The Birmingham age-herald., 1905-11-19

l than 15 per cent of the delays and inter l ruptions now arising will occur when
 once the new system is perfected. The 1 boiler, fire box, cylinders, pistons, re- 1 ciprocating parts, and all the complicated mechanism of a steam locomotive give way to motor set directly over the axle. Instead of the fireman toilng tn- cessantly with his shovel and rake to maintain the tremendous pressure nec- essary to drive a modern passenger train along at the speed demanded by the
 American public, the power comes In of it's own accord with equal ease from d third rail or an overhead wire. and the engineer. with one hand on the control Ter. and the other on the brake lever, needs no assistance. Whether second
 man will be kept in the cab at all is a question which has not yet been de- cided, for railroad men do not cross bridges until they come to them, but if
 he is, 1t will be as a precaution against
 the possibility of an unforeseen accident to the engineer
 | Like a willing horse. the electric loco
 motive will take all the work given to !, it without complaining. steam engine stops when tasks beyond it's strength are imposed upon 1t, but the electric ma chine never shirks. The extra work may
 burn up the motor but till this happens the train moves steadily on. Besides with electricity. it is far easier to pro portion the power to the load than 1t Is with steam. The average weight of a l train is 13O tons. but this is often greatly exceeded. The heaviest train run on the New Haven, for instance, weighs l5O l tons. An ordinary sleeping car weighs 30 tons and when the tide of travel 1 is at the flood the midnight express to
 Boston is often made up of ten or twelve l cars: a train of fifty loaded freight cars no uncommon sight-would also touch the maximum in weight.
 With steam power one must either de- sign locomotive to pull 75o tons and
 submit to the waste involved in having such a powerful machine draw third or half a load, or resort to the eXpedient, common in hilly country, of two engines utilized in a double header to pull heavy trains Double headers are abom- nations to railroad men. They mean in-
 cessant jerks and jars, for the two To- comotives cannot be run in perfect har-
 money: a great waste of force, since
 the effective combined drawing power is far from being the sum of that of each of the separate engines; and, finally the employment of extra men.
 Waste Is Avoided.
 With electricity all this waste is avoid- | ed The New Haven's electric engines. with a speed of from eighty to ninety | miles an hour will have pull of 1 250 tons apiece. 5When necessary, any
 number of machines can be coupled to- , gether and operated as one engine by one man. Thus 750-ton train would re- ouire three locomotives, a 500-ton train two and an ordinary light traffic can be
 drawn by single engine. The advant- ages to be derived from the possibility of combining at will these units of power are obvious.
 Even such minor duties as heating the cars are better performed by the new tyne of engine At present the iiremen
 must feed a fire capable not only of driv- ing a heavy train at the rate of mile
 A minute but of heating a dozen or so cars, of compressing air for the braking mechanism, and. in case of such trains as the evening fve-hour limited between New York and Boston, of lighting them with incandescent lamps as well. In the electric locomotive, where there is an abundance of power always at hand. there is a separate motor to compress
 air for the brakes just as there IS on the
 latest type of heavy interurban trolley
 cars A small boiler is used to make
 steam for heating, the low pressure which
 is sufficient for this purpose being main-
 tained by a fire automatically supplied
 with liquid fuel. No one needs to bother
 about it and the passengers are as com fortable as if the firemen were still throw
 ing shovelful after shovelful of coal into
 the firebox and laboriously raking the
 blazing mass over and over