THE COMING OF ELECTRICITY

Electric Street Cars—Suburban Cars—Electric Third-rail from Utica to Syracuse—Some Railroads Partially Adopt Electric Power—The Benefit of Electric Power in Tunnels—Also at Terminal Stations—Conditions Which Make Electric Traction Practical and Economical—Hopeful Outlook for Electric Traction—The Monorail and the Gyroscope Car, Invented by Louis Brennan—A Similar Invention by August Scherl.

It is barely more than a quarter of a century since electricity first became practical for use as a motive power upon railroads. The early experiments of Thomas A. Edison at Menlo Park, N. J., and upon the now abandoned railroad up Mount McGregor, N. Y., soon gave way to real electric street railroads in Montgomery, Ala., in Richmond, Va., and from Brooklyn to Jamaica, N. Y. These, in turn, gave way to still better forms of electric traction, until the trolley has not only all but entirely driven the horse-car and the cable-car from city streets, but has performed a notable new transportation function in giving quick communication from one town to another in the well-settled portions of the country. These enterprises are quite outside of the province of this book; the cases where the electric locomotive and electric motor-car have usurped the steam locomotive upon its own rails are pertinent.

As soon as the electric railroad had begun to reach out into the country from the sharp confines of the towns, the steam railroad men began to take interest. It would have been even better for them if some of them had taken sharper interest at the beginning. But the few men who were long-sighted enough a dozen years ago to see the development possibilities of a form of traction that was comparatively inexpensive to install and to operate have been repaid for their sagacity. These men began a dozen years ago to wonder if electricity could not be brought to the service of the long-established steam railroad.

In most cases the short suburban steam roads outside of large cities, which were as apt to be operated by “dummy engines” as by standard locomotives, were the first to be electrified, and in these cases they usually became extensions of the then novel trolley lines. Folk no longer had to come in upon a poky little “dummy train” of uncertain schedule and decidedly uncertain habits, and then transfer at the edge of the crowded portion of the city to horse-cars. They could go flying from outer country to the heart of the town in half an hour, and upon frequent schedule, and the business of building and booming suburbs was born. After these roads had been developed, other steam lines began to study the situation. A little steam road that had wandered off into the hills of Columbia County from Hudson, N. Y., and had led a precarious existence, extended its rails a few more miles and became the third-rail electric line from Albany to Hudson, and a powerful competitor for passenger traffic of a large trunk-line railroad. The New York, New Haven, & Hartford found the electric third-rail of good service between two adjacent Connecticut cities, Hartford and New Britain; the overhead trolley a good substitute for the locomotive on a small branch that ran a few miles north from Stamford, Conn.

But the problems of electric traction for regular railroads were somewhat complicated, and the big steam roads rather avoided them until they were forced upon their attention. The interurban roads had spread too rapidly in many, many cases, where they were made the opportunities for such precarious financing as once distinguished the history of steam roads—and they had in most of these cases made havoc with thickly settled stretches of branch lines and main lines. In a great many cases the steam roads have had to dig deep into their pockets and buy at good stiff prices the very roads the building of which they might have anticipated with just a little forethought.

The New York Central & Hudson River took such forethought after some of its profitable branches in western New York had been paralleled by high-speed trolleys, and a very few years ago installed the electric third-rail on its West Shore property from Utica to Syracuse, 44 miles. The West Shore is one of the great tragedies in American railroading. Built in the early eighties from Weehawken (opposite New York City) to Buffalo, it had apparently no greater object than to parallel closely the New York Central and to attempt to take away from the older road some of the fine business it had held for many years. After bitter rate-war, the New York Central, with all the resources and the ability of the Vanderbilts behind it, won decisively, and bought its new rival for a song. But a property so closely paralleling its own tracks has been practically useless to it all the way from Albany to Buffalo, save as a relief line for the overflow of through freight.

So the West Shore tracks for high-class high-speed through electric service from Utica to Syracuse was a happy thought. Under steam conditions only two passenger trains were run over that somewhat moribund property in each direction daily, while the two trains of sleeping-cars passing over the tracks at night were of practically no use to the residents of those two cities. Under electric conditions, there is a fast limited service of third-rail cars or trains, leaving each terminal hourly; making but two stops and the run of over 44 miles in an hour and twenty minutes. There is also high-speed local service, and the line has become immensely popular. By laying stretches of third and fourth tracks at various points, the movement of the New York Central’s overflow through freight has not been seriously incommoded. The electric passenger service is not operated by the New York Central, but by the Oneida Railways Company, in which the controlling interests of the steam road have large blocks of stock.

A high-speed electric locomotive on the Pennsylvania bringing a through train out
of the tunnel underneath the Hudson River and into the New York City terminal