The man who first invented railroad snow plows got the idea from watching a windmill. He saw how the windmill blades tossed snow around as it fell. Why couldn’t blades at the front of an engine cut into drifts and toss the snow off to one side? Of course they could. Railroads began using powerful rotary plows. The whirling blades chewed the drifts away. Even in lower country, there’s often plenty of work for the snow eaters to do.
OLD-TIME TRAVEL
The very first passenger cars were really stagecoaches with railroad wheels, and that’s why we still use the name coach. Some old-time passenger cars had two decks. All the cars were fastened together with chains, so they banged and whacked each other when the train started or stopped. Sparks from the woodburning locomotive flew back and set clothes on fire. Rails were only thin strips of iron nailed to wood. Sometimes the strips broke loose and jabbed right up through a car.
In the beginning, an engine had no closed-in cab for the engineer and fireman. They didn’t want to be closed in. It was safer to stand outside so they could jump off quickly in case of accident. Cows on the track often caused trouble. Then a man named Isaac Dripps invented a cowcatcher made of sharp spears. But farmers complained that it killed too many animals, so scoop-shaped cowcatchers were installed. The name for a cowcatcher now is pilot.
The first headlight was a wood fire built on a small flat car pushed ahead of the engine. Later, whale-oil and kerosene lamps showed the way at night.
Engineers were once allowed to invent and tinker with their own whistles, and they worked out fancy ways of blowing them. This was called quilling. People along the tracks could tell who the engineer was by listening to the sound of his whistle. Some great quillers could even blow a sort of tune.
One engineer fixed his whistle so that people thought it was magic. Every time he blew it, the kerosene lights in the station went out! What happened was this: The whistle made vibrations in the air that were just right for putting out the lamps. But they did the same thing to signal lights, and so the engineer had to change his tune.