The Modern Railroad

by Edward Hungerford

It was not long before the pioneer engines were considered too small for much practical value, and Mr. Baldwin was building a much bigger locomotive for the Vermont Central Railroad. This engine, named the Governor Paine for a famous executive of that State, was delivered in 1848, and for it was paid the unprecedented price of $10,000. It had a pair of driving-wheels, six and one-half feet in diameter placed just back of the fire-box, a slightly smaller pair being placed forward. Baldwin must have given full value, for it is related that the engine could be started from a state of rest and run a mile in forty-three seconds. The Pennsylvania Railroad ordered three of the same sort, and one of these once hauled a special train carrying President Zachary Taylor at sixty miles an hour. In weight, the locomotive was steadily increasing. In the beginning, these engines weighed from four to seven tons each; by the late forties engines of twenty-five tons each were being built for the Reading Road, and these were regarded as monsters.

Year by year the locomotive was being perfected in all its details. The cab made its appearance and was first opposed by the engineers, who imagined that they would be badly penned in, in case of accident. The Erie contributed the bell-rope signal from the train; we have already heard of that first whistle on the locomotive of the Sandusky and Mad River Railroad. The Boston & Worcester devised the headlight, so that time might be saved by handling freight at night. More important than these were the experiments by Ross Winans and by S. M. Felton that led to the substitution of coal for wood as a fuel, and the development by Rogers at his Paterson works of the link device, so necessary in stopping, starting, and reversing the locomotive.

Gradually the size of the locomotive increased to 28 and 30 tons in the late fifties. Finally James Milholland, engineer of machinery for the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, built in 1863 a pusher engine for coal trains that weighed something over 50 tons. When folk saw that engine they almost gasped, and wondered what the railroads were coming to. But the wiser men kept silent. They knew that as long as bridges and roadbeds and fine steel rails were increased in strength, the limit of size of the locomotive had not been reached. The greater grip the locomotive has upon the rail, the greater its pulling power, the greater its efficiency. Sheer weight, and weight alone, gives that grip. It certainly takes a weight of seven tons to give a grip of one ton upon a dry rail; in the case of wet rails this ratio becomes ten to one.

Then wonder not that the locomotive steadily increased in size, that the Moguls with six driving-wheels, and the Consolidations with eight, came into vogue a few years after the close of the war, and that these kept increasing in weight all the while. Height and width were and still are rigidly limited by the clearance of the line. The locomotive must stand no more than fourteen or sixteen feet high and from nine to eleven feet wide; in length the problem only meets the genius of the designer.

But it is altogether possible that the limit of the size of the locomotive would have been reached long ago if it had not been for the coming of the air-brake. This most important assurance of the safety of the railroad passenger came into its being in 1869, when George Westinghouse, its inventor, was permitted to try it on a Panhandle train. From the beginning of railroads the necessity for brakes was apparent, and in 1833 Robert Stephenson patented a steam brake for the driving-wheels. That same brake, with compressed air substituted for steam, is essentially the Westinghouse device of to-day. But Westinghouse made the air do the work of steam. After he had developed the idea he offered it to leading Eastern railroads, but they one and all declined it.

Finally, he was permitted to place it on a Panhandle train, full assurance having been given to the railroad officials that he would be personally responsible for any injury done to their equipment. Four cars and an engine were fitted with the new device and the train started forth from Pittsburgh to Steubenville. On the way its progress was halted by a farm wagon which was caught in the rail at a highway crossing. The engineer whistled for the handbrakes in the good old-fashioned way but he knew that he was too late. Then he thought of the air-brake. He had little faith in the contraption, but he gave its handle a wrench and the train stopped ten feet from the wagon. Several lives were saved and the air-brake was proven. From that day forth it was simply a question of developing the device to its fullest possibility, and Mr. Westinghouse has proved himself able to do that very thing.

The air-brake was a fact. Steel had come into use for axles, driving-wheel tires, frames, and every other vital or bearing part of the locomotive; and the designers were again increasing its size. They passed the Consolidation and built the Mastodon. These were freighters—each with ten drivers—drivers with tremendous gripping force. They went through what M. N. Forney has called a “period of adolescence in railroad progress,” and in that period they experimented with huge driving-wheels only to discard them once again. Then they built bigger engines than even the Mastodon; the Decapod, with twelve driving-wheels; the El Gobernador which was built by the Southern Pacific at its Sacramento shops in 1884, weighing, with engine and tender fully equipped, 113 tons.

Still the locomotive grows and its progenitors talk of the 500-ton machine. They have recently built the Mallet articulated compound, which because of its very great weight has splendid gripping force and is especially adapted for pushing-service on heavy grades. The Baltimore & Ohio, the Erie, the New York Central, the Great Northern, and the Santa Fe have already become committed to this type of engine. The American locomotive Company has just completed for the Delaware & Hudson several Mallet articulated compounds that are among the most powerful locomotives yet constructed. They were designed for pusher service, on heavy grades, north from Carbondale on the main line of the D. & H., which average from .81 to 1.36 per cent. Up to recently the heavy northbound coal traffic up these grades has been handled by the use of two heavy pusher engines. A single one of the new Mallets will do the work of the two pushers, and therein lies the economy in their use.

These new giants are, in operation, two 8-wheel engines, with individual cylinders, steam chests and supplies from a single boiler and fire-box. The gripping power of 16 driving-wheels under the enormous weight of 223 tons can be imagined; the designers estimate it at the high figure of forty-three tons. The exceptional length of these monster engines—a fraction over ninety feet—is carried around the curves of mountainous lines by an ingenious joint in their solid steel frames. This then is only the latest of American engines; but not quite the biggest, for the Topeka shops of the Santa Fe Railroad claim that honor with their new Mallets, each 121 feet long and weighing complete 810,000 pounds. The 500-ton locomotive does not seem so very far away when one comes to consider the Santa Fe giants. These engines, which are operated in pushing freights over the heavy grades in the Southwest, were built from two of the Santa Fe’s heaviest freight engines. They operate with equal facility in either direction as there is not a turntable in the land which would come anywhere near accommodating them.