The American Railway: Its Construction, Development, Management, and Appliances

by Thomas Curtis Clarke

Fig. 42.—Early Car on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad.

Figure 44 is an illustration of a car used for the transportation of flour on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, while horses were still used as the motive power. To show how nearly all progress is a process of evolution, it was asserted, in one of the trials of the validity of Winans' patent on eight-wheeled cars with two trucks, that before the date of his patent it was a practice to load firewood by connecting two such cars with long timbers, which rested on bolsters attached by kingbolts to the cars. The wood was loaded on top of these timbers, as shown in Figure 45. An old car (Fig. 46), which antedated Winans' patent and was used at the Quincy granite quarries for carrying large blocks of stone, was also introduced as evidence for the defendants in that suit. Although Winans was not able to establish the validity of his patent on eight-wheeled cars with two trucks, he was undoubtedly one of the first to put it into practical form, and did a great deal to introduce the system.

Fig. 43.—Early American Car, 1834.

The progress in the construction of cars has been fully as great as in that of locomotives. If the old stage-coach bodies on wheels are compared with a vestibule train of to-day the difference will be very striking. Most of us who are no longer young can recall the days when sleeping-cars were unknown, when a journey from an Eastern city to Chicago meant forty-eight hours or more of sitting erect in a car with thirty or more passengers, and an atmosphere which was fetid. Happily those days are past, although the improvement in the ventilation of cars has been very slow, and is still very imperfect.

Fig. 44.—Old Car for Carrying Flour
on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad.

Improvement has also lagged in the matter of coupling cars. It has been shown by statistics and calculations that some hundreds of persons are killed and some thousands injured in this country annually in coupling cars. The use of automatic coupling, by which cars could be connected together without going between them, it has been supposed, would greatly lessen, if it would not entirely prevent, this fearful sacrifice of life and limb. To accomplish this end, though, it is essential that some one form of coupler shall be generally adopted by all railroads. One of the obstacles in the way of this has been the mechanical difficulty of finding a mechanism which will satisfactorily accomplish the purpose for which it was intended. After thirty or forty years of invention and experiment, no automatic coupler has been produced, which has been approved by competent judges with a sufficient degree of unanimity to justify its general adoption. The patents on that class of inventions are numbered by thousands, so that it is no light task to select the best one or even the best kind. Besides this difficulty, there is the other equally formidable one of inducing railroad men, of various degrees of knowledge, ignorance, and prejudice regarding this subject, and who are scattered all over the continent, to agree in adopting some one form or kind of automatic coupler. Various cliques had also been organized on different roads in the interest of some patents, and in such cases argument and reason addressed to them were generally wasted. Public indignation was, however, aroused; and the stimulus of legislation in different States compelled railroad officers to give serious attention to the subject. After devoting some years to the investigation, the Master Car-Builders' Association—which is composed of officers of railroad companies, who are in charge of the construction and repair of cars on the different lines—has recommended the adoption of a coupler of the type represented by Figures 47 to 49, which has been already applied to many cars and the indications are that it will be very generally adopted for freight and probably for passenger cars. If it should be, it will relieve railroad employees of the dangerous duty of going between cars to couple them. Figure 47 shows a plan looking down on the couplers with one of the latches, A, open; Figure 48 shows it with the two couplers partly engaged; and Figure 49 shows them when the coupling is completed.

Fig. 45.—Old Car for Carrying Firewood on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad.