Care and Repair of Cars and Engines—The Locomotive Cleaned and Inspected after Each Long Journey—Frequent Visits of Engines to the Shops and Foundries at Altoona—The Table for Testing the Power and Speed of Locomotives—The Car Shops—Steel Cars Beginning to Supersede Wooden Ones—Painting a Freight Car—Lack of Method in Early Repair Shops—Search for Flaws in Wheels.
To care for its rolling-stock the railroad creates two distinct functions of its business. All the care of its permanent way, including tracks, tunnels, bridges, comes under the control of the Maintenance Way Department. Similarly, the Mechanical Department assumes control of the cars and engines, sees to it that each is maintained to its fullest efficiency, both by care in daily service and by certain visits to the shops at regular intervals, for repairs, reconstruction, and painting.
To do all this requires a large plant, both in buildings and machinery. It is distributed at every important point along the railroad. At terminal and operating points, roundhouse facilities of greater or less extent are sure to be located, and at the headquarters of each division these are generally expanded into shops for the making of light repairs and to avoid handling crippled equipment for any great distance. One large shop plant is apt to suffice the average railroad for the heavy repair work. If the road stretch to any extraordinary length, even this feature is apt to be duplicated in order to concentrate this repair work as far as possible.
All this concerns the care and repair of the locomotive—which the railroader quickly groups under the title “motive-power.” To care for the engines while they are in use out upon the line, to see to it that engineers and firemen alike handle these mechanisms with economy and skill, is a responsibility that is placed upon the road foreman of engines of each division. He has supervision over smaller roundhouses but at any of the larger of these structures there is a roundhouse foreman in direct charge. The railroad long ago learned that its best economy rested in having plenty of executive control. That has come to be one of the maxims of the business.
There is a master mechanic in charge of the division shops and in many cases he has authority over the road foreman of engines and the roundhouse foremen. Then under him he has his various assistants, forming a working force not at all unlike that of the average iron-working shop. All this organism is gathered together under a superintendent of motive power, who in turn may report to a general mechanical superintendent. This official answers only to the general manager, or, in some cases, to a vice-president to whom these functions of the care of the railroad are delegated.
The proposition of the cars is generally treated quite apart from that of the locomotive, and separate shops under the direction of a master car-builder and his assistants are located at a few points upon the system, where they may be of fairly easy access. Rough repairs (the car-builders term these “light” repairs) to cars are carried forth at each division yard. This work is almost entirely confined to the freight equipment, and a good part of it goes upon “foreign” cars—cars that do not belong at all to the railroad making the repairs.
This feature of the repair work is a direct result of an elaborate system of interchange in freight equipment upon American railroads, in order to prevent the breaking of bulk in the shipment of merchandise from one line to another. Cars will break down when they are many hundreds of miles away from home, and the railroad upon which they are operating at the time carts them to the nearest temporary repair yard or to its own shops, makes the necessary repairs, and charges for them in accordance with a scale prepared by the national association of Master Car-Builders. This necessitates a vast deal of bookkeeping and is only one of the many complications brought about by our extensive plan of railroading in America.
The railroad will probably build the greater part of its freight equipment, although in these days of the supplanting of wood by steel in car-construction the companies are apt to stand appalled at the cost of the steel working machinery, and to buy their cars direct from the manufacturers very much as they purchase their locomotives. Passenger equipment is almost invariably secured in this way. It is a big railroad indeed that seeks to construct for itself the huge travelling palaces that the passenger of to-day has come to demand for his comfort. The repairing and the painting of these elaborate vehicles is enough of a proposition in itself.
To begin at the beginning, one first comes in contact with the mechanical department as it comes into constant contact with the operation of the railroad. This is the more quickly observed at the roundhouses, those great circular structures that are a feature of the railroad section of every important town. In England the “engine sheds,” as they are there known, are simple enough structures, housing a series of parallel tracks, which are served by either a transfer table or switches. Such a plan is pursued in this country only where space is at a premium—as in the heart of some great city where realty is exceedingly high-priced; for the heads of our railroads have held tenaciously to the easily operated turntable and roundhouse scheme. The table, generally driven by electricity or a small dummy engine, forms the centre, the roundhouse a segment of the entire rim of the wheel. The great advantage of its simple design lies in the fact that it is instantly possible to get at any one of the fifty or more locomotives that it houses. It is this feature that has endeared it to the railroad man for many years.