At the coaling shed the tender is filled, some twelve or fifteen tons being required if the engine is large; the water-spout fills the capacious tanks, while the hostlers take good care to see that the sand-box is filled, as a precaution against slipping on the next steep grade. Then on to the turntable and the waiting stall, until ready to go out again upon the regular service or extra duty. During that time it will be both cleaned and inspected. The fireman may be held responsible for the cleanly appearance of his engine above the running-board. Below that, the work will be delegated to the roundhouse force. The fireman will probably feel that it should clean all the engine. When he feels particularly aggrieved over the matter it is time for him to meet one of the veterans of the service, who will tell him of the days when the engines were gayly ornamented with brass and light-colored paints, and the fireman’s career had added to it an endless campaign with his wiping rag against the tendency of the bright-work to tarnish. There are some things that decidedly favor the fireman of the present time.
There are not always sufficient roundhouse facilities at every point; the traffic of our railroads has a way of constantly running away from the facilities; and so there are many times when the engines must be housed in the open. But the vigilance and the care upon them are never relaxed. The railroad that is foolish enough to try to save upon the maintenance of its motive power sooner or later pays a terrible price for its penurious folly.
So it comes to pass that every engine makes a regular visit to the shops, generally at periods of from ten to fourteen months, depending upon the service in which it is engaged. On some of these visits, it will be pretty completely dismantled, and a travelling crane running the full length of the erecting shop will soon lift the heavy boiler from frame and wheels and carry it down to the boiler-makers, with no more difficulty than an automatic package carrier in a dry-goods store would have. There is a deal of pride and rivalry between the men as to the facility and speed that can be shown in taking an engine in hand, dismantling it completely, making necessary repairs, setting it up again and placing it in service once more. The men of the Erie shops at Hornellsville succeeded in doing the trick a year or so ago in the remarkably short time of twenty-four hours. In that brief time a locomotive came in from the road, bedraggled and begrimed and marked “TBMF” for the benefit of the shop-men. “TBMF” translated means “Tires, Boxes, Machine, Flues,” so specifying the engine parts to be repaired. In the slang of the repair shop the men say “To Be Made Fast.” These four requisites are the ones most necessary to make the locomotive fit for from 50,000 to 75,000 miles of service before she shall again turn into the shop. To make them in twenty-four hours required some planning on the part of the Erie shop foremen at Hornellsville, and yet it was only a few weeks after 1734 had come out of the Hornellsville plant fit for revenue service in a single day and night, before the men of the rival Susquehanna shop wished a chance at a contest of that sort. “TBMF” generally keeps a locomotive in the shop for from a fortnight to three or four weeks; the Canadian Pacific considered that it had done a remarkable thing in effecting these repairs on a locomotive, with a super-heater, at its Winnipeg shops in 57½ hours. The Hornellsville record was one most remarkable. But the Susquehanna shop men took 2018 in off the road after 70,000 miles without repairs; took in the big puller at 7 o’clock in the morning, made the heavy “TBMF” repairs, and turned her out for revenue service at 7:34 o’clock in the evening—thirteen hours and thirty-four minutes. At midnight she was pulling a heavy through freight west once again, and a most astounding record in American shop work had been consummated.
The United States have few such towns as England possesses in Swindon and in Crede, railroad towns in the distinctive sense that they were the absolute creation of the railroad in the first instance. There is many a town from one ocean to the other that has owed its stimulus and development to the location of large railroad shops and terminals within its boundaries, but the railroads have, as a rule, dodged the creation of distinctive towns. Pullman, within the outskirts of Chicago, was a monumental failure in this very sort of enterprise. It was designed and built to accommodate the great car-building shops of that man who did the most of all men to make luxury in railroad traffic—George M. Pullman; and no greater care was shown in the construction and design of the works than was given toward the stores, the churches, the schools, and the homes of the workmen. Pullman was decidedly a model town; yet Pullman was a failure. Other model towns of the same sort in Europe have been marked successes, and that very thing may well serve to illustrate the difference in temperament between the American and the European workingman. The American resents too much being done for him; he is instinctively jealous of his individuality.
Away back in the long-ago the Erie created a railroad town at Susquehanna in the extreme north part of Pennsylvania. It built shops there and soon after repeated the experiment at Hornellsville in the southwestern part of New York State. The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad similarly developed Cumberland, Maryland; and the Lake Shore, Elkhart, Ind. These are few of many instances where a great railroad shop has served to develop a sizable town. In some others they have developed important suburbs of large cities, as the Lake Shore’s plant at Collinwood, at the eastern edge of the city of Cleveland; and the great shops of the New York Central at Depew, in the outskirts of Buffalo, which were built when the plant at West Albany could no longer accommodate the rolling-stock of a rapidly growing system.
In Altoona, Pa., the United States possesses probably the only distinctive railroad town of extent within its boundaries. Altoona was the creation of the Pennsylvania Railroad more than half a century ago, and its progress, carefully stimulated, has proceeded step by step in company with the progress of one of the largest of American railroad systems. The mistakes of Pullman have not been repeated at Altoona. If the Pennsylvania Railroad has ruled the city in the hills, it has ruled it tacitly and tactfully at all times. It has avoided even the appearance of paternalism, and the growth of Altoona has been measured by the growth of the country, which in its turn is measured with marvellous accuracy by the growth of the railroad traffic. So a trip to Altoona and through its great shops will be illustrative of the very best practice in the construction and maintenance of a railroad’s car and engine.
The Altoona shops are unusual in the fact that both locomotives and cars of the highest capacity and finest type are built within them, in addition to a great repair and refurnishing work being carried forward there at all times. To do this work, the plant, employing during the seasons of heaviest traffic something like 15,000 men—is divided into several divisions that stretch themselves along the railroad tracks for about six miles.
The first of these divisions consists of the foundries, devoted largely to the manufacture of cast-iron car-wheels of every size and grade. Extensive cupolas, core-rooms and moulding-floors are provided for making 1,000 car-wheels every 24 hours. There is the blacksmith shop as part of this particular plant. The blacksmith is one of the handiest of men about a railroad shop and one of the few to survive the almost universal introduction of machine processes. There are also the machine and pattern shops, together with a large foundry for the manufacture of castings for cars and locomotives, having a capacity of 200 tons a day.
The second division of industrial activity at Altoona is the locomotive repair shop. This is the largest of all the individual plants at that point, employing about 5,000 men, and with its three- and four-story structures built closely within a busy yard it is a veritable city within a city. It has a capacity of about 1,800 reconstructed and repaired locomotives a year and is a shop well calculated to fill any one with respect.