“Give me a couple of million dollars’ worth of more locomotives and in a week I’ll have your problem solved. You don’t want more yards, to be clogged up in turn. You want yard shortage—and line movement. If you have a sufficiency of motive-power you won’t need many yards, not as many as you have to-day. Your stuff will keep moving, not hanging around on side-tracks.”
The problem of that Eastern road of a dozen years ago is to-day that of virtually every trunk-line of the Northeast. Remember, if you will, that for more than a decade there has been no main line trackage laid down east of Pittsburg or Cleveland. Previous to that time a considerable amount of relief work had been done by a half-dozen or so of the larger roads in that territory. But the relief that these changes gave has long since been swallowed up until to-day it is hardly apparent. And the steadily growing traffic demands fresh relief.
How it can be given is not as easy a problem to the big engineers. The Pennsylvania can and has planned still more low-grade relief-lines across and through the Alleghany Mountains, but Pittsburg still remains its bottle-neck—in there between the high hills and all but defying the railroad engineers. The New York Central needs more main-line trackage, but far more does it need relief of its own bottle-necks—at Albany and again at Buffalo. It is the problem of the cities that counts—not merely Albany or Buffalo or Pittsburg, but New York and Boston and Philadelphia and Baltimore and Cleveland and Cincinnati and St. Louis and Chicago. There is no use in laying down additional main tracks when the terminals in the hearts of these great cities are so sadly congested as to take a freight-car as long to move through a single one of them as from three hundred to five hundred miles on open line.
The smooth and shiny steel rails that slip through each of these congested traffic-hubs are their Fifth Avenues and their Michigan Avenues too. We do not permit the gasolene locomotive to park and obstruct these highways of asphaltum. But the laggard steam locomotive is permitted to loaf in great roundhouses along the steel highway. He is to-day not merely a laggard but an actual obstructionist. I hinted but a moment ago at the time he must spend between runs resting and being more or less overhauled—fires cleaned, machinery overhauled, flues calked and the like, twelve hours out of each twenty-four. Moreover he requires water each seventy-five miles and a fresh supply of coal each 150.
On the other hand, take the electric locomotive. Not only does he save weight by carrying no coal or water and so put that weight into motive machinery—his strength to-day is 7000 horse-power as against but about 3000 of our largest steam locomotives—but he actually goes 5000 miles without having to receive the inspection attention that his old-fashioned steam brother apparently has to have at the end of 150. Which means that for days at a time—and even a week or a fortnight, if the necessity arises—he can remain in steady service, going from one train to another, and only changing crews. The locomotive is always ready.
And what is true in this comparison of the “front shop” light repairs and overhauling, which the steam locomotive must undergo at the end of each division, is still more true of that fortnight in the “back shop”—the heavier repairs and more thorough overhauling that it must have each twelvemonth, if it is to be kept in anything like a decent condition of efficiency. The steam locomotive must go to the “back shop” at the end of 75,000 miles. Barring accidents the electric locomotive need never go there. Its only ordinary repairs are the removing of worn bearings or the occasional rewinding of an armature, which can be easily accomplished in any small shop of a division-point. The elaborate plants of roundhouses, coal and water stations, turntables, cinder-pits, and sizable shops required every hundred or hundred and fifty miles along the lines of a steam railroad disappear, while with the facility of the electric locomotive for long-continued running the division-points themselves may well disappear.
The New York Central railroad in its 440 miles between New York and Buffalo, using steam locomotives for 410 miles of this distance, for many years made three engine-changes upon the one-way run; recently it has done somewhat better than this. The Erie and the Lackawanna between these same cities make the same number of engine-changes. So do the Baltimore and Ohio and the Pennsylvania between New York and Pittsburg, only a slightly longer distance. This is standard steam railroad practice. It is only recently being changed. If these lines used electric locomotives the engines could easily make this entire stretch—with a possible change or two of engine-crews but not of locomotives—and at a vast saving of time, trouble, and money.
These statements are not made idly. This particular one is made upon the authority of the president of the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul railway, which has successfully undertaken the longest and most scientific electrification yet introduced in the United States. His name is H. E. Byram, and the main line of his road is to-day completely equipped for electric operation for 649 miles—from Harlowton, Montana, to Avery, Idaho, 438 miles (or about the same mileage as the New York Central’s between New York and Buffalo or the Pennsylvania’s between New York and Pittsburg) and again from Othello to Tacoma, Washington, 211 miles.
“We regularly run our electric locomotive the entire 438 miles between Harlowton and Avery on the same passenger-train,” says Mr. Byram, “and if the track were electrified for that distance could just as well run it four thousand miles. In fact, counting in attendance, wear and tear, shop capacity, and the like, we figure that one of our electric locomotives is equal to three of the heaviest steam type.”