All of this fixing and testing and making over takes a lot of time. A locomotive may spend a month or more in the shop. But at last it is all put together again, complete with a new coat of paint. Now it goes out for a test on the slip-track. This is a greased track where the engine’s wheels whirl round as if it were going at top speed while it is really almost standing still. If everything works all right, its old number is put in place, and an almost new locomotive is ready to highball again.
LOCOMOTIVES
More than forty different kinds of locomotive work for the railroads. Some of them haul freight, and some are passenger train engines. Some are steam locomotives, some are not.
Steam locomotives all need water to make the steam that makes the wheels turn. But they don’t all get it in the same way. One kind never has to stop and wait for its tender to be filled. Instead it has a scoop that dips down as the engine passes over a long track-pan of water set between the rails. With no time lost, the scoop sucks up water into the tank. The men say, “She’s jerked a drink.” In winter, the track-pans are heated to keep the water from freezing.
Two kinds of locomotive don’t even need water. Electric engines use electric current instead of steam to turn the wheels. They get the current from wires along the tracks. Diesel-electrics are more complicated. They have oil-burning engines that make electric current right in the locomotive, and this current runs motors that turn the wheels.
There are several engines inside a Diesel-electric locomotive. If one of them gets out of order during the trip, the others keep on delivering power while the one is repaired. The engineer and the fireman sit in the cab at the very front of a Diesel-electric. They can watch the track through front windows.
The cab is at the front of the engine shown on this page, too, but it is a steam locomotive. It burns oil instead of coal, so the cab doesn’t have to be right next to the tender. The men call it the Big Wamp. It hauls tremendously long freight trains across the Rocky Mountains. One siding where the men stop to eat is so long that there has to be a restaurant at each end!