SAN FRANCISCO FIGHTS FOR ITS CABLE CARS
“Save our cable cars,” say Frisco’s citizens. But the City Hall boys have other ideas.
By Louis Hochman
SAN FRANCISCO shakes again! In 1906 it was Nature that rocked the infant town into a mass of ashes and rubble. Today it’s human nature that is giving this Golden Gate City the shakes with a wave of public sentiment that has spread far beyond the city’s own boundaries. Once again the people of San Francisco have gathered in force to go fight City Hall. It’s a battle between practicality and sentimentality and the object of this latest uprising is once again the dinky little cable car—that ding-dong relic of the Gay Nineties that continues to clang its merry way up and down the precipitous hills of San Francisco in blissful defiance of modern science and the forces of progress.
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New German Air-Railway Car Speeds 100 Miles Per Hour
A NEW railway car resembling a zeppelin on wheels, which holds possibilities of a new era in railway transportation has recently been tested in Germany. Utilizing the principles of streamlining throughout, the long silver monster carrying 40 passengers attained a speed of more than 100 miles per hour on a straight stretch of track, getting up full speed in slightly more than a minute. Earlier secret trials are said to have resulted in a 114 m.p.h, speed.
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Rail Flyer to Set New Speed Marks
THE rail flyer, the inventor has called this new space-consuming creation of engineering, and it has several very good reasons for its existence.
It is so constructed that it is able to overcome one of the great problems of rapid transportation; the problem of traction. Every vehicle has tractive power, the ability to move forward under applied force.
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A-POWERED TRAINS IN GLASS TUBES
They’ll give airliner speeds plus weather-free reliability.
By Frank Tinsley
THE train of the future, whipping passengers vast distances through continent-girdling tubes at speeds and in comfort far surpassing that of modern air travel, is no longer merely a dream in the minds of our more imaginative designers and engineers. This old idea (New York’s first working subway train was sucked through a tube) has been brought well within the realm of probability—and the hero of this advance is, as has so often been the case in the history of technology, a new material.
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Train Picks Up and Drops Passengers Without Stopping
IF RAILROADS generally adopt a plan suggested by Rupert Wales, a Buffalo, N. Y. inventor, passengers on non-stop express trains will be able to get off and on at small wayside stations while the train rushes past at top speed. This feat will be accomplished by the use of a mono-rail transfer car, according to Mr. Wales.
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Train Robbers Routed by Science and Brawn
ALL the world . loves detective stories. Here is one that deals with real men and tells the thrilling truth about their fight to save millions of dollars in stolen goods. Ten years ago American railroads were losing $13,000,000 a year to box car bandits. On one road, scientific methods and the careful training of road police have now cut off about ninety-nine percent of this loss. In this story you see how these men do their work.
By BOYDEN SPARKES
I LIKE detective stories. Best of all I like stories of real detectives. Consequently when Professor Charles P. Berkey, Columbia University geologist, told me that a pile of rocks on his table was a clue in a mysterious robbery I pleaded for details.
“I’m just a helper on this job,” said Professor Berkey. “The real detectives are members of the New York Central Railroad police force. I am not at liberty to tell you about this case, but if you see Carl Jellinghaus, the railroad’s superintendent of Property Protection, perhaps you can get the whole story.”
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Due This Year: Trains That Can Go 150 M.P.H.
Electric cars will soon cut travel time between New York and Washington, in a bold U. S. program to speed travel by rail
By ALDEN P. ARMAGNAC
DRAWINGS BY HENRY B. COMSTOCK
All a-BOARD! Psshhh-the doors slide closed. The silvery train leaps forward. Back into your seat cushion you go, as if in an airplane taking off. No nonsense about it, this train’s really going to ride—in just 150 seconds it will accelerate to 125 m.p.h., more than two miles a minute. For it aims to get you to your destination in a travel time matching that by air—maybe less.
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Mobile Power Plant
GAS-TURBINE power plants on rails have been conceived by Allis-Chalmers engineers as emergency units to be used when power plants fail or disaster disables transmission lines. Still in the blueprint stage, the turbine generators mounted on railway trucks for rapid movement will be built in 3000 and 6000-kilowatt units, to operate as a sole source of electric power or to be synchronized with an existing power system.
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Wonder Subway Built Under Skyscrapers on Stilts
Propping up multi-storied skyscrapers on stilts, burrowing beneath railway tunnels, digging out huge chunks of solid rock, thousands of workmen have just completed the most amazing engineering job of its kind on record—the construction of New York City’s newest subway, which is the very last word in underground transportation luxury.
by THOMAS M. JOHNSON
ONE winter day 62 years ago, wheels turned in the first underground railway ever operated in an American city. Really it was a block-long subterranean pneumatic tube, through which a steam-driven fan blew a singe 18-passenger car, then sucked it back.
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Ball-Shaped TRAIN Pulled By Magnets
THE “bullet-flash,” most radical idea in railroad design since the recent advent of streamlining, has just been conceived by a Swiss engineer. Based on electro-magnetic principles, the new ball-shaped iron horse is expected to roll on standard-size rails at a speed as high as 300 m.p.h.
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