But improvements came one by one—better devices for coupling them together, culminating in the modern automatic “jaw coupler,” better framing, better platforms, better trucks, improved hand-brakes; and after them the now universal air-brakes made life safer both for the traveller and the railroad employee. Finally came the steel-end vestibule; and where cars have been equipped with this very comfortable device, telescoping in collision, a very common and disastrous accident in which one car-shell enveloped another, has been rendered impossible.
The car-platforms for many years remained a menace and a problem. An early railroad in New Jersey sought to emphasize their danger by painting on an inner panel of each car-door a picture of a newly made grave, surmounted by a tombstone, on which was inscribed: “Sacred to the memory of a man who stood upon a platform.” The railroad used every method to keep its passengers off the platforms at first. Afterwards they began to encourage it and to devise means to promote a general intercourse between the cars.
The dining-car, of which much more in another chapter, was a prime factor in this change of attitude on the part of railroad officers. Its use necessitated passengers going the length of the train, a movement which, in itself, was facilitated by the main design of American cars, as differentiated from those of English railroads. When the English roads began the universal use of dining-cars they had to revamp the entire plan of their car construction and produce what are still known across the Atlantic as “corridor trains.”
To make such communication safe, George M. Pullman, the sleeping-car man, set forth to devise a platform protection. Back in the fifties there had been something of the sort on the old Naugatuck Railroad in Connecticut, rough canvas curtains enclosing the platforms; but these had been built to facilitate car ventilation, and failing in this, they were abandoned after three or four years of trial. Pullman did better. He devised a platform enclosure of folding doors and placed a steel frame at the end of his vestibule that did more than merely protect passengers from the stress of weather; these, of course, then served as effective anti-telescoping devices. The Pennsylvania Railroad began the use of these vestibules in 1886 and they were soon universally adopted by American railroads on their fast through trains.
After that a better vestibule was devised by Col. W. D. Mann, one that extended the full width of the car. In fact the platform of the car had practically ceased to exist, the structure being full-framed to include its entrances at both ends.
After the vestibule came the steel car, introduced within the past ten years for freight service, and within the past five or six for passenger equipment. It has everything to commend it, save a slightly increased original cost, which is more than compensated by economy of maintenance, to say nothing of the intangible but certain raised factor of safety. It is to become universal; the wooden car will become extinct upon American railroads almost as soon as the present equipment is worn out and sent to the scrap-heap.
Of the forms and varieties of railroad passenger coaches there are many, and these will be described when we come to consider in a later chapter the luxury of modern railroad travel. But the variety of passenger equipment quite pales before that of the freight service. Flat-cars, coal-cars, box-cars, grain-cars, live-stock cars—the list runs on into catalogue form. There are refrigerator cars that are kept filled with salt and ice or ice alone, precooled cars that are merely kept air-tight, and ventilator cars employing a distinct reverse of that method; and up in northern climates there are heater-cars which are kept warm by lamps or by stoves and which are used for the transportation of fresh fruit and vegetables in winter just as the refrigerator-cars and the precooled cars are used for that same purpose in summer.
Almost all the safety devices that have been added to the running-gear of the passenger equipment have been added to the freight equipment also, to the great safety and peace of mind of the railroad employee. The car itself remains the simple essential of the very beginnings of the railroad. Its change has been a change in size, in weight, and in strength.
The first freight cars of the very old railroad at Mauch Chunk weighed 1,600 pounds each, and were permitted to carry a weight or “burden” of only 3,200 pounds. When the Boston & Albany first began using freight cars 30 feet long, it was so confused that it gave each end of the car a separate number for convenience in billing and designating consignments. Nowadays 40 tons is the right load for an efficient car, although they go as high as 55 and 60 tons’ capacity; the car itself may weigh approximately half that figure.
Freight cars by hundreds of thousands go bumping all over the different railroads of the land, and all the while they are getting bumped and broken in accidents—large and small. In such cases they are hauled to the nearest shop of the railroad upon which they are travelling and there repaired at the cost of the road that owns them. In earlier days, the job of master mechanic was no sinecure, for each road built its cars upon its own plans and no two of these plans were alike. A simple broken part necessitated the manufacture of a new part. It was a matter of great confusion and expensive to every line.