The third division is the Junction shops, where the new locomotives are built; 1,800 men are employed within it, and there men take the new castings and forgings (most of the castings coming up from the giant foundries that we have just noticed), and from them they create that almost human thing, the railroad locomotive. When the locomotive emerges from that shop it takes its turn upon the testing-table, the mechanical experts place their final stamp of approval upon it, and at last it goes out from the shop, under its own steam, to perform the great work for which it was created.
The testing-table is one of the most interesting of Altoona’s activities. The engine is run upon a series of wheels that fit exactly underneath its own; it is fastened snugly into place; connections are made with a score of pipes and rods that fit upon its mechanism, and it starts off for a run up over the division. It runs miles and miles, snorting furiously over the hard grades and under the heavy loads it has to haul, and yet it does not move even the finest fraction of an inch from that testing table. Its mechanism throbs with energy, its wheels revolve at a fearful rate; yet it is a helpless caged creature in a seemingly impotent energy, as the men in charge of the test watch a dozen dials, notebooks in hand. The big driving wheels turn only upon the friction wheels beneath them but the engineers who are conducting the test can tell the speed at which the locomotive is travelling—in theory—by the almost human needles upon the dial-faces. There is more delicate scientific apparatus behind the engine. It is stripped from its tender for this test, and by this apparatus the pull of the engine upon the dead load of the train can be exactly estimated in pounds and ounces. Nor is this all. The friction wheels underneath the drivers are controlled by powerful water brakes, and by the regulation of these brakes, strains or handicaps can be placed upon the engine exactly similar to those of the grades it may have to reach over a heavy mountainous stretch of railroad.
There is no guess-work about modern railroading. Many hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent each year in expert scientific tests of every sort, in the salaries of men who devote their entire time to this work; and the railroads reap the benefits in many more hundreds of thousands of dollars in operating economies. Railroading is a pretty exact science; the big engine on the testing-table at Altoona is only one of a host of evidences of the skill and genius that are being brought to bear upon the operation of the great railroad properties of the country at the present time.
This engine goes upon diet. Dr. Wiley down at Washington with his young men sustaining themselves scientifically upon measured and selected foods has something of the same method that is shown with the test engine up at Altoona in the hills. Its supply of coal is carefully weighed and analyzed by sample. An accounting of the amount consumed down to ounces is carefully kept, the water supply is also examined and measured with great care. When the test is finished and the big chaotive engine has covered miles of theoretical grades with a long theoretical train hitched on behind, the experts get busy with their pencils and begin to prepare the reports upon which their chief may rely when he goes ahead to construct another gross of 100-ton locomotives.
The car shops rank next in importance to the locomotive shops. The foreman of this plant tells you casually that it has an annual capacity of 300 new passenger cars and 3,600 new freight cars. It is a great plant of itself, some seventy acres of ground covered with great construction buildings. Some of these are in roundhouse form, for convenience in handling equipment under construction; others are set side by side and easily reached by use of a long transfer table.
The work of erecting the freight equipment is carried on quite separate from that of the passenger car work. The almost universal use of steel in the manufacture of every sort of freight car, save the box-cars, which still have wooden walls and roof built upon a steel foundation, has made a large steel-working shop a necessary adjunct of every car-building plant. One of the most interesting features of the Altoona car-building plant is a giant hydraulic press situate in the open, just outside of the steel-working plant. This press brings a dead weight of 1,500 tons down upon the sheet of steel that it receives. It is used in making the sills of the freight-cars—“fish-bellies,” the master car-builders call them—and under that giant press a sheet of steel, one-half inch in thickness and from thirty to forty feet in length, is bent into shape as easily as you might bend a sheet of soft cardboard within your fingers. The press makes many hundred “fish-belly” sills every working day, and it pays its way.
The steel-working in this shop has been carried forth into passenger car construction and a great shed given over for that work. Within it one sees the gaunt frames of the cars that are to be, gaining shape, until at the far end of the shop is a line of the cars, completed as far as the steel workers can carry them, and ready to be swung by one of the ever-busy switch-engines to the finishing shop, and then finally to the paint shop.
Even with the steel car coming into its own, there are still hundreds of thousands of wooden cars in operation; and the construction of wooden cars will not cease for many years. While steel as a raw material is not far in advance of the cost of wood these days, the cost of fashioning it into cars is still so excessive as to make it impracticable save in cases of extremely profitable operation. One of the strongest points in favor of steel in car-construction is that of the economy of its maintenance, always a strong point with railroad men. The wooden car feels the wear and tear of life upon the rail keenly; in the case of a wreck it is not to be even compared with the steel car.
It should not be forgotten, though, that the railroads have many thousands of wooden passenger-coaches still in service, and the substitution of steel equipment for these has only just begun. The average life of a car approximates twenty years, and the simplest of railroad economics demands that these cars be retained for their active life. As they wear out steel cars can be, and they already are being, substituted by the great systems. This new equipment is being used at first upon the main lines and through trains, where both speed and density of traffic demand the railroad’s best equipment. Gradually it will be spread to the trains and branch lines of less importance.