the country, which in its turn is measured with marvellous accuracy by the growth of the railroad traffic. So a trip to Altoona and through its great shops will be illustrative of the very best practice in the construction and maintenance of a railroad's car and engine.

The Altoona shops are unusual in the fact that both locomotives and cars of the highest capacity and finest type are built within them, in addition to a great repair and refurnishing work being carried forward there at all times. To do this work, the plant, employing during the seasons of heaviest traffic something like 15,000 men--is divided into several divisions that stretch themselves along the railroad tracks for about six miles.

The first of these divisions consists of the foundries, devoted largely to the manufacture of cast-iron car-wheels of every size and grade. Extensive cupolas, core-rooms and moulding-floors are provided for making 1,000 car-wheels every 24 hours. There is the blacksmith shop as part of this particular plant. The blacksmith is one of the handiest of men about a railroad shop and one of the few to survive the almost universal introduction of machine processes. There are also the machine and pattern shops, together with a large foundry for the manufacture of castings for cars and locomotives, having a capacity of 200 tons a day.

The second division of industrial activity at Altoona is the locomotive repair shop. This is the largest of all the individual plants at that point, employing about 5,000 men, and with its three- and four-story structures built closely within a busy yard it is a veritable city within a city. It has a capacity of about 1,800 reconstructed and repaired locomotives a year and is a shop well calculated to fill any one with respect.

The third division is the Junction shops, where the new locomotives are built; 1,800 men are employed within it, and there men take the new castings and forgings (most of the castings coming up from the giant foundries that we have just noticed), and from them they create that almost human thing, the railroad locomotive. When the locomotive emerges from that shop it takes its turn upon the testing-table, the mechanical experts place their final stamp of approval upon it, and at last it goes out from the shop, under its own steam, to perform the great work for which it was created.

The testing-table is one of the most interesting of Altoona's activities.

The engine is run upon a series of wheels that fit exactly underneath its own; it is fastened snugly into place; connections are made with a score of pipes and rods that fit upon its mechanism, and it starts off for a run up over the division. It runs miles and miles, snorting furiously over the hard grades and under the heavy loads it has to haul, and yet it does not move even the finest fraction of an inch from that testing table. Its mechanism throbs with energy, its wheels revolve at a fearful rate; yet it is a helpless caged creature in a seemingly impotent energy, as the men in charge of the test watch a dozen dials, notebooks in hand. The big driving wheels turn only upon the friction wheels beneath them but the engineers who are conducting the test can tell the speed at which the locomotive is travelling--in theory--by the almost human needles upon the dial-faces.

There is more delicate scientific apparatus behind the engine. It is stripped from its tender for this test, and by this apparatus the pull of the engine upon the dead load of the train can be exactly estimated in pounds and ounces. Nor is this all. The friction wheels underneath the drivers are controlled by powerful water brakes, and by the regulation of these brakes, strains or handicaps can be placed upon the engine exactly similar to those of the grades it may have to reach over a heavy mountainous stretch of railroad.

There is no guess-work about modern railroading. Many hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent each year in expert scientific tests of every sort, in the salaries of men who devote their entire time to this work; and the railroads reap the benefits in many more hundreds of thousands of dollars in operating economies. Railroading is a pretty exact science; the big engine on the testing-table at Altoona is only one of a host of evidences of the skill and genius that are being brought to bear upon the operation of the great railroad properties of the country at the present time.

This engine goes upon diet. Dr. Wiley down at Washington with his young men sustaining themselves scientifically upon measured and selected foods has something of the same method that is shown with the test engine up at Altoona in the hills. Its supply of coal is carefully weighed and analyzed by sample. An accounting of the amount consumed down to ounces is carefully kept, the water supply is also examined and measured with great care. When the test is finished and the big chaotive engine has covered miles of theoretical grades with a long theoretical train hitched on behind, the experts get busy with their pencils and begin to prepare the reports upon which their chief may rely when he goes ahead to construct another gross of 100-ton locomotives.

The car shops rank next in importance to the locomotive shops. The foreman of this plant tells you casually that it has an annual capacity of 300 new passenger cars and 3,600 new freight cars. It is a great plant of itself, some seventy acres of ground covered with great construction buildings.

Some of these are in roundhouse form, for convenience in handling equipment under construction; others are set side by side and easily reached by use of a long transfer table.

The work of erecting the freight equipment is carried on quite separate from that of the passenger car work. The almost universal use of steel in the manufacture of every sort of freight car, save the box-cars, which still have wooden walls and roof built upon a steel foundation, has made a large steel-working shop a necessary adjunct of every car-building plant.

One of the most interesting features of the Altoona car-building plant is a giant hydraulic press situate in the open, just outside of the steel-working plant. This press brings a dead weight of 1,500 tons down upon the sheet of steel that it receives. It is used in making the sills of the freight-cars--"fish-bellies," the master car-builders call them--and under that giant press a sheet of steel, one-half inch in thickness and from thirty to forty feet in length, is bent into shape as easily as you might bend a sheet of soft cardboard within your fingers.

The press makes many hundred "fish-belly" sills every working day, and it pays its way.

The steel-working in this shop has been carried forth into passenger car construction and a great shed given over for that work. Within it one sees the gaunt frames of the cars that are to be, gaining shape, until at the far end of the shop is a line of the cars, completed as far as the steel workers can carry them, and ready to be swung by one of the ever-busy switch-engines to the finishing shop, and then finally to the paint shop.

Even with the steel car coming into its own, there are still hundreds of thousands of wooden cars in operation; and the construction of wooden cars will not cease for many years. While steel as a raw material is not far in advance of the cost of wood these days, the cost of fashioning it into cars is still so excessive as to make it impracticable save in cases of extremely profitable operation. One of the strongest points in favor of steel in car-construction is that of the economy of its maintenance, always a strong point with railroad men. The wooden car feels the wear and tear of life upon the rail keenly; in the case of a wreck it is not to be even compared with the steel car.

It should not be forgotten, though, that the railroads have many thousands of wooden passenger-coaches still in service, and the substitution of steel equipment for these has only just begun. The average life of a car approximates twenty years, and the simplest of railroad economics demands that these cars be retained for their active life. As they wear out steel cars can be, and they already are being, substituted by the great systems.

This new equipment is being used at first upon the main lines and through trains, where both speed and density of traffic demand the railroad's best equipment. Gradually it will be spread to the trains and branch lines of less importance.

With the wooden car still a factor in railroad equipment, the carpenter has not yet lost his vocation in the shops. There is much of the coarser work on the freight cars for him; in the elaborate passenger coaches, dining-cars and other equipment of that class, the great mass of cabinet work still demands the cunning of his hands. Here in the miscellaneous carpenter-shop he is at work upon a seat frame for a day-coach, a shade fixture, a broken chair from a dining car, a baggage truck from some station; there is plenty of work for the carpenter around a car-shop.

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