From all these shops, a busy industrial railroad brings the different parts to the great and busy hall of the erecting-shop, a vast place of vast distances and filled always with the noisy clatter of great industry. Here the different parts, which have been carefully built by skilled artisans, are assembled into the finished whole. The cylinders and saddle-halves are placed and firmly riveted together. Into the collar of that saddle a giant overhead crane carefully sets the boiler and the fire-box. They are quickly riveted to the upper flange of the saddle: the locomotive is coming into a semblance of itself.
The cab is fastened into position; then the boiler-makers descend upon the unfinished engine and place the 200 or more flue-tubes that run from fire-box to smoke-box, just underneath the stack. They make every tube and joint fast—put into the growing locomotive all the energy and all the skill of good workmanship. When they are gone the giant crane again comes noiselessly down along the ceiling. It reaches down, grasps the engine-trunk, and swings it high aloft.
Down there, resting on real railroad tracks, are the driving-wheels and the lead truck, carefully spaced in anticipation. The crane, lifting the fifty tons of boiler and frame with no apparent effort whatsoever, places its load squarely upon the wheels that are to carry it. Again the mechanics are busy; the engine is growing into a solid unit. Upon their heels follow testers, men who must look for steam or water leaks. They work under a test of air, carrying lighted candles into every nook and cranny of the giant. If the candle flutters, air is escaping, and the leak must be found.
Finally comes the report “O. K.” from the testing crew. The stacks, the steam and sand domes, and the air-brakes are being made fast. The engine is hurried off to the paint-shop. There it may find its companion in life, the humble useful tender already awaiting it. It came direct from the tender shop; for the appendage of the locomotive is no longer a specially rigged flat-car but a solid steel plate construction built to carry some 9,000 gallons of water and about 16 tons of coal. Only a little time ago, a New Yorker, scion of a wealthy and famous family of railroaders, proved himself worth his oats by designing a tender of great practicability and of great economy of construction.
When the engine emerges from the paint-shop it is gorgeous and refulgent—brilliantly new. Unless it is going to foreign lands, when it must be partly dismantled and crated, it will ride its own wheels to the road which has purchased it. A string of new locomotives may be sprinkled through a freight train—never coupled together—in charge of an inspector from the locomotive company, who will bunk in one of the cabs and never leave his charges until they have been receipted for. After that the locomotive begins to bend to the work for which he was created. Unless he is of a very unusual sort or was built for some very especial purpose, he soon loses his identity. The days are gone when locomotives were christened after the fashion of ships. There are too many of them. Each is given the cold informality of a number, marshalled for service in a mighty company.
Cars came as corollary to the locomotive. In the beginning the passenger coaches were nothing more or less than old-time stage-coaches which had been set upon wheels so flanged as to enable them to stay upon the rail. So it was that the first cars built for the railroad followed stage-coach models. It was a practical necessity from the first to draw more than one small coach at a time, so the couplings and the bumper devices came as a matter of development. Then came the day when an aspiring inventor grouped several stage-coaches together on a single rigid frame and he had really developed a form of railroad coach—a form which our English and continental cousins still cling fondly to, in despite of its most apparent disadvantages.
Four wheels quickly gave way to eight. In the early thirties, Ross Winans developed a double-truck car for use on the Baltimore & Ohio. Compared with anything that had gone before it was certainly a pretentious vehicle. It was thirty feet in length, four-wheel trucks being attached at the ends, very much after the present fashion. There were seats on the flat roof, which were reached by a ladder in the corner, and the car itself was divided into three compartments. A little later Winans tore out the cross partitions in the car and introduced the end doors and the centre aisle, thus establishing the American passenger coach of to-day. The Baltimore & Ohio manufactured a number of these coaches at its famous Mount Clare shops. They were known for years as the “Washington cars,” probably because they were the first run on the Washington branch.
If Winans had been able to establish his patent rights to the double-truck car he might have reaped a fortune from its royalties alone. But when he went to assert his right as an inventor, it was discovered that the idea was not absolutely new. Gridley Bryant, in his old Quincy Granite Railroad, just south of Boston, had used the device in crude form. The four-wheeled flat cars which he had employed in bringing stone from the quarries down to the dock were not long enough for granite slabs. He had met that emergency by fastening two of them together with coupling-rings, and thus in a way had created the eight-wheel car. So Winans lost his patent although credit is given him for having really developed the passenger car of to-day.
The form, once set, came quickly into vogue. In a few of the Southern States, old-fashioned gentlemen followed the early English fashion of having their private carriages attached to flat freight-cars whenever they went on railroad trips, but even this was a passing fad. At that time carriages were no novelty, and railroad cars were. They were stuffy little affairs compared with the coaches of to-day, miserably lighted and heated and ventilated, but Americans were very proud of them. The fashion that made early locomotives gay with color, with brass and burnished metals of other sorts, found full scope upon the passenger cars, both inside and out. They were pannelled and striped, ornamented and lettered to the limit of the skill of gifted painters. A coach, named the Morris Run, on the old Tioga Railroad, which began running south from Elmira about 1840, was decorated in red and green and yellow and blue and gilt and several other colors. It would have made a modern circus band wagon inconspicuous. But the day came when the brass stars and the red stack-bands began to disappear with the names from the locomotives and in that day the railroad cars became subdued in colorings. Some of the gay frescoes of the interiors, typical of the taste of an earlier day, were in use within the present generation.
While the “Washington cars” set a type, there was much yet to be accomplished in the development both of the passenger coach and of the freight car, and this much was chiefly in the line of the development of safety devices. The old-time passenger rode in a very decent fear of his life. Sometimes a loosened end of one of the “strap rails” would come plunging up through the flimsy floor of the coach and impale some unfortunate passenger upon its end against the ceiling; other times the cars would go rolling off the banks and crashing into kindling-wood against one another. They were lightly built contrivances, incapable of standing any sort of shock or collision.