The forty-five electric locomotives now in service on the Harlowton-Avery section—the first to be installed—actually have replaced the 120 steam locomotives that formerly were needed for it. The power for this section, crossing the high ranges of the Rockies, as well as for the newer section further to the west, which crosses the Cascades, is supplied entirely by water. The fuel saving in 650 miles of just an ordinary busy single-tracked main-line railroad in a twelvemonth—259,000 tons of coal and 31,700,000 gallons of fuel-oil, according to its careful estimates for a single typical year—is considerable. When you come to project these to the busy double-tracked and triple-tracked and four-tracked railroads of our Eastern territory you begin to have the great savings which I outlined toward the beginning of this chapter. And these were only predicated upon the use of coal in the power-houses which becomes quite naturally part and parcel of any scheme of electrification.
Consider the Milwaukee’s important experiment in somewhat greater detail. It has been loath to give out exact figures as to its savings in dollars and cents by its electric installation until a number of years of operation should determine these beyond a point of quibbling or of argument. Some of its economies are quite obvious however. I am not going into the remarkable system of “regenerative braking” under which in the course of a year some 60 per cent. of the current taken from the overhead trolley-wire by the road’s electric locomotives is returned to that thread of copper by the seemingly simple expedient of turning the locomotive’s motor into a dynamo momentarily and so utilizing the ancient force of gravity upon a descending mountain grade as to actually turn out electric current and return it to the unseen treasury through that connecting medium of a copper wire. It is enough to say that a 60 per cent. return of current is an appreciable amount. If you do not believe this, ask the next trolleyman that you meet what it would mean to his road if 60 per cent. of the coal which his power-houses have reduced to ashes could be returned to good coal again—and an infinite saving made upon brake-shoes into the bargain.
These things have been told. But there has not been told publicly before this time a comparison of operating costs between the Missoula division—half of the Harlowton-Avery electrified section of the Milwaukee—and an adjacent mountain division which in 1918 and 1919 was not electrified, and which moreover is not subjected to the extremely hard winters of the Missoula range. The cost of locomotive repairs for 1918 and 1919 on this steam division was two and one-third times as great as upon the electric, owing in no small degree to the fact that the electric locomotive handles heavier trains and at higher speed than the steam, yet, notwithstanding this increased capacity, has a much lower maintenance cost per mile run. The cost of train crews was nearly two and one-half times greater on the steam division than upon the electric—this also because of the greater train tonnage and speed under electric operation. The expense for enginemen for similar reasons was 55 to 60 per cent. greater on the steam operation.
It is easy enough to talk in generalities, much harder sometimes to come to the brass tacks of a situation. It is a sort of brass tack, isn’t it, when on this steam division of the Milwaukee, the engine-house expense was two and one-half times greater than upon the electric—and for reasons that we have already seen? We do not need the exact dollars and cents of saving, when these comparisons are placed before us.
Neither do we need exact dollars and cents when we come east to the important electrification of the coal-carrying Norfolk and Western through the Blue Ridge Mountains of West Virginia—a tremendously busy thirty-mile stretch of line over which there constantly moves a vast tonnage of bituminous coal. Conditions here are considerably different from those upon the Milwaukee yet the results that are being attained are largely the same. Upon the N. & W. huge trains of one-hundred-ton steel cars (3250 tons to the train), which formerly required three big steam Mallets, are now being hauled by two articulated electric locomotives, and at twice the speed. Focus your attention upon this last statement and then remember what we were saying about the necessity of keeping the motor-cars moving constantly and uniformly through the busiest streets of our metropolitan cities. It is not any more necessary to the understanding of the real economics of railroad electrification to know that the Norfolk and Western has made twelve double electric locomotives do the work of thirty-three steam Mallets than it is to know that those great mountain-climbing trains are moving at the rate of fourteen miles an hour instead of but seven as formerly. Here is speed; but speed expressed in a double dimension—speed compounded if you choose to put it that way.
While there also arises the interesting further proposition that in any railroad of high traffic density it is intensely important that its trains be kept moving at a uniform speed. In other days the freight movement at seven miles an hour through the thirty-mile heavy grade mountain section of the Norfolk and Western tended to “drag the line” and hold back the trains behind it, despite the fact that upon these more level sections their steam power could easily draw them at fourteen miles an hour. But never without a free clearance. That thirty-mile summit section was indeed a clog to the efficient operation of the line. Electricity removed the clog. And, quite incidentally, the soft-coal smoke in a very dirty tunnel through the crest of the Blue Ridge.
Take such speed, such even traffic flow, and apply it to our overburdened trunk-lines of the Northeast; to make the most definite instance and the greatest necessity. Suppose that no more main-line tracks need be laid upon the railroads east from Chicago and St. Louis, north from Washington and Cincinnati, no more expensive notchings in the mountains that hem in Pittsburg or fresh expenditures in Buffalo, if but a far quickened movement of freight can be obtained over existing rails. Here then is a double economy effected not alone in the use of fuel (still leaving the water-power solution in abeyance) but in a greatly bettered use of existing terminals and trackage. If our railroads can save three quarters of a billion dollars a year by burning their coal and oil in central power-stations instead of in locomotive fire-boxes, it may be fair to say that the terminal economies that might be effected by increasing the existing facilities from 40 to 50 per cent. without physical enlargement would equal the first saving. When the shoe begins to pinch there is many and many a way of relieving the foot.
There are railroaders, and shrewd railroaders too, who will not chime in rapidly. Here is one of them—in the Far West, a mighty operating executive schooled years ago by one of the half-dozen of the real captains of the industry. He feels the need of great relief to the traffic pressure upon his own great system—the greater need of a smoother movement of the traffic upon its rails.
“The game,” he says, “is simplicity itself. It is to take the friction out of the pipe and at the same time increase the pressure.”