AMERICAN CARS.

Peter Parley's illustration ([p. 101]) of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad represents one of the earliest passenger-cars used in this country. The accuracy of the illustration may, however, be questioned. Probably the artist depended upon his imagination and memory somewhat when he drew it. The engraving below (Fig. 40) is from a drawing made by the resident engineer of the Mohawk & Hudson Railroad, and from which six coaches were made by James Goold for the Mohawk & Hudson Railroad in 1831. It is an authentic representation of the cars as made at that time. Other old prints of railroad cars represent them as substantially stage-coach bodies mounted on four car-wheels, as shown by Figure 41. The next step in the development of cars was that of joining together several coach-bodies. This form was continued after the double-truck system was adopted, as shown by Figure 42, which represents an early Baltimore & Ohio Railroad car, having three sections, united. It was soon displaced by the rectangular body, as shown in Figure 43, which is a reproduction from an old print.

Fig. 40.—Mohawk & Hudson Car, 1831. Fig. 41.—Early Car.
(From the original drawing by the resident engineer.) (From an old print.)

Fig. 42.—Early Car on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad.

Figure 44 is an illustration of a car used for the transportation of flour on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, while horses were still used as the motive power. To show how nearly all progress is a process of evolution, it was asserted, in one of the trials of the validity of Winans' patent on eight-wheeled cars with two trucks, that before the date of his patent it was a practice to load firewood by connecting two such cars with long timbers, which rested on bolsters attached by kingbolts to the cars. The wood was loaded on top of these timbers, as shown in Figure 45. An old car (Fig. 46), which antedated Winans' patent and was used at the Quincy granite quarries for carrying large blocks of stone, was also introduced as evidence for the defendants in that suit. Although Winans was not able to establish the validity of his patent on eight-wheeled cars with two trucks, he was undoubtedly one of the first to put it into practical form, and did a great deal to introduce the system.

Fig. 43.—Early American Car, 1834.

The progress in the construction of cars has been fully as great as in that of locomotives. If the old stage-coach bodies on wheels are compared with a vestibule train of to-day the difference will be very striking. Most of us who are no longer young can recall the days when sleeping-cars were unknown, when a journey from an Eastern city to Chicago meant forty-eight hours or more of sitting erect in a car with thirty or more passengers, and an atmosphere which was fetid. Happily those days are past, although the improvement in the ventilation of cars has been very slow, and is still very imperfect.

Fig. 44.—Old Car for Carrying Flour
on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad.

Improvement has also lagged in the matter of coupling cars. It has been shown by statistics and calculations that some hundreds of persons are killed and some thousands injured in this country annually in coupling cars. The use of automatic coupling, by which cars could be connected together without going between them, it has been supposed, would greatly lessen, if it would not entirely prevent, this fearful sacrifice of life and limb. To accomplish this end, though, it is essential that some one form of coupler shall be generally adopted by all railroads. One of the obstacles in the way of this has been the mechanical difficulty of finding a mechanism which will satisfactorily accomplish the purpose for which it was intended. After thirty or forty years of invention and experiment, no automatic coupler has been produced, which has been approved by competent judges with a sufficient degree of unanimity to justify its general adoption. The patents on that class of inventions are numbered by thousands, so that it is no light task to select the best one or even the best kind. Besides this difficulty, there is the other equally formidable one of inducing railroad men, of various degrees of knowledge, ignorance, and prejudice regarding this subject, and who are scattered all over the continent, to agree in adopting some one form or kind of automatic coupler. Various cliques had also been organized on different roads in the interest of some patents, and in such cases argument and reason addressed to them were generally wasted. Public indignation was, however, aroused; and the stimulus of legislation in different States compelled railroad officers to give serious attention to the subject. After devoting some years to the investigation, the Master Car-Builders' Association—which is composed of officers of railroad companies, who are in charge of the construction and repair of cars on the different lines—has recommended the adoption of a coupler of the type represented by Figures 47 to 49, which has been already applied to many cars and the indications are that it will be very generally adopted for freight and probably for passenger cars. If it should be, it will relieve railroad employees of the dangerous duty of going between cars to couple them. Figure 47 shows a plan looking down on the couplers with one of the latches, A, open; Figure 48 shows it with the two couplers partly engaged; and Figure 49 shows them when the coupling is completed.

Fig. 45.—Old Car for Carrying Firewood on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad.

Fig. 46.—Old Car on the Quincy Granite Railroad.

One of the first problems which presented itself in the infancy of railroads was how to keep the cars on the rails.

Anyone who will stand close to a line of railroad when a train is rushing by at a speed of forty, fifty, or sixty miles an hour must wonder how the engine and cars are kept on the track; and even those familiar with the construction of railroad machinery often express astonishment that the flanges of the wheels, which are merely projecting ribs about 1¹/₈ inches deep and 1¼ inches thick, are sufficient to resist the impetus and swaying of a locomotive or car at full speed. The problem of the manufacture of wheels which will resist this wear, and will not break, has occupied a great deal of the attention of railroad managers and manufacturers.

Fig. 47.Fig. 48.Fig. 49.
Janney Car Coupler, showing the Process of Coupling.

Locomotive driving-wheels in this country are always made of cast-iron, with steel tires which are heated and put on the wheels and then cooled. They are thus contracted and "shrunk" on the wheel. The tread, that is, the surface which bears on the rail, and the flange of the tire are then turned off in a lathe, shown in Figure 25, on [p. 121], made especially for the purpose. For engine-truck, tender, and car-wheels, until within a few years, "chilled" cast-iron wheels have been used almost exclusively on American railroads. If the tread and flange of a wheel were made of ordinary cast-iron they would soon be worn out in service, as such iron has ordinarily little capacity for resisting the wear to which wheels are subjected. Some cast-iron, however, has the singular property which causes it to assume a peculiar, hard crystalline form if, when it is melted, it is allowed to cool and solidify in contact with a cold iron mould. The iron which is thus cooled quickly, or "chilled," becomes very hard, and resists wear very much better than iron which is not chilled. Car-wheels which are made of this material are therefore cast in what is called a chill-mould. Figure 50 represents a section of such a mould and flask in which wheels are cast.

Fig. 50.—Mould and Flask in which Wheels are Cast.

A A is the wheel, which is moulded in sand in the usual way. The part B B of the mould, which forms the rim or tread of the wheel, consists of a heavy cast-iron ring. The melted iron is poured into this mould and comes in contact with B B. This has the effect of chilling the hot iron, as has been explained. In cooling, the wheel contracts; and for that reason the part between the rim C and the hub D is made of a curved form, as shown in the section, so that if one part should cool more rapidly than another these parts can yield sufficiently to permit contraction without straining any portion of the wheels injuriously. For the same reason the ribs on the back of the wheels, as shown in Figure 51, are also curved. As an additional safeguard to the unequal contraction in cooling, the wheels are taken out of the mould while they are red-hot, and placed in ovens where they are allowed to remain several days so as to cool very slowly.

Figure 52, on [p. 145], represents a section of the tread and flange of a chilled wheel, showing the peculiar crystalline appearance of the chilled iron.

Fig. 51.—Cast-iron Car Wheels.

In making cast-iron wheels the quality of the iron used is of the utmost importance. The difficulty in making good wheels lies in the fact that most iron which is ductile and tough will not chill, whereas hard white iron, which has the chilling property in a very high degree, is brittle, and wheels which are made of it are liable to break. There are some kinds of cast-iron produced in this country which have the two qualities combined, in a very remarkable degree; that is, they are ductile and tough, and will also chill. Wheel-founders also mix different qualities of irons to produce wheels with the required strength, and which will resist wear; that is, they use a certain amount of hard white iron which will chill, with that which is ductile and soft. By changing the proportions, any required amount of chill can be produced. The danger is that iron which has little strength or ductility will be fortified with hard chilling iron, and a very weak wheel will thus be the result. Thousands of such wheels have been bought and used because they are cheap, and many lamentable accidents are undoubtedly due to this cause. To guard against this, car-wheels should always be subjected to rigid tests and inspection.

In Europe wheels are made of wrought-iron, with tires which were also made of the same material before the discovery of the improved processes of manufacturing steel, but since then they have been made of the latter material. Owing to the breakage of a great many cast-iron wheels of poor quality, steel-tired wheels are now coming into very general use on American roads under passenger-cars and engines. A great variety of such wheels is now made. The "centres" or parts inside the tires of some of them are cast-iron, and others are wrought-iron constructed in various ways.

Fig. 52.—Section of the Tread and Flange of a Car Wheel.

What is known as the Allen paper wheel is used a great deal in this country, especially under sleeping-cars. A section and front view of one of these wheels is shown by Figure 53. It consists of a cast-iron hub, A, which is bored out to fit the axle. An annular disk, B B, is made of layers of paper-board glued together and then subjected to an enormous pressure. The disk is then bored out to fit the hub, and its circumference is turned off, and the tire C C is fitted to it. Two wrought-iron plates, P P, are then placed on either side of it, and the disk, plates, tire, and hub are all bolted together. The paper, it will be seen, bears the weight which rests on the hub of the axle and the hub of the wheel.

Fig. 53.—Allen Paper Car Wheel.

Steel tires have the advantage that when they become worn their treads and flanges may be turned off anew, whereas chilled cast-iron wheels are so hard that it is almost impossible to cut them with any turning tool. For this reason machines have been constructed for grinding the tread with a rapidly revolving emery-wheel. In these the cast-iron wheel is made to turn slowly, whereas the emery-wheel revolves very rapidly. The emery-wheel is then brought close to the cast-iron wheel, so that as they revolve the projections on the latter are cut away, and the tread is thus reduced to a true circular form. These machines are much used for "truing-up" wheels which have been made flat by sliding, owing to the brakes being set too hard.

It would require a separate article to give even a brief description of the different kinds of cars which are now used. The following list could be increased considerably if all the different varieties were included.

Baggage-car,
Boarding-car,
Box-car,
Buffet-car,
Caboose or
conductor's car,
Cattle- or stock-car,
Coal-car,
Derrick-car,
Drawing-room car,

Drop-bottom car,
Dump-car,
Express-car,
Flat or platform car,
Gondola-car,
Hand-car,
Hay-car,
Hopper-bottom car,
Horse-car,
Hotel-car,

Inspection-car,
Lodging-car,
Mail-car,
Milk-car,
Oil-car,
Ore-car,
Palace-car,
Passenger-car,
Post-office car,
Push-car,

Postal-car,
Refrigerator-car,
Restaurant-car,
Sleeping-car,
Sweeping-car,
Tank-car,
Tip-car,
Tool or wrecking car,
Three-wheeled
hand-car.

The following table gives the size, weight, and price of cars at the present time. The length given is the length over the bodies not including the platforms.


	Length, feet.	Weight, lbs.	Price.

Flat-car	34	16,000 to 19,000	$380

Box-car	34	22,000 to 27,000	$550
Refrigerator-car	30 to 34	28,000 to 34,000	$800 to $1,100

Passenger-car	50 to 52	45,000 to 60,000	$4,400 to $5,000
Drawing-room car	50 to 65	70,000 to 80,000	$10,000 to $20,000

Sleeping-car	50 to 70	60,000 to 90,000	$12,000 to $20,000
Street-car	16	5,000 to 6,000	$800 to $1,200

Fig. 54.—Modern Passenger-car and Frame.

Some years ago the master car-builders of the different railroads experienced great difficulty in the transaction of their business from the fact that there were no common names to designate the parts of cars in different places in the country. What was known by one name in Chicago had quite a different name in Pittsburg or Boston. A committee was therefore appointed by the Master Car-Builders' Association to make a dictionary of terms used in car-construction and repairs. Such a dictionary has been prepared, and is a book of 560 pages, and has over two thousand illustrations. It has some peculiar features, one of which is described as follows in the preface: "To supply the want which demanded such a vocabulary, what might be called a double dictionary is needed. Thus, supposing that a car-builder in Chicago received an order for a 'journal-box'; by looking in an alphabetical list of words he could readily find that term and a description and definition of it. But suppose that he wanted to order such castings from the shop in Albany, and did not know their name; it would be impracticable for him to commence at A and look through to Z, or until he found the proper term to designate that part." To meet this difficulty the dictionary has very copious illustrations in which the different parts of cars are represented and numbered, and the names of the parts designated by the numbers are then given in a list accompanying the engraving. An alphabetical list of names and definitions is also given, as in an ordinary dictionary. The definition usually contains a reference to a number and a figure in which the object described is illustrated. In making the dictionary the compilers selected terms from those in use, where appropriate ones could be found. In other cases new names were devised. The book is a curious illustration of a more rapid growth of an art than of the language by which it is described.

The following table, compiled from "Poor's Manual of Railroads," gives the number of locomotives and of different kinds of cars in this country, beginning with 1876, and for each year thereafter. If the average length of locomotives and tenders is taken at 50 feet, those now owned by the railroads would make a continuous train 280 miles long; and the 1,033,368 cars, if they average 35 feet in length, would form a train which would be more than 6,800 miles long.

Statement of the Rolling Stock of Railroads in the United States; from "Poor's Manual" for 1889.


Year.	Miles of railroad.	Locomotives.	Passenger-train cars.		Freight cars.	Total.

			Passenger.	Baggage, mail, and Express.

1876	76,305	14,562	—	—	358,101	358,101
1877	79,208	15,911	12,053	3,854	392,175	408,082
1878	80,832	16,445	11,683	4,413	423,013	439,109
1879	84,393	17,084	12,009	4,519	480,190	496,718
1880	92,147	17,949	12,789	4,786	539,255	556,930
1881	103,530	20,116	14,548	4,976	648,295	667,819
1882	114,461	22,114	15,551	5,566	730,451	751,568
1883	120,552	23,623	16,889	5,848	778,663	801,400
1884	125,152	24,587	17,303	5,911	798,399	821,613
1885	127,729	25,937	17,290	6,044	805,519	828,853
1886	133,606	26,415	19,252	6,325	845,914	871,491
1887	147,999	27,643	20,457	6,554	950,887	977,898
1888	154,276	29,398	21,425	6,827	1,005,116	1,033,368

The number of cars, it will be seen, has more than doubled in ten years, so that if the same rate of increase continues for the next decade there will be over two millions of them on the railroads of this country alone. Beyond a certain point, numbers convey little idea of magnitude. Our railroad system and its equipment seem to be rapidly outgrowing the capacity of the human imagination to realize their extent. What it will be with another half-century of development it is impossible even to imagine.