The cigar-shaped car of the monoroad

The locomotive that hauls the train goes to its “stall” in the roundhouse directly after its work is done. Its crews, having finished their run, desert it for the time being, and it comes within the charge of the roundhouse foreman and his “hostlers.” These old terms are reminiscent of the days when the roundhouse was a real stable and its denizens flesh and blood horses. Now the denizens of the roundhouse are iron horses, and in their great size as they rest within their house they are indicative of the progress that has been made in the design and construction of railroad equipment.

On the way to the roundhouse, possibly on the way from it (the practice varies on different railroads) the engine will stop at the ash-pit. It will have its fires cleaned in a long pit that runs underneath a section of track, and then pass on to the coaling-shed. The long pit at some points is filled with iron buckets that run on wheels into which the ashes are dumped and these are emptied by overhead crane apparatus into a nearby line of empty gondolas, ready to be taken away to be disposed of.

At the coaling shed the tender is filled, some twelve or fifteen tons being required if the engine is large; the water-spout fills the capacious tanks, while the hostlers take good care to see that the sand-box is filled, as a precaution against slipping on the next steep grade. Then on to the turntable and the waiting stall, until ready to go out again upon the regular service or extra duty. During that time it will be both cleaned and inspected. The fireman may be held responsible for the cleanly appearance of his engine above the running-board. Below that, the work will be delegated to the roundhouse force. The fireman will probably feel that it should clean all the engine. When he feels particularly aggrieved over the matter it is time for him to meet one of the veterans of the service, who will tell him of the days when the engines were gayly ornamented with brass and light-colored paints, and the fireman’s career had added to it an endless campaign with his wiping rag against the tendency of the bright-work to tarnish. There are some things that decidedly favor the fireman of the present time.

There are not always sufficient roundhouse facilities at every point; the traffic of our railroads has a way of constantly running away from the facilities; and so there are many times when the engines must be housed in the open. But the vigilance and the care upon them are never relaxed. The railroad that is foolish enough to try to save upon the maintenance of its motive power sooner or later pays a terrible price for its penurious folly.

So it comes to pass that every engine makes a regular visit to the shops, generally at periods of from ten to fourteen months, depending upon the service in which it is engaged. On some of these visits, it will be pretty completely dismantled, and a travelling crane running the full length of the erecting shop will soon lift the heavy boiler from frame and wheels and carry it down to the boiler-makers, with no more difficulty than an automatic package carrier in a dry-goods store would have. There is a deal of pride and rivalry between the men as to the facility and speed that can be shown in taking an engine in hand, dismantling it completely, making necessary repairs, setting it up again and placing it in service once more. The men of the Erie shops at Hornellsville succeeded in doing the trick a year or so ago in the remarkably short time of twenty-four hours. In that brief time a locomotive came in from the road, bedraggled and begrimed and marked “TBMF” for the benefit of the shop-men. “TBMF” translated means “Tires, Boxes, Machine, Flues,” so specifying the engine parts to be repaired. In the slang of the repair shop the men say “To Be Made Fast.” These four requisites are the ones most necessary to make the locomotive fit for from 50,000 to 75,000 miles of service before she shall again turn into the shop. To make them in twenty-four hours required some planning on the part of the Erie shop foremen at Hornellsville, and yet it was only a few weeks after 1734 had come out of the Hornellsville plant fit for revenue service in a single day and night, before the men of the rival Susquehanna shop wished a chance at a contest of that sort. “TBMF” generally keeps a locomotive in the shop for from a fortnight to three or four weeks; the Canadian Pacific considered that it had done a remarkable thing in effecting these repairs on a locomotive, with a super-heater, at its Winnipeg shops in 57½ hours. The Hornellsville record was one most remarkable. But the Susquehanna shop men took 2018 in off the road after 70,000 miles without repairs; took in the big puller at 7 o’clock in the morning, made the heavy “TBMF” repairs, and turned her out for revenue service at 7:34 o’clock in the evening—thirteen hours and thirty-four minutes. At midnight she was pulling a heavy through freight west once again, and a most astounding record in American shop work had been consummated.

The United States have few such towns as England possesses in Swindon and in Crede, railroad towns in the distinctive sense that they were the absolute creation of the railroad in the first instance. There is many a town from one ocean to the other that has owed its stimulus and development to the location of large railroad shops and terminals within its boundaries, but the railroads have, as a rule, dodged the creation of distinctive towns. Pullman, within the outskirts of Chicago, was a monumental failure in this very sort of enterprise. It was designed and built to accommodate the great car-building shops of that man who did the most of all men to make luxury in railroad traffic—George M. Pullman; and no greater care was shown in the construction and design of the works than was given toward the stores, the churches, the schools, and the homes of the workmen. Pullman was decidedly a model town; yet Pullman was a failure. Other model towns of the same sort in Europe have been marked successes, and that very thing may well serve to illustrate the difference in temperament between the American and the European workingman. The American resents too much being done for him; he is instinctively jealous of his individuality.

Away back in the long-ago the Erie created a railroad town at Susquehanna in the extreme north part of Pennsylvania. It built shops there and soon after repeated the experiment at Hornellsville in the southwestern part of New York State. The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad similarly developed Cumberland, Maryland; and the Lake Shore, Elkhart, Ind. These are few of many instances where a great railroad shop has served to develop a sizable town. In some others they have developed important suburbs of large cities, as the Lake Shore’s plant at Collinwood, at the eastern edge of the city of Cleveland; and the great shops of the New York Central at Depew, in the outskirts of Buffalo, which were built when the plant at West Albany could no longer accommodate the rolling-stock of a rapidly growing system.

In Altoona, Pa., the United States possesses probably the only distinctive railroad town of extent within its boundaries. Altoona was the creation of the Pennsylvania Railroad more than half a century ago, and its progress, carefully stimulated, has proceeded step by step in company with the progress of one of the largest of American railroad systems. The mistakes of Pullman have not been repeated at Altoona. If the Pennsylvania Railroad has ruled the city in the hills, it has ruled it tacitly and tactfully at all times. It has avoided even the appearance of paternalism, and the growth of Altoona has been measured by the growth of the country, which in its turn is measured with marvellous accuracy by the growth of the railroad traffic. So a trip to Altoona and through its great shops will be illustrative of the very best practice in the construction and maintenance of a railroad’s car and engine.

The Altoona shops are unusual in the fact that both locomotives and cars of the highest capacity and finest type are built within them, in addition to a great repair and refurnishing work being carried forward there at all times. To do this work, the plant, employing during the seasons of heaviest traffic something like 15,000 men—is divided into several divisions that stretch themselves along the railroad tracks for about six miles.

The first of these divisions consists of the foundries, devoted largely to the manufacture of cast-iron car-wheels of every size and grade. Extensive cupolas, core-rooms and moulding-floors are provided for making 1,000 car-wheels every 24 hours. There is the blacksmith shop as part of this particular plant. The blacksmith is one of the handiest of men about a railroad shop and one of the few to survive the almost universal introduction of machine processes. There are also the machine and pattern shops, together with a large foundry for the manufacture of castings for cars and locomotives, having a capacity of 200 tons a day.

The second division of industrial activity at Altoona is the locomotive repair shop. This is the largest of all the individual plants at that point, employing about 5,000 men, and with its three- and four-story structures built closely within a busy yard it is a veritable city within a city. It has a capacity of about 1,800 reconstructed and repaired locomotives a year and is a shop well calculated to fill any one with respect.

The third division is the Junction shops, where the new locomotives are built; 1,800 men are employed within it, and there men take the new castings and forgings (most of the castings coming up from the giant foundries that we have just noticed), and from them they create that almost human thing, the railroad locomotive. When the locomotive emerges from that shop it takes its turn upon the testing-table, the mechanical experts place their final stamp of approval upon it, and at last it goes out from the shop, under its own steam, to perform the great work for which it was created.

The testing-table is one of the most interesting of Altoona’s activities. The engine is run upon a series of wheels that fit exactly underneath its own; it is fastened snugly into place; connections are made with a score of pipes and rods that fit upon its mechanism, and it starts off for a run up over the division. It runs miles and miles, snorting furiously over the hard grades and under the heavy loads it has to haul, and yet it does not move even the finest fraction of an inch from that testing table. Its mechanism throbs with energy, its wheels revolve at a fearful rate; yet it is a helpless caged creature in a seemingly impotent energy, as the men in charge of the test watch a dozen dials, notebooks in hand. The big driving wheels turn only upon the friction wheels beneath them but the engineers who are conducting the test can tell the speed at which the locomotive is travelling—in theory—by the almost human needles upon the dial-faces. There is more delicate scientific apparatus behind the engine. It is stripped from its tender for this test, and by this apparatus the pull of the engine upon the dead load of the train can be exactly estimated in pounds and ounces. Nor is this all. The friction wheels underneath the drivers are controlled by powerful water brakes, and by the regulation of these brakes, strains or handicaps can be placed upon the engine exactly similar to those of the grades it may have to reach over a heavy mountainous stretch of railroad.

There is no guess-work about modern railroading. Many hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent each year in expert scientific tests of every sort, in the salaries of men who devote their entire time to this work; and the railroads reap the benefits in many more hundreds of thousands of dollars in operating economies. Railroading is a pretty exact science; the big engine on the testing-table at Altoona is only one of a host of evidences of the skill and genius that are being brought to bear upon the operation of the great railroad properties of the country at the present time.

This engine goes upon diet. Dr. Wiley down at Washington with his young men sustaining themselves scientifically upon measured and selected foods has something of the same method that is shown with the test engine up at Altoona in the hills. Its supply of coal is carefully weighed and analyzed by sample. An accounting of the amount consumed down to ounces is carefully kept, the water supply is also examined and measured with great care. When the test is finished and the big chaotive engine has covered miles of theoretical grades with a long theoretical train hitched on behind, the experts get busy with their pencils and begin to prepare the reports upon which their chief may rely when he goes ahead to construct another gross of 100-ton locomotives.

The car shops rank next in importance to the locomotive shops. The foreman of this plant tells you casually that it has an annual capacity of 300 new passenger cars and 3,600 new freight cars. It is a great plant of itself, some seventy acres of ground covered with great construction buildings. Some of these are in roundhouse form, for convenience in handling equipment under construction; others are set side by side and easily reached by use of a long transfer table.

The work of erecting the freight equipment is carried on quite separate from that of the passenger car work. The almost universal use of steel in the manufacture of every sort of freight car, save the box-cars, which still have wooden walls and roof built upon a steel foundation, has made a large steel-working shop a necessary adjunct of every car-building plant. One of the most interesting features of the Altoona car-building plant is a giant hydraulic press situate in the open, just outside of the steel-working plant. This press brings a dead weight of 1,500 tons down upon the sheet of steel that it receives. It is used in making the sills of the freight-cars—“fish-bellies,” the master car-builders call them—and under that giant press a sheet of steel, one-half inch in thickness and from thirty to forty feet in length, is bent into shape as easily as you might bend a sheet of soft cardboard within your fingers. The press makes many hundred “fish-belly” sills every working day, and it pays its way.

The steel-working in this shop has been carried forth into passenger car construction and a great shed given over for that work. Within it one sees the gaunt frames of the cars that are to be, gaining shape, until at the far end of the shop is a line of the cars, completed as far as the steel workers can carry them, and ready to be swung by one of the ever-busy switch-engines to the finishing shop, and then finally to the paint shop.

Even with the steel car coming into its own, there are still hundreds of thousands of wooden cars in operation; and the construction of wooden cars will not cease for many years. While steel as a raw material is not far in advance of the cost of wood these days, the cost of fashioning it into cars is still so excessive as to make it impracticable save in cases of extremely profitable operation. One of the strongest points in favor of steel in car-construction is that of the economy of its maintenance, always a strong point with railroad men. The wooden car feels the wear and tear of life upon the rail keenly; in the case of a wreck it is not to be even compared with the steel car.

It should not be forgotten, though, that the railroads have many thousands of wooden passenger-coaches still in service, and the substitution of steel equipment for these has only just begun. The average life of a car approximates twenty years, and the simplest of railroad economics demands that these cars be retained for their active life. As they wear out steel cars can be, and they already are being, substituted by the great systems. This new equipment is being used at first upon the main lines and through trains, where both speed and density of traffic demand the railroad’s best equipment. Gradually it will be spread to the trains and branch lines of less importance.

With the wooden car still a factor in railroad equipment, the carpenter has not yet lost his vocation in the shops. There is much of the coarser work on the freight cars for him; in the elaborate passenger coaches, dining-cars and other equipment of that class, the great mass of cabinet work still demands the cunning of his hands. Here in the miscellaneous carpenter-shop he is at work upon a seat frame for a day-coach, a shade fixture, a broken chair from a dining car, a baggage truck from some station; there is plenty of work for the carpenter around a car-shop.

It is a matter of pride with the railroad to keep its passenger equipment bright and shiny and new of appearance. It is part sentiment and part good business. For a railroad cannot hope to attract passengers with dirty, unkempt, weather-beaten cars. So it is that the paint-shop is a large function of the car-shop. American railroads may not go quite as much into gaudy car decoration as do the railroads of England and continental Europe. Each year the canons of simple good taste are driving the car-designers to plainer models, but no expense is spared to make car-surfaces, within and without, as bright and shiny as those of a private carriage or an automobile.

So it is that a passenger coach spends from eighteen to twenty days in the paint-shop alone, in its period of refurbishing. It is primed at first and then it receives from three to five coats of surfacer. This is all hand-work, requiring both strong muscles and infinite patience on the part of the painters. Two or three coats of the standard color of the railroad, by which its equipment is known distinctively, are given to the exterior. Lettering and striping follow, then finally two coats of fine varnish are flowed and rubbed to a high and brilliant polish.

The car is now ready for the dust and the dirt of the line. About every year it will come back again for re-varnishing and at the end of about eight years it will again undergo practically the same treatment within the paint-shop as was given it at the beginning. It will come in rusty and begrimed after many thousands of miles up and down the toilsome line. Within three weeks it will emerge from the paint-shop fresh and radiant, having obtained a new lease of life.

If the same process were to be applied to the freight equipment, the paint-shop would be of almost unlimited size. But freight-cars are not varnished. They are merely painted with the best of time-resisting pigments, usually a dull and sombre red. The freight-cars literally go through a bath in the paint-shop. Expert painters stand, like fire-fighters, with a hose-nozzle in their hands. Through the hose the paint is forced, gallons upon gallons of it; and when it is all over the freight-car is a fine, even red, just like the painters themselves. The lettering is a quick matter, with the use of stencils.

There remain two other great divisions of a central plant of this sort—locomotive repair shops and car repair shops, for the needs of the immediate divisions with their heavy traffic. These shops, extensive in themselves, present no radical differences from the usual division shops which a great railroad maintains at every division operating point in order to keep its rolling stock in the best of order. They are used to make light repairs. The master mechanic is a discerning man. He must know and judge accurately when a disabled car or locomotive should go to the company’s main shops, when the repairs can best be made at the local plant. It is one of the points upon which the economy of the shop system depends.

On this matter of shop economy whole volumes might be written, and have been written. In the beginning of shop practices there was little system in these matters, just as the shop work was reckoned far below its real importance. One of the earliest of real railroads was the Columbia & Philadelphia—nowadays one of the main stems of the Pennsylvania’s trunk line—and it was from the beginning a railroad of quite heavy traffic, double-tracked and reaching into a fat country. Yet a shop at Parkersburg, halfway up the line, employing forty men in all, was considered quite enough for the maintenance of equipment. If one of those early engines broke down at either terminal, the engineer, the fireman and perhaps the local blacksmith had to make their own repairs.

Nothing was standard, not even the sizes of such simple affairs as nuts and bolts. Years of railroading have changed all this. The master-mechanics and the master car-builders meet in annual sessions; and by means of reports from their expert committees have been evolved standards in every detail of rolling stock—standard materials, standard compositions, standard sizes, even standards in nomenclature of railroad apparatus down to the smallest parts.

Even with this assistance there still remains a mass of detail in every railroad shop; and a large clerical force is one of its greatest efficiencies. A sharp and accurate accounting is kept of the cost of repairs upon each locomotive and car, even such general shop costs as gas and heat are pro-rated against it. There is no time that the railroad cannot tell to a nicety the precise cost of each unit of its equipment.

These units are not, in many roads, increased, without precise orders from the board of directors or the executive committee of the board. In order to get around this rule some niceties in reconstruction have been known. A single timber of a worn-out freight car has kept the unit and the number of the old car, and going into the new has prevented the creation of a forbidden unit.The system upon which cars and locomotives are numbered varies greatly upon different systems. In some cases the first figures of the numbers indicate the class and style of the car or locomotive, in others they mean nothing. When a car or a locomotive is nigh worn out its number passes from it and is given to some newcomer. The old servant has a neatly painted “X” placed before its number. That “X” is its death warrant. In a little time it leads the way to the scrap heap.

The men who labor in the railroad shops see little of the romance of the line. Their work is much like that of the men who work in every sort of large shop. Their responsibility is not less than that of the other railroaders, the men to whom 150 or 300 miles of line and out-spread towns are as familiar as the very rooms of their own homes. A flaw in the steel, a careless bit of shopwork, may serve to derail the express at the least foreseen moment, to cause disaster in the ringing way that every railroad man sees at one time or another. It may not always be possible to trace the responsibility for such an accident. But there is a responsibility, and the men who work at forge or lathe, at press or planer feel that it is there. They form no mean brigade of this great industrial army of America.

Such responsibility continues outside of the main shops to the smaller shops, down to the roundhouse forces, by whose care and vigilance the big locomotives are kept fitted for their important work; down still farther to the car-inspectors, who, blue signal-lights in hand, creep through the long freight-yards of a winter’s night to strike the flaw in the metal, to sound the note of alarm before the worst may come to pass. Some of these last you hear in the night as you scurry across the country. As you rest in your berth, and the express is changing engines at some division point, you may hear the car inspectors coming along the train, striking with their hammers against the wheels, listening intently for the false ring by which they may detect trouble. If you trouble yourself to lift the curtain of your berth, you may see them, a grimy crew, working busily with their hammers, thrusting their torches in among the trucks to see that all is well.

Responsibility for the safety in railroad operation does not cease at the doors of the mechanical department.