The outer shell of the New Haven’s freight locomotive
removed, showing the working parts of the machine

Similarly, the Erie Railroad disposed of a decaying branch of its system, running from North Tonawanda to Lockport, to the Buffalo street railroad system, although reserving for itself the freight traffic in and out of Lockport. The Buffalo road installed the overhead trolley system, and now operates an efficient and profitable trolley service upon that branch.

Perhaps it was because the Erie saw the application of these ideas, and decided that it was better to take its own profits from electric passenger service than to rent its branches again to an outside company; and perhaps because it also foresaw the coming electrification of its network of suburban lines around New York, and wished to test electric traction to its own satisfaction; but five years ago it changed the suburban service of its lines from the south up into Rochester from steam to electric.

It is now preparing to continue this work further. The Pennsylvania, while its great new station in New York was still a matter of engineer’s blue prints, began practical experiments with electric traction in the flat southern portion of New Jersey. It owned a section of line ideally situated in every respect for such experiments, its original and rather indirect route from Canada to Atlantic City, which had since been more or less superseded by a shorter “air line” route. The third-rail was installed, and the new line became at once popular for suburban traffic in and out of Philadelphia and for the great press of local traffic between Philadelphia and Atlantic City. Of the success of that move on the part of the Pennsylvania there has never been the slightest question. Regular trains have been operated for several years over this route at 60 miles an hour, and not the slightest difficulty has been found in maintaining the schedules.

But nowhere has the substitution of electric locomotive for the steam worked greater comfort for the railroad passenger—to say nothing, of the raising of that somewhat intangible factor of safety—than in long tunnels. The Baltimore & Ohio, which was a pioneer among the steam railroads in the use of electric locomotives, began to use them in 1896 in its great tunnel that pierces the very foundations of the city of Baltimore. That system, once adopted, became permanent. What was at one time a fearful summer experience between Camden Station and Mount Royal Station in that city has become merely a pleasant novelty upon the trip.

What could be done at Baltimore has been done under the Detroit River, twice. The Grand Trunk pierced underneath that stream in 1890, by a single-track tunnel 6,000 feet in length, in which for seventeen years both freight and passenger trains were hauled by special locomotives, fitted for the burning of anthracite coal. Although these engines rendered rather satisfactory service, it was found desirable to substitute electric locomotives for them in order to remove the limitations of haulage capacity in the tunnel; for it is a known fact that electric trains can be operated much more rapidly and also more closely together than steam. The change obviated the danger and inconvenience due to locomotive gases in the tunnel. The electric locomotives first went into service in February, 1908. The tunnel is now clean, well-lighted, and safe to work in; and trains of much greater length than before can be hauled, thus relieving the congestion in the freight-yards on both sides of the river.

Similarly, electric locomotives have become the tractive power in the great new tunnel which the Michigan Central has just completed across the Detroit River at Detroit, and upon the Cascade Tunnel where the Great Northern Railroad pierces one of the great ranges of the Western Divide. The Cascade Tunnel is interesting from the fact that it is entirely built upon a heavy grade of 1.7 per cent for its length of more than three miles. The steam locomotives are cut out from the service, while on the heavy up-grade of the tunnels an electric locomotive, of tremendous pulling power, will carry even the heaviest freights through the bore at an average speed of fifteen miles an hour. These Cascade Tunnel locomotives are the only ones in the country taking alternating current at triple phase and at the tremendous voltage of 6,600 directly from an overhead trolley wire. And that will bring us in a moment to another consideration of this question of the development and the delivery of power.

The most recent of tunnel installations has just been completed in the greatest of all American mountain bores—the Hoosac Tunnel. This famous tube, four and three-quarters miles in length, gave itself very readily to the skill of the electric engineer, with the result that the Boston & Maine system, its present owner, finds the greatest impediment to the operation of its main line from Boston to the west entirely removed.

The earlier installations were all what is known as direct current; that is, the power is brought directly from the dynamos in the power-houses and by means of third-rail or overhead trolley it is delivered to the motors of the locomotives of the cars. But some years ago the larger of the distinctively electric railroads found that for great current demands over a large distributing district, this system was expensive and impracticable; that, for the chief thing, it required copper cables for carrying long-distance current so large as to be of very great cost. So some of these, with the aid of the electrical manufacturers, experimented and developed the alternating current of high voltage and low amperage, which is capable of being carried to distant transforming or sub-stations and there reduced to low voltage and high amperage. This alternating current system, because of its great operating economies, is rapidly becoming the standard for the city railroad systems of metropolitan communities, as well as for the great trunk-line interurban electric roads that are beginning to gridiron the country. The New Haven Railroad, when it first began to electrify its extensive suburban service into New York City, was the first to bring it to the service of a standard steam road, and by a clever adaptation of its locomotives was able to bring a single-phase alternating-current directly to them at the enormously high voltage of 11,000, without the use of transforming stations or direct-current transmission. After some fearfully disappointing experiments at the outset, the New Haven system has finally proved the worth of its alternating-current, and the road is now engaged in erecting its overhead transmission construction all the way from Stamford (the present terminal of the electrical service) to New Haven, 72 miles distant from New York. Within ten years its heavy New York and Boston traffic will probably be entirely handled by electricity, and the run of 232 miles will be made without difficulty in four hours or even less.

At present the steam locomotives of these trains and the other trains that serve almost all of New England are detached from the inbound movement at Stamford, and the remaining 33 miles of the run into the Grand Central Station is made behind a powerful electric locomotive. The process is, of course, reversed on outbound trains. For the 12 miles from Woodlawn into the Grand Central the run is made over the tracks of the Harlem division of the New York Central Railroad which uses direct current at a voltage of 650, and third-rail instead of overhead transmission. The wonderful adaptability of the alternating current is shown, not in the fact that a change must be made from overhead trolley to third-rail alone, for that is merely a slight mechanical problem, but in the fact that a locomotive hauling a heavy train can, without a great slacking of speed, change from receiving an alternating current of 11,000 volts to a direct current of 650 volts. Outbound, it reverses the process.

The necessity of clearing out the smoke-filled Park Avenue Tunnel approach to the Grand Central Station brought both the New York Central, its owner, and the New Haven, its tenant, to electric traction for terminal and suburban service at New York. The New York Central’s system, as has already been stated, is direct-current and it is supplied from two great power-houses in the suburban district. Through trains are hauled in and out of the station by electric locomotives, while suburban trains, which make their round-trip runs entirely within the 25 or 30 miles of electric zone, are run without locomotives, the steel suburban coaches having motors set within their trucks, after the ordinary fashion of electric cars across the land. The change from steam to electricity at the Grand Central Station did more, however, than merely clear the long-approach tunnel of smoke and foul gases, so that nowadays a man can ride on the observation-platform over its entire length. The traffic in that wonderfully busy station has for many years had sharp limitations because of the four tracks in that tunnel, two tracks being used for the train movement in each direction. The limited station-yard capacity at the terminal has necessitated many trains being stored at Mott Haven yards; and the drilling of these empty trains in and out of the station, combined with the normally heavy movement of regular and special trains, has only added to the great congestion. The minimum three-minute headway between trains operated by steam through the tunnel, and its four-tracked viaduct approach, fixed the maximum traffic at 40 trains an hour in each direction. The capacity of the terminal with this limitation of service was taxed to its utmost, and some relief for the constantly increasing traffic was imperative. Now, owing to the improved conditions of electric operation, trains may be run on a two-minute headway, or less—this one measure thus increasing the station capacity by 50 per cent at the least.

The New Haven road has also adopted the practice of running some of its suburban trains without locomotives, but by means of motors underneath each coach—the multiple-unit system, as electrical engineers have come to know it. This is the system, with some slight variations, upon which the elevated and subway lines of New York, Brooklyn, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago are operated; and it is quickly applicable, as we have just seen, to some phases of terminal operation for the standard steam railroads. But the steam locomotive is to hold its own for many years, in many, many phases of railroad operation; electric traction is practical and economical only when there are fairly congested traffic conditions. The coaches that are standard for it, and which it must haul for many miles across the land, must be handled in the electrically equipped terminals by electric locomotives of one type or another. These locomotives are generally equipped with coal-heaters for maintaining the steam in the heating-pipes of the through equipment; and in these days, when the electric lighting of through trains is all but universal, they may supply current for this purpose also.

Electric locomotives have been completely successful where they have been used, both alone and in connection with multiple-unit suburban trains, in the Grand Central Station and the Pennsylvania Station in New York City as the first complete installations. But what has been so successfully done in New York will soon be repeated in other big cities in the land; Boston is already insisting that the network of suburban lines that spreads over her environs be electrified; Philadelphia is preparing for the electrification of the Pennsylvania’s fan-work of lines into Broad Street Station; Baltimore is demanding that what has been done in one great tunnel underneath her foundation hills be repeated in two others. Chicago will see great installations of this service within the next few years.Nor is the use of electricity upon the standard steam railroad to stop bluntly with these terminal changes and improvements; many and many a decaying branch is yet to be fanned into new life, new strength, new activity, through a skilful transformation of its tractive powers. What has been done at the Detroit River and the Cascade tunnels is to be done elsewhere across the land—through the dozens of points where railroads pierce the mountains and go under the rivers by tunnels. Electric tunnels are yet to bring the Pennsylvania at lower grade at Gallitzin and the Southern Pacific through the high crest of the Sierras. Electric traction for the big steam roads is still in its infancy. Only 1,000 miles out of a total of 220,000 miles of steam railroad in the land are as yet operated by electricity. The other day a big traffic-man sat in his Chicago office and said:

“The first railroad that electrifies for the thousand or less miles between this town and New York is going to get all the rich passenger business. Not a big portion of it, mind you, but every single blessed bit of it!”

Consider for a final moment, in passing, the mono-rail, the gyroscope. If you are a practical railroader you may laugh and say: “A toy.” Perhaps it is a toy to-day. But just remember history and you will recall that the toy of to-day becomes the tool of to-morrow, and then give the mono-rail a moment of sober thought. Less than 2,000 feet of this construction formed a most interesting exhibit at the Jamestown Exposition of 1907. A railroad man who rode on that experimental track said:

“If you had built more than 300 feet of track you could have given a better demonstration of your system.” To this the inventor smilingly replied:

“You have gone over 1,800 feet.”

The investigator had ridden faster than 45 miles an hour and had not realized the speed. You never do in the mono-rail car. It rides more gently over the roughest bit of track than the finest Limited moves over heavy rail and stone ballast, the best track that men can maintain.

An actual railroad of the mono-rail type has been built and is being developed in the suburbs of New York City. It supersedes a railroad of the oldest type—horse-cars—from Bartow to City Island, in the Bronx. Balance is kept for its cars by means of a light overhead metal construction, hardly more conspicuous than that of the overhead trolley-work used in city streets. This overhead work, like the trolley-wire, supplies electric power to the cars; only in emergencies will it come into play to hold the one-legged car erect. On this stretch of line speed and balance tests will be made when passenger traffic is at low-tide. Upon the result of these tests will be drawn the construction plans for a four-track rapid transit railroad from New York to Newark, ten miles. This last plan has already been financed by New York men who have made transportation their chief problem for many years. It may be developed upon the rails of a double-track railroad, more than doubling its capacity, without increasing the width of the right-of-way.

All of these mono-rail roads will become applicable to the gyroscope when that wondrous man-toy becomes a man-tool. And the gyroscope demands no overhead construction of any sort. It simply asks a single rail upon which to find a path and offers no objections either to the steepest of grades or to the sharpest of curves. The first model of gyroscope car showed its ability to navigate easily the full length of a piece of crooked gas-pipe, laid in rough semblance of a track.

For there is a gyroscope car already—in fact, several of them. On May 8, 1907, Louis Brennan, a brilliant Irish inventor, living in England, exhibited the first model of the gyroscope car, and the news was flashed in detail all the way around the world. The little car he then showed was enough to interest the keenest of scientists. It traversed every sort of mono-rail track that could be devised, at varying rates of speed, it stood still at the inventor’s command and retained its balance perfectly. When a man’s hand was pushed against it as if to throw the car off its seemingly slight balance, it pushed back, stanchly held that balance, and Brennan laughingly said that there was something that compared with the velocity of the wind. When he spoiled the even trim of his ship (it did look like a boat as it sped around the lawn upon its narrow, guiding thread) and placed the weights upon one side of the car, that side rose up to receive them. The car still held its balance perfectly, and Brennan said that his act represented forty or fifty persons moving suddenly across a full-sized passenger coach. Finally, he placed his little daughter in the car and sent it out over a deep gully where a single stout steel cable served as a suspension bridge. The inventor’s assistant swung that bridge like a hammock but the car laughed at the old-fashioned domineering laws of gravity, and the little girl waved her hand at her daddy.

Well might she wave her hand at him. His achievement was a real triumph. From a top revolving in a frame at any angle he had evolved the gyroscope car, the one thing required for the successful development of the mono-rail. From that car he has been steadily developing better ones. On the tenth of November, 1909, he built a full-sized car upon which twenty men and boys rode in glee. On that self-same day, by strange coincidence, a German inventor, August Scherl, exhibited in a large hall in Dresden, a mono-rail car, held at perfect equilibrium by a gyroscope which he had quietly built and perfected. The car was 18 feet long and 4 feet wide, and mounted on two trucks. The net weight was 2½ tons, while the gyroscope itself, turning in a vacuum at the fearful rate of 8,000 revolutions a minute, weighed but 5½ per cent of the total weight of the car. It carried eight persons, and when first shown in Berlin it caused a tremendous sensation, 60,000 persons witnessing the trial during a period of five days. Even royalty took its turn at riding in the novel conveyance.

The first question that the average man asks when he sees a gyroscope is:

“Well, this thing may be all right when it is in motion, but how the deuce is it going to support itself when it is standing still?”

But it does support itself. The gyroscope wheels continue to revolve at something close to 8,000 revolutions a minute, and they hold the car, so that the fluctuation in the weight it carries, due to loading or unloading, does not affect it, even in slight degree. The average man remains unconvinced.

“Suppose the electric power that spins the gyroscope goes back on you?” he demands. The inventor tells him that that is easy enough. The gyroscope, revolving in a vacuum, will keep on turning at sufficient speed to balance the car for nearly an hour. Long before that the side-stays, that make the car a three-pronged structure while out of service, can be dropped.

When To-morrow finally comes and the gyroscope car is in its own, provision will be made on all through mono-rail routes against just such an emergency. At various points sidings will be constructed with low walls, just high enough to receive the cars when their gyroscope equilibrium ceases. These will be just as much a part of the equipment of the mono-rail trunk line as wharves are a part of steamship service. It will be a part that will receive less and less attention as folk begin to realize how little dependent the gyroscope car is upon the old laws of gravity.

“We will have billiard cars in our fastest trains,” says Brennan. “A man will be able to play that delicate game on a railroad train all the way from New York to San Francisco, if he chooses.”Contemplate that, you railroaders and travelled folk of to-day. Those cars will make the cars of to-day seem like pygmies. Each will be 200 feet in length and 30 feet in width. No wonder that people can talk of billiard tables. A train of six of these cars will be longer than the longest of our transcontinental expresses of to-day. They will be fastened together with vestibule connections, and the forward end of the first car will have a sharp beak. The blunt front of an ordinary train begins to be a speed obstacle at more than 50 miles an hour.

Speed? Do you think that 50 miles an hour is speed? Our locomotives do far better than that every day in the United States. A train on a standard railroad and hauled by steam as a motive power has gone faster than the rate of 135 miles an hour. With the mono-rail and the gyroscope, with the countless mountain brooks and rivers harnessed and grinding out electricity, the inventors say calmly that they will begin at 200 miles an hour.

Do you realize what 200 miles an hour means? It means that your grandson or your grandson’s son can leave New York in the morning, do half a dozen errands in Cincinnati, and be back in his home in West Four Hundred and Thirty-eighth Street in time for a late supper. It means that he can lunch in Chicago, span half a dozen mighty States, threading the mountains, through the towns and over the cities, skimming the broad expanses of fat farms, and dine in New York the same night. It means that he can go from one ocean across the continent to the other in twenty-four hours.

But To-morrow is not yet here. Yesterday was just here. In Yesterday men were boasting of their ability to go from New York to Philadelphia by coach in two nights and two days and were asking:

“What next?”