The Birmingham age-herald., 1918-02-17

Central of that type which weighs | 100000 pounds, and the Boston and
 Maine has recently installed some all
 most as large.
 The traffic of the war will be hard
 on both cars and locomotives. It has
 practically worn out the rolling stock and tracks of Germany and France. /, our old cars and engines will be grad : | ually sent to the scrap heap and new
 ones will have to be built in the short
 est time possible. Tn 1916 we had 29, OoO less cars and 1237 less locomotives
 than in 1915, and the wear and tear iess year was greater than ever. The
 car works and locomotive works are
 all busy upon government orders. | Since the war began 10000 new lfelght cars have been bought by the railroads, and the war board ap- proved of another order for ,000 l more cars to be financed by the gov ernment The biggest of engines are | oelng built in the locomotive works, ahG they turned out the first within 1 tEree weeks after receiving the order The work of building new rolling
 stock IS being pushed as never before. ailo that notwithstanding the cost. The pitces or all materials and wages have aHpost doubled since the war began. ana the prices of cars and engines nave risen sky-high The Santa Fe re- cently ordered box cars at s23oo
 apIece' which is $500 more than they ccst Tn 1916, and $500 more than q 1 rev years before. One of tbe raiGN roads recently paid s1.250,OO0 for 4 oo~eh Mallet locomotives The price
 Was more than $1o0,O00 for each en-
 sihe' m 1916 they cost s97.00O and be-
 Tore that the cost was still less
 hhese prices will give you an idea of ,neie some or the money goes in operat .ns our railroads. For the coming year 1, We shall be shovelng out gold b,, tai taa reas of millions of dollars a month
 ana large amount will be spent for ra f,
 .9au equipment. As the roads are now | .pey nave something like 65G00 locono- | tIres, ana We shall need thousands more nave more cars than there are peo- | pc III Chicago, and the building of sev-
 eai hundred thousand new ones is under ! ~aS. we need box cars, flat cars, and
 tne sohdolas of steel which are used for | coal freighting. The capacity of each
 cldss or freight car is 100 GOO pounds or more, and the cars are from 4O to ae 1 leet Tn length But the boz cars on one
 'lach and crowd them together and they would make a solid train all the way from Boston to San Francisco and oY oSs the Paeifc ocean to Shanghai l III Cnlna. The passenger cars range in
 length from 72 to 7S feet. and sooe nt .,t our locomotives are from go to 100 feet 1 iohg The total number of cars of ali classes IS almost 2,500,0G0 enough to fill a elack running around the earth at tbe
 equator and leave some to spare.
 ne apove figures give you an inlSlins
 ol oHcle sam job. It is the biggest rail-
 road Job in the world and the one which | ls VIII take most skill to handle Our
 raliWays are so many that if the trac.s 1 could be stretched out in one lina +h,v would reach 10 times around the earth l or If you could bridge the slies tba,,
 would be sufficient to lay track to the
 moon With lHOOo miles of railway to l spare. All the world has only 6S7. .O1f | ,hiies oL rallways and the United States
 mas 26IoOO miles, not including tbe
 switches and side tracks We have in 1 lact almost half of all the railroad tract, upon the earth, and we could replaca av 1 cry mile in all Europe and have 40 oof
 miles over. We have 10 times as mrch | railway as Great Britain, and five tin,es
 as much as the combined mileage ot
 Gieat s1 bfieain and France. The Chicago 1 Milwaukee and St. Paul system has about
 as much track as all Italy. and the New ork Centralahas half as much as Fne. | land and scotland All the rails of K. opanIsh penlnsular would not cover the l Pennsylvania system, and the Atcheson | Topeka and Sante Fe railroad has one.
 Iourth as much line as the empire of
 Germany. We have four times as much
 railroad track as the continent of Asia
 nine times as much as the continent ot Africa, and more than 10 times as muck
 as Austria. The whole western hemis.
 phere has only 354,O00 miles and of this we have almost three-fourths.
 But the track is only a part of our hi,
 railway equipment. I have given vo7