THE ENGLISH LOCOMOTIVE OF 1850.
304. The “ne plus ultra” for the seven feet gauge (Great Western Railway) by Gooch, has inside cylinders 18 × 24 inches, one pair of eight feet driving wheels, grate area twenty-one square feet. Fire-box surface, one hundred and fifty-three feet. Three hundred and five two inch tubes, giving 1,799 feet of surface. Total heating surface, 1,952 square feet. Weight of engine, empty, thirty-one tons; of tender, eight and one half tons; whole weight with wood and water, fifty tons. Evaporating power, three hundred cubic feet of water per hour. This engine can draw two hundred and thirty-six tons, at forty miles per hour.
The maximum for the London and North-western Railroad, four feet, eight and one half inches gauge (Crampton’s patent), has cylinders 18 × 24 inches; wheels, eight feet; two hundred two and three sixteenths inch (outside diameter) tubes; grate, twenty-one and one half square feet; fire surface, one hundred and fifty-four feet; tube surface, 2,136 feet; whole heating surface, 2,290 square feet; weight, loaded, thirty-five tons; twelve tons upon driving wheels; tender, twenty-one tons, loaded; whole weight, fifty-six tons.
THE AMERICAN LOCOMOTIVE OF 1855.
305. The engine “Charles Ellet, Jr.,” drew on the 9th of August, 1854, forty tons, over a grade of two hundred and seventy-five feet per mile, and over grades of two hundred and thirty-eight feet, upon curves of three hundred feet radius. This engine has wheels four and one half feet in diameter coupled seven feet apart; cylinders 14 × 26 inches; and weighs, including wood and water, 53,058 lbs. This is a tank locomotive, the tender is dispensed with, and in its room a tank containing one hundred cubic feet of water, and one cord of wood is used. This engine was built by Richard Norris and Son.
An engine built by the Cuyahoga Steam Furnace Co. of Cleveland, Ohio, performed the following feat.
An ordinary passenger train was carried one hundred and one miles, over a total ascent of 1,255 feet of grades, making twenty stops, at an average speed of twenty-five miles per hour, with a consumption of only ninety cubic feet of wood.
The same engine drew an average load of three and one third cars four hundred and thirty miles, making seventy-five stops, surmounting a total ascent of 5,439 feet, averaging twenty-five miles per hour, with one tender full of wood only.
In the months of July and August, 1856, two engines upon the Pacific Railroad (Missouri), one by R. K. and G., and one by Palm & Robertson, ran each one hundred and twenty-five miles, with three passenger and one baggage cars, using only one cord of wood.
Note.—For an interesting example of what can be done by the American locomotive, and an illustration of engineering peculiarly American, the reader is referred to a description of the “Mountain top track” at the Rock-fish Gap crossing of the Blue Ridge (Va.), by the Virginia Central Railroad, given by the engineer under whose direction the work was proposed and executed (Charles Ellet, Esq.), from which is extracted the following:—