Hidden away behind a bewildering labyrinth of railway arches, in a cul-de-sac, approached from a back street, not a hundred miles from a great railway station, is a plain, very plain brick building, wherein, for aught one knows to the contrary, such prosaic articles as pots and pans, or cardboard boxes, may be in course of manufacture. Pass through a door, always on the swing, and an unpretending office is reached, furnished in the usual manner, and occupied by clerks engaged upon the ordinary duties of their vocation.
Access to the engineer-in-chief being granted, he courteously conducts us to the power room, whence issues the energy that drives the trains.
Imagination had pictured a great hall, filled with ponderous machinery whose component parts are cranks, steel rods, shafts, and toothed wheels, a wilderness of metal, moving with bewildering rapidity and thunderous power, in an atmosphere redolent of lubricating oil, a vision of whirling wheels, an Ezekiel vision of wheels in the midst of wheels, instinct with life, such as the prophet saw 600 years B.C., by the River Chebar, in the land of the Chaldean.
FIG. 2. NINE WILLANS-SIEMENS DYNAMO SETS FOR ELECTRIC TRACTION, 700 H.P. EACH.
By permission of Willans and Robinson, Ltd., Rugby
Nothing of the kind! One portion of a moderate-sized apartment is devoted to the “fitting” of the motor locomotives, and at the other end, enclosed within a low railing, resting upon a bed of great solidity, and occupying but little space, is the machinery in duplicate, as a safeguard against breakdowns.
It consists of a vertical compound engine, supplied with steam from an adjoining boiler-house, whose cylinder is coupled direct to the fly-wheels of the revolving dynamos that are partly sunk into the flooring. These, with their electro-magnets, are so shut in, and so little can be seen of the working, that it all looks very mysterious and incomprehensible to the uninitiated.
In large power-producing machinery an iron staircase leads up to a platform above the dynamos, giving access to the loftier parts of the apparatus, which then, in its general appearance and compactness, somewhat resembles a modern marine engine. On the walls are endless dials, recording the amount of current generated, localising the exact position of the trains on the line at any given moment, and checking the quantity of current picked up by each engine. There is absolutely no smell, no outward indication of resistless power, while almost Arcadian quiet reigns in the neighbourhood of the machines.