“Humph,” interrupted my friend the old railroader out in the West, “I suppose you think that we are going to get engineers of the caliber to handle all these fancy claptraps that you would put upon the engines?”
No, Old Railroader. Not for a minute. We have those engineers already in America; nine out of ten of the men who are handling our locomotives in the United States are quite capable of handling all these devices, and a considerable number in addition. Even overseas where, broadly speaking, the type of individual railroad employee is not supposed to be as high as in this country, the enginemen are to-day used to all these modern devices, the hall-marks of the really modern steam locomotive. A keen-minded American who has known and loved locomotives all his life went over to France not many months ago and rode in the cab of one of those high-speed engines that haul the heavy expresses of the Northern railway from Paris to Calais, 180 miles in three hours and thirty-five minutes—a remarkable daily performance,—and he had his eyes opened. In the first place the cab was immaculate. I might almost add “of course.” I rode myself in the cabs of British locomotives after the Armistice. Had there been a war just ended over there across the narrow English Channel? The rolling-stock of the British railways certainly belied that fact. Their locomotives were clean, bright, freshly painted; they were not rusty, dirty, or leaky. They had upkeep, continuous upkeep even through the fifty-one heart-breaking, man-shortage months of the World War. That showed for itself.
The cab of the engine in which my friend rode from the Gare du Nord to the Calais pier was more than immaculate; it was intricate. There were levers here and levers there, gages high and gages low. It looked more like the control-board of a fair-sized steamship than that of a locomotive. There was a variable exhaust nozzle, a control here, a control there; the locomotive was itself a four-cylinder compound engine with all the improvements that we have just seen (and then some more)—and with 180 miles to be made in 215 minutes, which is faster than almost any American train goes to-day—faster by twenty-five minutes than the fastest train between New York and Baltimore (185 miles); faster by thirty-one minutes than the fastest express between New York and Providence (also 185 miles).
Somewhere between Paris and Amiens the fireman was taken slightly ill. With hardly a word between the two railroaders in the cab they changed places. The fireman stood his intelligent trick at the throttle; for more than an hour the engineer fed the fire-box partly coal and partly briquettes. There was 15 per cent. of briquettes in the tender and a bonus to the engine-crew for any fuel saving that they made upon the run. Moreover the names of the engineer and the fireman, printed upon neat, small, brass plates, were inserted in an especially showy place on each side of the engine-cab—a good deal as Mr. Underwood of the Erie once began naming his best engines after the men who habitually ran them, painting their names in large, conspicuous letters upon the engine-cabs, where in other days locomotives bore the names of presidents, governors, railroad directors, and others who sought a brief temporal glory. The French plan is best in that it permits flexibility in the assignment of the locomotives; the American plan best in that it confers an even greater and more permanent distinction upon the engine-driver. I wish you could see old Harvey Springstead as I saw him about ten years ago on the first day he drove the Harvey Springstead into the battered old Erie terminal in Jersey City. Warren G. Harding accepting a lovely sprig of flowers from the prettiest ten-year-old girl in Marion, Ohio, could not have been a prouder man.
When that fleet engine of the Chemin de Fer du Nord (French for the Northern railway) came to its first and final stop out of Paris upon the Calais pier, sixteen men attacked her with brushes and cloths and hammers and wrenches and what else I know not. Yes, sixteen. My friend counted them. And he later found that before the war-times there had been thirty-two. The fleet locomotive had a real inspection, while the little engineer and his fireman repaired to the near-by Café de la Gare and enjoyed their dejeuner and their small bottle of wine.
Sixteen men went to that engine! Four would have been a goodly force for the average American roundhouse or terminal shed; and the engine probably would have waited two or three hours for its inspection. One of the crimes against the American locomotive is the lack of care and attention that is given it. Think, if you will, of an engine on one of our first-class railroads being discovered so badly out of order in regard to the setting of its valves that a very few hours of repair work upon them brought an immediate saving of 25 per cent. in its fuel consumption! Is not that being penny-wise and pound-foolish?
I have digressed. And without apology. We were recounting the actual devices for the improvement of the steam locomotive: the superheater, the brick arch, the feed-water heater, the booster. None of these—in their essentials, at least—are patented devices. Any good locomotive builder can use them freely. He only waits the word of the purchaser of the locomotive. Neither is there any patented monopoly in the mechanical stoker. Two or three very good types already are on the market and if you wonder at their efficacy may I again suggest that some good warm summer’s day you go down into your own cellar and shovel seventeen tons of coal across it—from one side to the other—in four or five hours. Sleep overnight—if you wish to complete the illusion, preferably on a rough, hard bed—and the next day shovel all the coal back again, in four or five hours. Then ask yourself, if you were a locomotive fireman would you feel that there was any real need for a mechanical stoker.
There is no monopoly, either, in the plans for substituting more and more light reciprocating locomotive parts of alloy-steel in place of the old-fashioned heavy cumbersome ones that hold their places, almost through tradition alone. Our American locomotive to-day is far too heavy. The automotive industry—the group of men who in real coöperation have perfected almost every detail of the American motor-car—again has pointed the way. If a balanced crank-shaft is valuable to a rubber-tired locomotive upon a concrete highway, should a device of similar ingenuity and value be accounted an impossibility upon the flange-wheeled one of the steel highway? The possibilities of intensive development of the steam locomotive upon these lines alone seemingly are almost infinite. If Henry Ford, with not only the skill and experience of his own marvelously ingenious mechanical mind, but the expert staff that he has always at his elbow, can succeed in bettering the American steam locomotive radically, I think that the American public will be tempted to call him blessed indeed. If Mr. Ford can only succeed in putting better bearings under our railroad-cars his name should be accounted as blessed in our railroad tradition. The axle-bearing of the average railroad-car in this country—particularly the freight rolling-stock—has neither been improved nor changed in more than half a century. It is virtually the same now as it was in 1860—a swabbing of cotton-waste and grease set in a box upon the axle-end, a device forever becoming dry and hot and blazing forth into flame. Contrast such an archaic thing with the axle-bearing of the modern motor-car or motor-truck. Ball-bearings, or, in the case of heavier vehicles, roller-bearings. A Detroit specialty concern installed these on a big Michigan Central box-car not many months ago, and two men pushed the car down a siding with no vast effort.
If these things can be done and have been done, why are they not being done to-day?