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Portland’s Zoo Railway

HAPPY tots and smiling adults ride around the new $3,859,000 Portland, Ore., zoo on America’s latest railway—the Portland Zoo Railroad Co. The rocket-styled, Diesel-powered Zooliner hauls three gleaming Skydome coaches and a luxurious club car which tote 99 adults or 132 kids. The pike is headed by famed Pacific Northwest author and historian, Stewart H. Holbrook, Chairman of the Board, and John H. Jones, President. All aboard!

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RAILROADS IN THE SKY

Monorails promise swift and economical transportation for congested cities.

By Archie Robertson

HERE’S a brand-new way of travel for American commuters—the overhead, suspended train. In a monorail coach, light and roomy as a luxurious airliner and faster than a surface train, you will skim along above the crowded downtown streets, looking with thankfulness at your escape from a misery of crawling cars, traffic fumes, honking horns, whistling cops and squealing brakes. Whether you’re just going downtown to shop or commuting to work 50 miles from your home, a monorail will take you where you’re going two or three times as fast as conventional surface transportation.

The Houston, Texas pilot monorail that opened for demonstration purposes last winter is only 970 feet long, and passengers are allowed to ride free. But in other respects, it is very much like the full-length lines which its backers plan to build soon.

The single “rail” of the Skyway, as the Houston line is called, is a 30-inch pipe supported by 30-foot towers set at 50-foot intervals. At one end of the present line the passengers ascend to a loading platform; at the other the rail declines to bring the coach to ground level. The passenger car hangs below the rail; above it ride the two 305-hp engines, the control equipment and driver’s seat. The unit rides on eight pneumatic-tired wheels; 16 rubber guide wheels keep it in place on the rail. People who have taken the free trip report a nearly silent ride with little sense of motion. The coach has a Fiberglas body and large plexiglass windows; the effect inside is light, airy and cheerful. Seats along the sides accommodate 60 passengers and 50 more can stand comfortably.

The reasons for the monorail can be summed up briefly. Six million new cars coming along every year add to downtown traffic congestion which already causes an economic loss estimated in the billions. Conventional elevated roads and railroads block light and air from the streets below. Subways and surface railroads lose money. And aircraft aren’t yet ready for the job of carrying the public to work and back.

In several major population centers monorails are much closer to construction than the general public realizes. Their safety and dependability have already been proved in steel milk and other industrial plants, and full-scale plans for passenger-carrying monorails have been drawn for Los Angeles, San Francisco, Montreal, and Washington, D. C. The plan for Los Angeles awaits action by the California legislature, to enable the operating company to issue revenue bonds. It includes a 44-mile line between Fernando and downtown Los Angeles, with ten-car trains having a top speed of 100 mph. Even with 15 stops in this distance, the trains will maintain an average speed of 41 mph. This will make it by far the world’s fastest transit system. (New York subway expresses average only 24 mph.) The Los Angeles monorail system, designed by Gibbs & Hill, a New York engineering firm, will have automatic train control. Trains will berth themselves correctly at each station. Doors will open and close by themselves. The train attendant will ride up front in a plexiglass bubble to watch for possible obstructions, like a tall crane passing below. In this case, of course, he’ll be able to stop the train. Escalators will carry passengers up and down from the street.

One monorail plan eliminates bus-to-train transfers for off-line passengers. You’ll be able to board a bus at your usual corner to start your trip downtown. When the bus reaches its monorail station a steel frame will be lowered from the overhead rail. The bus will drive into it, the frame will lock around it and hoist it up. Without leaving your seat in the bus, you’ll be whisked over congested downtown areas to your destination.

The monorail is highly adaptable. In the Los Angeles plan, for example, it takes a dive underground to operate for two miles as a subway. Out in the country, its single row of pillars can be erected in the grassy, center strip which divides modern, separated expressways and thruways. Edward H. Anson, the vice president of Gibbs & Hill, has sketched a plan for a double loop monorail around the heart of Manhattan, with several cross-town lines to relieve congestion on the East-West streets. At rush hours, these are probably the scene of the nation’s worst traffic snarls with a staggering loss in time and money as a consequence.

Monorail enthusiasts, of course, do not claim that theirs is the only answer to the traffic problem. More thruways and expressways are needed, all engineers agree. But expressways and thruways fill up with new traffic jams almost as fast as they are built. The New Jersey Turnpike is now carrying the volume of traffic which it was expected to carry some 30 years hence. Also, deluxe new highways always bring more cars into town every day, to be parked—somewhere. And they cost a lot to build, not only because of their massive construction but because expensive property must be condemned to secure the right-of-way for a city freeway. To build one mile of modern automobile freeway costs from $4,000,000 to $6,000,000; a monorail line of the same length costs only $500,000 to construct.

When it comes to the number of people who can ride, the comparison is even more staggering. The monorail train—allowing for ten cars—can easily move about 24,000 passengers per hour, running on a 90-second headway between trains as in the Los Angeles design. Compare that with the mere 6,000-7,000 people who can travel a six-lane highway in private automobile during the same time—if we allow for the national average of about 1-1/2 passengers per car.

It doesn’t look as if we’re going to build many more miles of subway systems or suburban surface lines. Virtually no subways have been constructed since 1940. They cost about four times as much to build as monorails and they lose money, steadily. The New York subway system, the world’s greatest, runs deeper into the red every year as its passenger traffic declines while its fares go up. In general, the same sad story is true of commuters’ trains around New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and other large cities. Almost without exception their managements report that the trains are run at a loss, schedules are being curtailed or service being abandoned altogether.

Highspeed buses, or trains of buses, running on elevated tracks above the city streets have also been suggested. But an elevated roadway, of any kind, has the serious disadvantage of cutting off the light and air from the street beneath it.

Monorails of the present are not remotely like the old elevated railroads. On the Houston line, for example, the pillars are spaced 75 feet apart in a single row. The light, airy structure deprives nobody of sunshine and fresh air. There’s plenty of room for flowers and trees and no occasion for traffic accidents on the surfaces. Operations are quiet—no rumble, roar or clicking ties.

The monorail train isn’t a new invention. It-was proposed in England as early as 1830, and a few years later, a 20-mile line of single rail was built in the West of Ireland. A line was proposed to relieve New York traffic congestion in 1873.

Early monorails, however, were laid on the ground, or erected only a few feet above it, with engines and cars balanced upright on them. Such, for instance, was the famous, four-mile long Peg Leg Railroad in Pennsylvania, which opened in 1878 and unfortunately blew up a year later. The Bicycle Railroad— a similar design—skimmed along near Bellport, Long Island at 60 miles an hour, back in 1892. By 1901 an English monorail between Manchester and Liverpool was hitting 100 mph. In 1915 a monorail, elevated two feet above ground, ran between Bartow and City Island, N. Y. And of course for many years a little monorail car has been shuttling United States Senators underground between their office building and the adjoining Capitol.

The most famous existing monorail, however, is at Wuppertal, .in the Ruhr district of Germany. Nine and a half miles in length, it is a suspended, overbad type—like the new Houston line. It’s been running, without a single fatality among a total of 310,000,000 passengers, since 1902.

“Overhead, upside-down railroad,” though a clumsy phrase, may be a more accurate description of tomorrow’s mass transportation than the word “monorail.” While the Houston line has just one rail, the Gibbs & Hill design for Los Angeles is actually a narrow-gauge railroad, upside-down with the trains suspended from two rails, three feet apart. This split-rail design, engineers point out, makes switching a lot simpler than the single rail and offers other advantages. Rails, for example, can be enclosed inside a longitudinal box girder, treated with acoustic material, and they can rest upon a resilient, sound-deadening bed. Gyroscopes would not be necessary in the split-rail design. Even under stress equivalent to a 70-mph wind, the cars would lean less than 10 per cent from the vertical— less than some surface trains as they round a curve at high speed.

Maintenance costs on the monorail should be low. An enclosed track is safe from rain and snow. Brakes and motors on top of the cars are readily accessible for inspection and repairs.

What will it cost to ride it? According to the Los Angeles plan, the rate may be about 2.8 cents per mile which . compares with an average nationwide cost of 8 cents a mile for operating a privately-owned automobile. And no more than you pay now to ride a bus or train which is tied to earth.

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Home for Aged Trolley Cars

THE Seashore Electric Railway of Kennebunkport, Me., is a short stretch of track going nowhere. It’s run by and for people who miss the rattle-clang of the streetcars that have been discarded by Progress in favor of malodorous diesel buses. Fifteen years ago three sentimental Bostonians acquired a 12-bench open trolley; now the New England Electric Railway Historical Society has 300 members and owns rolling stock from points as far away as Denver and Minneapolis.

World’s Largest Vacuum Cleaner Keeps Rail Bed Clean
THE Pennsylvania railroad has perfected the largest vacuum cleaning machine in the world to keep clean the right of way near principal terminals. The powerful machine lifts the stone ballast and foreign matter from along the track into a great cleaning chamber and then redistributes the thoroughly cleaned ballast rock along the rails and ties. It accomplishes the work at the rate of thirty-three feet in three minutes.

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The 400-Mph Passenger Train

It may ride on air cushions rather than on rails, and be driven by jets or even rockets. A number of far-out ideas are competing for serious development. And industry is studying a big new market.

By 1980, unless something drastic is done about it, traffic in the populous northeast corridor of the U.S. between Boston and Washington will have reached an imbalance and impasse of monstrous proportions. Already, superhighways in key metropolitan areas are reaching congestive saturation, though close to $2 billion has been spent on those in the corridor alone since 1945. And congestion in air-lane and airport facilities, on which over $1 billion has been spent in the same period, is already severe. By 1980, preliminary studies show, the corridor’s population will have jumped by some 25 percent to well over 50 million. At the same time travel between cities, in the increasing mobility of the era, will have more than doubled or tripled.

The indiscriminate proliferation of superhighways seems less and less of a solution. For one thing, rights-of-way are getting hard to come by and costs are steeply rising, not only in dollars but in land blight. Eventually, if highways spin out unchecked, the whole northeast corridor, following the pattern of Los Angeles, will be largely concrete. Perhaps the superhighway quandary is best illuminated by a proposal last year to double part of the already overburdened New Jersey Turnpike from six lanes to twelve, at a cost of some $350 million. The Port of New York Authority, whose cooperation is required, blanched and promptly cried halt, for not only are the tunnels connecting the turnpike to New York incapable of carrying the added traffic, but no one would know where to put it once it got into Manhattan. Ultimately, if this madness continues, cities will have to hang out signs similar to those on their parking lots: “Full up.”

While congestion on roads and airways was everywhere growing worse, the railroads, historically the most efficient mass movers of people and goods, have been suffering a precipitous drop in traffic. This is not the place to go into the well-known plight of the railroads, delicately balancing the blame between government misdeeds and private mismanagement. The signal fact is that today 91 percent of all intercity passenger travel, including commuter traffic, is by automobile. Of the remainder, the railroads get only 3 percent, where once they had nearly all.

The railroads struggled against this tide. In the last decade or so technical improvements plus tax easements have won back freight traffic and a measure of profitability.

And since World War II all manner of new equipment has been tried, including lightweight cars, Talgo trains, and new sleeper services, to win back passengers. But all these measures represented only marginal improvements, thinly spread, upon a transportation system basically unchanged since the last century; no substantial increase in passenger-train speeds has been shown since 1900. Against the rising power of the automobile and aircraft, aided by massive federal subsidies for highways, airports, and aeronautical research, the railroads fell further and further behind in the sine qua non of twentieth-century travel—speed, comfort, and convenience. Their grimy, cavernous terminals took on the aura of a departed age.

As passenger volume melted, most railroads, primarily freight carriers to begin with, found passenger services becoming a fifth and flat wheel on operations and earnings. Under the burdens of an outmoded system, archaic labor practices, and encrusted rules and regulations, every passenger lured back only added to the enormous running deficits. By 1960 over 100,000 miles of track had been taken out of passenger use, and one route after another was being cut back or terminated. As the railroads abdicated their role as passenger carriers, the government was forced to put up ever mounting funds just to keep some vital but decrepit lines running. Over $40 million has been pumped to date into the rickety New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad, with no end in sight. Most railroad men, except for a few hardy Westerners, became convinced that passenger traffic was something to be shunned. Some even predict that most railroads will be entirely out of the passenger business by 1970.

But precisely at this depressing juncture some startling-developments are under way to reverse the outlook. After years of inaction, government is joining with research science, inventive engineering, and advanced industrial skills in pursuit of a new vision of superhigh-speed ground transportation.

A new transportation vocabulary The passenger from Boston enters a train of long, slim cars shaped like projectiles. Soft music plays as he sinks into a contour chair, straps on a seat belt, and tells a pretty hostess his destination—Washington. With a slight, almost imperceptible lift, the train takes off down a gleaming metal tube, swiftly gaining speed until it reaches a steady, smooth, softly suspirating 400 miles per hour. At Providence, Hartford, New York, and other intermediate points, the train, without slackening speed, spins off cars and picks up new ones via high-speed feeder loops. Somewhere between Providence and Wilmington the passenger has a haircut in the lounge’s barbershop, orders a snack and a drink, and watches an up-to-the-minute newscast. Just before Baltimore he picks up a phone and completes his arrangements in Washington. The trip, door to door, takes something under two hours.

This vision may appear to be the purest moonshine to the much-jolted and discouraged riders of today’s railroads. Yet all of it is well within the abundant technological resources of the clay. And the tubular train is only one of half a dozen devices being seriously considered by the Northeast Corridor Project, a federal program designed to demonstrate what can be done to rejuvenate mass ground transportation in the densest traffic area in the U.S. The project was initiated in 1962 by the late President Kennedy. After a task-force study, he directed then Secretary of Commerce Luther H. Hodges to undertake a thoroughgoing exploration of what government might do to improve and coordinate all transportation in the critical corridor. Before his retirement early this year, Secretary Hodges set a goal of 200-mile-per-hour rail travel between Boston and Washington to cut travel time from something over eight hours to something under four. The project is now completing its preliminary planning phase and is ready to take off on its first active research stage, with a boost from President Johnson’s State of the Union Message and a slated fiscal budget of $20 million.

This program is not to be confused with the federal mass-transit program, administered by the Housing and Home Finance Agency, which has an initial budget of some $400 million to aid cities in shoring up and improving present commuter services—an entirely different, short-range, and specialized problem. The Northeast Corridor Project looks beyond this to a longer-range, more basic technical solution to transit problems, and specifically to intercity travel. For it quickly discovered that a great gap exists in really basic research on advanced ground-transportation systems, due to over half a century of neglect by the industry as well as government.

Without delay, therefore, the project’s director, Dr. Robert A. Nelson—a transportation expert brought in from the University of Washington in 1963—let a $500,000 study contract to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to make a broad survey of all the technological possibilities. The M.I.T. report is due this June. A major part of its job is to block out broad research projects and areas— such as propulsion, guidance, computer control, and network layout—in which the government might profitably invest research funds, looking toward the final construction of a new system. To keep an open mind about what that system may be, as well as to stay out of the rut of railroad thinking, M.I.T.’s engineers use the term “guideways” instead of rails, “vehicles” instead of trains, and they borrow freely from the concepts and proved techniques of aerospace system development.

In marked contrast to the melancholy outlook of most railroad men, the M.I.T. engineers find the field brimming with ideas, some of which have been shoved far back on the shelf for years. The ideas come in such numbers, under such pent-up pressures to sell a particular scheme or piece of equipment, that the Northeast Corridor Project is carefully not committing itself to any system as yet. It will take four to five years of contract research on components to shake down ideas, test the feasibility of systems, and decide on hardware. The propulsion possibilities alone, for instance, include advanced electric motors, turboprops, turbojets, ramjets, pure rockets, free-piston devices, and even nuclear engines. One big task is to choose among alternatives.

To begin to get a sound basis for decision, the Northeast Corridor Project proposes to divide its budget this year, for which President Johnson is asking a $20-million appropriation, three ways. First, $2 million will go for a detailed market survey of all traffic in the nation by source and destination, the first of its kind. Then $8 million will go for demonstration projects on present rail lines in the corridor to study the effects of stepped-up speed and service and to settle once and for all whether simply refurbishing cars, cleaning washrooms, and the like will bring back passengers, as some Congressmen still believe. This is the short-range part of the program to meet the pressures for some improvement now. Finally, for the long-range effort, $10 million will go for research to start testing all the technological alternatives.

The very first idea, of course, was simply to increase speed and improve service on conventional rails. The Northeast Corridor Project, in fact, had its genesis in just such a pro- posal by Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island. Irritated by poor transportation between Boston and Washington, he hit the front pages in 1962 with a comprehensive plan for a modernized passenger service. He introduced a resolution proposing to set up an eight-state public authority to acquire trackage and right-of-way from the railroads now operating in the region. The authority would run new, lightweight, self-propelled cars capable of traveling at seventy miles per hour and at fifteen-minute intervals or alternatively a monorail or other advanced system. The program was to be financed by a bond issue of $500 million.

The need to be unconventional But Pell’s conventional train scheme, though it would considerably increase frequency of service, would not cut travel time much below present averages, or offer much in the way of equipment or attractiveness beyond what the railroads already have tried in various places with no marked success. If a monorail were introduced, it would require an entirely new-track structure, yet it would offer little more in the way of performance. None of the various monorail systems, which for over a quarter of a century have held forth tantalizing promise, have been able to reach useful speeds beyond sixty to seventy miles per hour. At that point they develop excessive sway or instability. This would place their usefulness in lower-speed, stop-and-go commuter services rather than in medium- to long-range routes. Moreover, $500 million is probably a highly optimistic estimate for installing even such limited systems over the 460 miles between Boston and Washington. The more the problem was studied, the less did it appear to yield to so quick or easy a solution.

A more ponderable development to consider was Japan’s crack new Tokaido train, sleekly designed to run between Tokyo and Osaka at 125 to 150 miles per hour. This new speed record is attained not so much by train power, which is conventional electric, but by the use of a special, stabilized roadbed. The tracks are made up of heavy, mile-long welded rails on rubber blocks and prestressed concrete ties, and there are no sharp curves. The $1-billion Tokaido line is powered by motors and gears of Westinghouse design, and was partly financed by the World Bank, to which the U.S. is the major contributor. Yet U.S. railroads showed no interest in the development, maintaining that such an investment could not be justified in the U.S., with its heavier highway and air competition. But others think that a Tokaido-type line is just the ticket for the Northeast Corridor Project. Westinghouse, for one, feels that such a system could be pushed up to 200 miles per hour in U.S. service. Along with other big conventional traction-equipment manufacturers, it is urging adoption of a stepped-up Tokaido system as the quickest, most economical answer to the corridor’s problem, and the one requiring the least experimentation with the unknown.

But this, too, needed to be closely examined. Studies showed that a Tokaido-type line between Boston and Washington would cost— if the Japanese outlay of nearly $5 million per mile is any guide -anywhere from $1.5 billion to well over $2 billion. Speeds might well be pushed up to 200 miles per hour at extra cost, but any higher speeds would be in the realm of engineering uncertainty. Beyond 200 miles per hour, according to most calculations, today’s conventional train would encounter such penalties in wheel friction and air resistance and such difficulties in merely staying on the rails that it might well be close to the limit of its development. Only one electric train so far has reached slightly over 200 miles per hour on a short, straight, experimental run in France, and it burned out its equipment doing it.

To be sure, the big equipment manufacturers that are plumping for a Tokaido-like system believe that a sizable margin of improvement is possible using new suspension and stabilizing techniques and other developments, which up to now they have had no encouragement to undertake. And one surprising newcomer to the railroad field, United Aircraft Corp., which for the past year has been applying its aeronautics talents to studying the whole problem of ground transport, is confident that a rail car can be designed, using aerospace principles, that would be a long step ahead of the Tokaido. But to freeze the pattern on conventional rails now, without further study, would exclude a great range of more advanced or higher-speed unconventional proposals. The real fear is that a 150-to-200-mile-per-hour rail system may not be a sufficiently dramatic advance to lure any substantial number of passengers off the highways.

If you can’t lick the auto, join it More effective competition with the highway is precisely the aim of a highly unorthodox scheme presented last year by General American Transportation Corp., large builder of tank cars and other specialized freight equipment. Called RRollway—a combination of “railroad” and “tollway”—it was conceived by Deodat Clejan, the company’s director of transportation planning. He is a pragmatic, young Romanian-French expert who had a lot to do with the introduction of piggyback freight service in the U.S. His new system is a sort of adaptation of the piggyback principle (see page 128). It would enable passengers to take their automobiles along with them on the train, so that they would have the use of their own cars at the end of the journey. His reasoning is that the American does not want to be parted from the convenience, comfort, and mobility of his private automobile, and any system that does not cater to this desire is bound to fail. Instead of fighting the automobile, he would join with it in an entirely new form of intermodal rail transportation.

Clejan and his advanced transportation research staff have spent two years working out the preliminary details of a new system. Its basic unit is a huge, streamlined, electric railroad car, 128 feet long and 24 feet wide, which would carry twelve automobiles parked crossways. A passenger would drive his own car through an automatic tollgate, up a ramp onto the train, and spend his journey relaxing in a lounge at one end. Trains of any length, interspersed with a few all-passenger cars carrying 300 to 500 passengers each, would be made up automatically as traffic dictated. They would ride on a special roadbed on wide, eighteen-foot-gauge tracks. There is little or no engineering reason why today’s four-foot, eight-and-a-half-inch standard-gauge tracks, adopted in the last century, should be sacrosanct. On wider, more stable tracks, making for a lower center of gravity, Clejan’s train would have no trouble reaching speeds of 150 to 200 miles per hour, using third-rail d. c. power; a block system would control speeds from outside the train simply by varying the power input.

Out to beat the toll road Some such combination of rail and automobile has been in the air for some years. French railways have a popular vacation service in which a family’s car is driven onto a two-tiered auto rack and transported along with the family, who ride in the train. But this system would not be likely to catch on in the U.S. since it takes up to forty-five minutes to load and unload cars, and offers no great advantage in speed or comfort. Germany has been working on a system somewhat similar to RRollway. And in 1961, Westinghouse also proposed a system, which never got beyond the proposal stage, employing big, flat-bottomed, wheelless cars riding on a series of rubber rollers, powered by individual induction motors—something like a conveyer system.

Essentially, RRollway would offer a fast, fully automatic auto-ferry service, running at five-minute intervals between the outskirts of major cities. In its initial form it would require no very unconventional equipment or technical breakthroughs. Estimated costs per mile would run somewhat lower than those of the Tokaido system, since RRollway would not enter the city centers and could economize on right-of-way. In comparison with toll roads, costs would look even better, for Clejan figures that one RRollway line would be equivalent in traffic-carrying capacity to a ten-lane superhighway. The system would charge fares no higher than the toll-road driver’s estimated average cost of 6 cents per mile (2 cents for tolls plus 4 cents for automobile running costs), while speeding him along two to three times faster than on the highway and relieving him of the task of driving.

Clejan thinks the system could be self-liquidating, for at 6 cents per mile it would take in, after operating expenses, almost three times more income per automobile-mile than the more expensive toll road. Clejan also believes that, while conventional rails were selected at the start to make the system more immediately practical, nothing would prevent later versions from using more unconventional guideways and propulsion units, as these became available, for still more speed and economy. Announcement of the RRollway system last fall was hastened in order to get it into the running for the Northeast Corridor Project. But its potential revenues look so good that GATX itself is seriously contemplating building a RRollway in the next five to six years somewhere outside the northeast corridor. It is studying half a dozen routes where traffic is heavy enough to make the project feasible.

Has the wheel had it?

In the spectrum of advanced ideas under study, RRollway is at the conservative end; in its initial form it would still use old-fashioned wheels and rails. A considerable number of experts, particularly the aeronautical engineers, have veered to the notion that the wheel-on-rails has had it as a mode of passenger transportation and is about ready to give way to some form of vehicle that rides on a cushion of air. The point is to eliminate most of the friction found in wheel-driven vehicles. The air-cushion principle has been applied to dozens of ground-effect machines being developed, mainly for military purposes, to skim about a foot or more over rough terrain or water. But this type of tree-moving vehicle is hard to control and it cannot go very fast because it tends to lose its air cushion to the surrounding atmosphere at higher speeds. These difficulties may be avoided, however, by operating the machine over special rails or guideways, only a fraction of an inch or so off their surface. It is as a tracked vehicle that the air-supported machine may have its greatest potential.

Curiously enough, the most substantial work on this type of vehicle in the U.S. has been done by the Ford Motor Co. Ford got into the unlikely field of mass transit when, about a decade ago, it brought in Dr. Andrew A. Kucher, an inventor well known for several major aeronautical and electromechanical devices, to organize its basic research and engineering laboratory. Kucher had been working for thirty years on an air-support idea quite different from all others. Its basic component was a smooth, flat, perforated metal plate called a “levapad.” Through the perforations a compressor pumped a thin film of air that raised the plate a fraction of an inch off the guide surface beneath it. On this thin film of air the plate floated smoothly over the guide, with a minimum of push, like a high-pressure steam iron over Monday’s laundry. With a large new laboratory at his disposal, Kucher persuaded Ford to plunge into engineering development of this device.

By 1961 the engineering feasibility was worked out, and levapads, replacing wheels, had been designed into a number of small laboratory vehicles and projected Levacars of various sizes and configurations. The biggest one on the drawing board was a 124-foot-long, bullet-shaped vehicle, carrying 200 passengers, powered by two turboprop engines, front and aft. It would ride over an elevated structure, on light, six-inch, hollow-square rails, with levapads designed to press against the top and one side of the rails for support and guidance (see diagram, page 127). The top design speed for this vehicle was 150 miles per hour, but with only slightly more power it could be pushed up to 350 miles per hour, and laboratory experiments showed that Levacars could reach 500 miles per hour. Cost estimates for constructing the system were a low $150,-000 per mile. Ford went to the major railroads with its scheme. Dozens of conferences produced some interest but no funds to build a full-scale experimental system, the next step in proving out the engineering concept. Since an auto company could not justify such a big investment for itself, Ford reluctantly put the Levacar project on the shelf in 1962.

The Ford system and others like it may now be dusted off as the Northeast Corridor Project gets moving, for there is a persistent rise of developments in the air-cushion field. Britain’s Hovercraft Development Ltd., for instance, is working on a Hovercar transport system providing a continuous pressurized air cushion on the underside of the car. One version operates at speeds up to 300 miles per hour over a V-shaped track, and is powered by either a diesel engine or a new kind of linear electric-induction motor. The linear-motor system, one type of which is being developed at Manchester University, is a novel and promising idea. It separates the stator and rotor of the traditional electric motor, so that in effect the vehicle itself becomes the rotor, moving along a third rail that acts as stator. The result is a swift, silent, economical form of propulsion without moving parts.

In the U.S., Westinghouse is experimenting with a magnetic type of suspension system in which a double track of strong, ceramic-type permanent magnets repels a vehicle equipped on its underside with magnetic strips of the same polarity; these magnets can now be manufactured almost as cheaply as steel rail. The repulsion of like poles creates a thin magnetic flux between the vehicle and roadbed that acts like an air cushion.

Sliding through a tube The main problem facing all these as yet untried systems, from levapads to magnetic suspensions, is that at ground speeds in the 200- to 500-mile-per-hour range, the stability and support of vehicles and the protection of rights-of-way from heavy weather, thrown rocks, or other intrusions would become very critical problems. The more thought that is put on it, particularly around Cambridge, the more it appears that the ideal guideway would be a tubular structure, offering the maximum in protection, support, stability, and guidance of high-speed vehicles.

Oddly enough, the concept of a tube as a means of highspeed travel is one of the older ideas currently being reexamined. Robert H. Goddard, famed U.S. inventor of the liquid-fuel rocket, proposed such a system in 1904. Then a student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, he wrote an assigned freshman theme on “Traveling in 1950,” proposing a superhigh-speed train suspended and driven in an evacuated steel tube by electromagnets. It would reach 1,200 miles per hour, he calculated, owing to the elimination of all friction and air resistance. The idea was greeted with the same skepticism as Goddard’s later prediction of rocket flights to the moon. Ironically, in 1950, five years after his death, he was awarded a posthumous patent on the system.

In the Forties, Irving Langmuir, General Electric’s great research scientist and Nobel Prize winner, also suggested that a vacuum tube stretching from New York to San Francisco would make it perfectly feasible for rocket vehicles in the tube to reach speeds of 5,000 miles per hour. But the cost of maintaining a vacuum in such systems alone would probably place them beyond the limits of economic feasibility.

More practicable and ingenious is a tubular transport system proposed more recently in some detail by Dr. Joseph V. Foa, an Italian-born professor of aeronautical engineering and astronautics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Instead of employing a vacuum, his tube system combines air-cushion suspension with jet propulsion in an entirely new way. Foa hit upon the new principle in 1947 while working at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory in Buffalo and thinking about the problems of tubular travel. The main problem was similar to that of an ordinary train in a railroad tunnel. The train, acting like a leaky piston, must push the entire column of air confined in the tunnel ahead of it, with great expenditure of energy and loss of speed. Foa conceived a vehicle, using aeronautical principles and such newly available prime movers as fanjets or ramjets, that would rapidly transfer the air immediately in front of it in the tube to its rear. This would leave the main body of air in the tube relatively undisturbed, making possible a great increase in speed and operating economy. In laboratory experiments he proved that such a system would in fact create an invisible air screw or propeller of air around the vehicle, rapidly pushing air to the rear and augmenting thrust.

Since 1952, when he came to R.P.I., Foa has been industriously exploring the principle on R.P.I, research funds, U.S. Army Research Office and other grants. He has dreamily designed vehicles of two classes. The most immediate one, which he thinks is well beyond the dream stage by now, is a turbofan jet vehicle in the 250- to 400-mile-per-hour speed range. One of his latest designs in this class is a mammoth cigar-shaped vehicle, 195 feet long and 9 feet in diameter, with six big air-cushion pods to keep it hovering about one foot off the tube’s walls. It is designed to carry 200 passengers. This he thinks would be ideal for the Boston-Washington run, for at speeds of 300 to 400 mph a safe headway between cars would be two minutes. Not far behind in his estimation—indeed, he thinks the development ought to be concurrent—is a second class of ramjet vehicles with a speed range of 1,000 to 2,000 mph, for transcontinental travel. At these speeds the trains would compete with supersonic aircraft and, considering the many problems of supersonic flight, the tube might be a better, safer all-weather bet.

The major problem with the tube is where to lay it. Foa thinks that it could be either put on the surface, elevated down the center strip of superhighways, or buried underground like a pipeline—and the feats of pipeliners in this century indicate that it could be done. But since the tube would have to be as straight and stable as possible to contain such high speeds, M.I.T.’s thinkers lean toward tunneling it some 500 feet underground. At this level it would reach a uniform rock structure, bypass all surface soil problems, and avoid the problem and cost of acquiring rights-of-way. Such deep tunneling would be uneconomic, however, unless drilling costs could be brought down to about one-quarter of their present level. Not much intensive research has been done on rock drilling, and this is likely to be another challenge for the Northeast Corridor Project.

Computers at the throttle All the most advanced ideas and systems, which offer the greatest promise, are still in the laboratory-model stage. Foa’s next step, for instance, is to go from toylike models to pilot-scale vehicles in a tube three feet in diameter and three miles long, which will cost some $1 million to build. It is estimated that $100 million or more will be required just to carry the various ideas through research and development, up to the stage of full-scale tests, before a rigorous cost-justification analysis can be run on them. From there it will take $2 billion or more to build an operating system.

This may seem an enormous, even outlandishly extravagant investment. But the 200,000 miles of U.S. railroad tracks laid down in the last century, with the aid of vast federal land grants and other subsidies, represented an enormous investment in its day. And even now nearly $50 billion is to be spent on the U.S. interstate highway program and over $1 billion may go into the development of a supersonic airliner. Unless mass ground transportation is brought into more vigorous competition with these other modern forms of travel, so that each may find its most useful level of operation, the chaotic congestion around urban centers may well cost the nation far more than the amount that would have to be invested in supertrains.

Whatever system is settled on, whether it be a Tokaido-type line or a composite of far-out vehicles, it will be a system development on a scale with some of the largest in the aerospace program. It will draw not only on the widest technical and corporate skills, but on economists, sociologists, political scientists, and urban planners. Among other things, it will call for the highest level of central computer control and automation, for at speeds beyond 100 miles per hour human reactions become too slow. None of the systems contemplated would employ more than an attendant in each vehicle or train to press an emergency button should the whole system fail. There is also the question of routing—whether through central cities, for instance, or only through their peripheries, where more and more traffic is originating -answers to which would profoundly affect metropolitan development.

Eventually, of course, the intercity system must tie in and coordinate with intra-urban commuter services, whose whole course of development the Northeast Corridor Project may do much to shape and stimulate. Indeed, the commuter field itself is already bubbling more hopefully with uninhibited ideas from hydrofoils and hover-craft to make use of long-neglected river routes, to monorails and a new Westinghouse Transit Expressway system for land travel. Next month Fortune will examine the problems and promises in this area of transportation.

How the supertrain may be built Exactly who would build and manage the big intercity project is still an open question. The eight-state public authority originally proposed by Senator Pell now appears to be too difficult and cumbersome. There are more attractive alternatives. An operating company could be set up by government charter, as the early railroads were. Or the project could be put in the hands of a wholly government enterprise, like TVA or NASA, which would let out contracts to industry. Or it could be done by a mixed semi-public and private corporation along the lines of Comsat, the company set up to create a space-satellite communication system. This last procedure is winning favor in Washington, for the great success of Comsat indicates that the public is ready and willing to invest in long-range technological ventures in which both the government and major industrial elements are represented. What part, if any, the present railroads would play in all this is unclear. But before everything is settled, the economic and political controversies that could arise might well present more difficulties than the technology.

Yet the imperatives to do something are pressing. By the latter part of the century more than 100 large metropolitan areas will have grown and fused into some twenty megapolitan super-regions such as the one that is already filling up the corridor between Boston and Washington. To handle the increasingly dense traffic generated in these super-regions, something is going to be built and lots of money will be spent —whether it be on highways, toll roads, feeder airline facilities, or some of the systems discussed in this article. The proposition advanced by the Northeast Corridor Project is that the time to plan a more rational development of transportation is now. Behind it is the belief that the system engineering capable of doing many “impossible” tasks in going to the moon can also devise a better ground transportation system for going from Boston to Washington.

Railroads Run Special Cars For Amateur Photographers

IN ADDITION to their special trains for hikers, bicyclers and other hobby enthusiasts, railroads are now running special observation trains for the accommodation of amateur photographers. Many unusual photos are obtained as the amateurs “shoot” passing trains, entrances and exits from tunnels, sharp curves, etc.

To provide additional material for unusual photos, the railroads permit the amateurs to visit their shops so that locomotives, tenders, cars, and roundhouse equipment can be photographed. The popularity of the idea can be judged by the fact that on a trip to shops of the Pennsylvania Railroad at Altoona, Pa., more than 1,600 amateurs participated.

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Over-and-under monorail — a single beam tor two-way taxis

By DAVID SCOTT

Munich, West Germany Starting next year, the people of Hamburg will be able to peer down on the city from a Cabintaxi, a personalized urban conveyor with a difference. It has small electric cars moving in both directions, but on a single elevated track. Cars run both above and below the slim, lofty beam. This unique mass-transit system was designed here by Messerschmidt-Bolkow-Blohm, Germany’s leader in aerospace and a high-technology innovator in other fields.

There’s already a demonstration setup working in Hagen, in the Ruhr area, and by mid-1981 the Hamburg line will be installed by Mannesmann Demag, MBB’s construction partner in the project. This will be a one-mile loop with three overhead stations linking a commuter rail station with a nearby business district. Nine 12-passenger driverless cabs will circulate and stop on demand. All movement will be computer-controlled. The initial installation is intended to test public acceptance and to prove feasibility.

Now, let’s take a ride. From the main rail station I take an escalator to the Cabintaxi level, drop a coin into a ticket-vending machine, and punch out my destination by number on a keyboard. A magnetically encoded ticket and my change drop out, and my departure platform appears on an indicator panel.

At the platform I drop the ticket into a reader that flashes my demand to the central computer. This assigns the next free car to my destination, which is displayed on the car’s side for identification. I step in and press a button to close the door. That starts the journey. If one or two other people are going to the same place, we share the cab.

The computer now takes over completely. It regulates our speed, senses the position of any car ahead to maintain a safe headway, and holds us at intermediate stations only if the track is temporarily occupied. We’re programmed for travel to the selected destination by the most direct path. Upon arrival, the car is released for immediate use by other travelers.

“Our over-and-under guideway is a big space-saver and cost-cutter,” MBB’s Gert von Lieres told me. “A two-level guideway can fit into narrow streets that couldn’t accommodate parallel rails, and there’s less clutter in the streets from support columns. Construction is simplified and thus relatively cheap.”

It’s also a quiet system; the cars glide at about 22 mph on rubber-tired wheels. And it shouldn’t be affected by weather; the base, suspension, and guidance tracks are fully enclosed within the beam. “This protects them from snow and ice,” von Lieres said, “while the lateral rollers eliminate any risk of derailment. They allow tight corners—a turn radius as small as 100 feet—meaning greater versatility in urban routing.”

Electric drive is from individual onboard linear-induction motors (see “Flying Trains,” PS, Aug. ’79). Power and flat reaction rails at both levels are completely shielded, so there are no weather or safety problems. Since traction does not depend on wheel-to-track friction, gradients up to 10 percent can be handled at full speed. The no-contact motors are also used for skid-free braking, supplemented by mechanical wheel brakes for parking and emergencies.

Switching at track junctions is done on the cars themselves by swiveling guide rollers, and is computer-auto-mated. There are no moving points on the guideway needing regular maintenance or heating in winter. Cabin-taxis move slowly but surely. MBB figures average travel times will be 50 percent shorter than by private car or other street vehicle in city traffic.

Tiny three-seat cabins only 12 feet long are planned for flexibility and economy on lines where traffic varies widely between peak hours and slack periods. These might be used on an extended 20-mile, 38-station network now envisaged for Hamburg.

The individual monorail cars could do a lot to speed people and reduce road congestion in cities. They could be on call around the clock. The scheme is heavily funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research and Technology—which makes its chance of success pretty good.

Passengers’ Luggage Handled Speedily by Monorail Line

HANDLING package freight to and from ocean-going vessels near Hamburg, Germany, is done in an extremely efficient and satisfactory manner. A unique monorail line carries bundles, trunks, etc., over an extensive tract of land and water to the passenger depot.

The cars are drawn by a gasoline motor along a rail suspension line at a rapid rate of speed. By this means, passengers’ luggage is quickly transported to and from a ship. Steel ribbed girders support the rail.

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The Subway City Grows

Street traffic goes on as usual while gigantic construction project approaches completion many feet below.

by Don Glassman

UNDERGROUND flyers crashing through caves of darkness serve the largest metropolitan population in the world—New York. They carry people to and fro every minute of the year; storm, rain, snow or ice —nothing stops them. Under rivers, streets, skyscrapers, occasionally coming up for a breath of light and air, the trains for the most part run underground where the running is good and the tracks are clear.

Fancy running New York or London without subway traffic. It can’t be done! So long as huge cities flourish, so long as we have street congestion, underground travel is the easiest solution to our problem. Experience proves it.

The world’s greatest cities keep pace with the growth of population and street traffic by constantly extending the routes of underground transit. Subway building began as a twentieth-century industry, and it seems destined to go on forever. Before one project is finished, another is under way. The process goes on and on, because people are insisting on motion without waste of time or effort. And speed is not a luxury any more.

The population spreading over the wide expanse of New York uses the most elaborate network of underground transit ever built. The city is distributed over something like 5,333 miles of streets, and about 848 miles of subway track are required to serve these thoroughfares with speedy subway transit.

The newest link in a $1,000,000,000 subway system is a two and one-quarter-mile stretch under one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares —Sixth Avenue. The cost is $57,000,000, more than $25,000,000 per mile for a quadruple-lane subterranean highway, surely one of the most costly bits of rail construction on record.

Merely a brief examination of what engineers must contend with will give one an appreciation of why it takes so much money and five long years to build so short a subway section.

In the first place, the overhead street traffic must go on day and night as if there were no construction below. Heavy busses, trucks and other surface vehicles travel the roadway constantly. Also, the same street supports the pillars of an elevated train structure on which passenger trains are always running.

For twenty-four blocks of the distance, the new subway route runs above the tunnels of a high-speed interurban train. Under one street intersection, it must leap over the Pennsylvania Railroad tunnels, dive under another subway and a tunnel, and support the elevated structure over the street.

To all this difficulty is added the presence of a seventeen-foot aqueduct from the Cats-kill Mountains, carrying a stream of clear water for the city’s daily use. Gas mains, steam pipes, electric conduits, sewers, cables, sub-basements, and underground freshets add to the difficulties. Skyscrapers must be pinned up, foundations carried down, cables separated, excavations removed, and concrete poured. Steel beams are pushed through narrow openings. Air drills attack the hard granite and drive holes for dynamite.

Then there is the underground blasting, most ticklish job of all. Every blast is “in the lap of the Gods.” If it fails to go off according to plans, something gives way and perhaps the whole structure may tumble down. Careful calculations and the most painstaking labor enter into subway construction. Hundreds of • thousands walk on the rough planks covering the streets, but few know what actually goes on below. Underwater tunnel construction is another industry that bids fair to develop into permanency. The East River takes the world’s record with ten double-track underwater tunnels. Five immense bridges span this same channel.

Ever since the completion of the Holland Tunnel connecting New York and New Jersey, which accommodates about 11,000,000 auto passengers every year, there has been a movement to build fewer bridges in congested areas. The War Department sympathizes with this movement because fewer bridges will simplify harbor protection. The newest tunnel under the Hudson is called the Midtown, 8,000 feet long and 31 feet in diameter on the outside, and 21-1/2 feet wide on the roadway. This same tunnel may later be driven clear across the island of Manhattan and beneath the East River, emerging finally on Long Island.

Underwater tunnel construction is usually more expensive than ordinary subway work. The new Midtown costs about $40,000,000 for a length of one and one-half miles.

The heroes of construction on the vehicular tunnels are the muckers, sand hogs and engineers who work under conditions that make many so-called hazardous jobs appear very tame.

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TAKE YOUR CAR WITH YOU ON THE TRAIN

Car-carrying coaches that enable the traveler to make a doorway-to-doorway visit across country may be the answer to the woes of the railroads.

By Frank Tinsley

FOR some years now the famous old “high-ball” sign of America’s railroads has degenerated into an “eight-ball” as far as passenger traffic is concerned. Not that travel has fallen off. Actually, John Q. Public’s well-known itching foot is itchier than ever. It is just that rail service has been dragging its brakeshoes and the traveler has turned to more convenient means of transportation.

The reasons for this lamentable state of affairs are not hard to find. The rise of cross-country bus lines, cut-rate air-coach service, superhighways and private automobile travel has hacked a substantial slice out of the railroad’s passenger pie.

Alarmed by the steady drip of red ink, rail management has been trying to plug the leaking dike. So, apparently, have rail stockholders. During the past few months, operating control of several old, conservative lines has passed to more progressive hands and a general atmosphere of modernization seems under way. Advertising campaigns now depict the delights of train travel. Family plans and special rates have eased the bite on John Q’s pocketbook and a whole new series of streamliners, luxury coaches, bars, grills and vistadomes combine to ease his seat, stomach and sight-seeing.

Perhaps the most radical break from the railroad’s stage-coach past is the new Talgo Train, a caterpillar-like, lightweight speedster patterned on airplane construction principles. Originated by a Spanish engineer named Goicoechea, the design was taken up by a Spanish firm, Patentes Talgo, and a well engineered prototype developed and built by our own American Car & Foundry Corporation.

In addition to its lightweight, short, articulated car sections and “guided axles” which steer the wheels around curves, Talgo’s chief characteristic is its “piggy-back” system of suspension. Each unit has but one pair of wheels, situated at its rear end. The forward end of the coach rests and pivots on the wheels of the «nit ahead, somewhat like a trailer truck, and is drawn along with a minimum of effort. Vibration is absorbed by long travel, spiral springs and the wheels are equipped with king-size, automobile-type brakes. With an underslung frame and a car floor that almost seems to skim the roadbed, the Talgo’s center of gravity is a good two feet lower than that of the standard railway coach. This, plus the steerable wheels, permits it to round curves at speeds that would derail the conventional train.

This record, along with recent demonstration runs, has created a decided stir in U.S. railroad circles. A committee was sent to Spain for a first hand report and the presidents of several large eastern systems met to consider the Talgo’s possibilities. When enough rail lines agree on a standardized model and come up with firm orders, a mass production assembly line can be set up and costs cut far below present estimates. Patrick B. McGinnis, the energetic, imaginative new president of the New Haven Railroad, says that if this is done, he will be interested in purchasing at least 20 and perhaps 30 Talgo Trains. Robert Young, who espoused the ultra model Train X when he was president of the Chesapeake & Ohio, and who now bosses the great New York Central system, is expected to follow suit. The head men of the Pennsy, B&O and other fines, are equally interested.

All this sounds fine for both the railroads and the traveling public. But there is still a big, fat fly in the roads’ passenger-revenue ointment. This is the growing group of ex-rail users who now make even the longest and most arduous trips in their own automobiles. Some think it more convenient just to toss their luggage into the family car, slip on some informal duds and drive directly from doorstep to doorstep. And so it is—if the distance is not too great. Another large segment is made up of the false economists. These penny-wise characters figure the gas and oil bills against seemingly higher rail fares and decide to save by driving. What they fail to reckon with, of course, is the expense of motel stops and the extra meals made necessary by the longer road trip.

These are the people railroad passenger agents are re-surveying with acquisitive eyes. Mr. McGinnis, a firm believer in the volume theory of personal rail transport, puts it this way: “The New Haven now carries around twenty million passengers a year—just about all the business traffic in the area. The market we are seeking to develop is that of the pleasure traveler who is now going by car. We have to get ‘em back if we are ever going to get our passenger department out of the red!”

There is one point which Mr. McGinnis has missed. That is the problem of people who want to travel by rail but who would like to take their cars along with them. Steamship lines catering to tourists have long offered this service. Car ferries transport vacationists and their automobiles between Florida and Cuba, U. S. and Canadian ports and many other points, here and abroad. In England, there is even a cross-channel air car-lift that flies the family and its bus to and from Paris! When airlines, weight-sensitive as they are, can carry autos, what in tarnation is holding back the railroads?

MI believes that the old iron horse has missed a bet in ignoring this type of service—that the passenger should be able to drive to a depot, check his car through to his destination and drive it away at the other end of the run. The “carfare” would have to be fairly high, of course, but compared to the road costs of a two or three day trip, not to speak of the personal fatigue involved, the difference should not prove too excessive. With this in mind, the author has prepared two concepts of possible “car coach” superstructures, adapted to the new, high speed Talgo running gear.

Fundamentally, they are the same design. One, shown in the diagrammatic drawings, is a stripped down utility model. The other, pictured in the lead illustration, has been prettied up to conform to the flowing lines, window and panel patterns of the Talgo Train. Two, four and even six-car coaches are possible. However, the Talgo philosophy of short, highly articulated, lightweight components, make a 25-foot, two-car unit the most practical from the point of view of weight saving and operational flexibility.

As shown in the diagram on pages 58-59, the entraining car is driven onto a parking belt by an attendant. The belt shuttles the car sideways to a vacant parking space where it stays until the train is ready to load. Then the auto is driven onto another shuttle belt and moved sideways to the correct train-loading gate. The car is then driven through the gate and onto the uniquely designed car coach.

The salient points in the design are the rotating superstructure and the drawbridge type upper deck. The former permits the car-carrying element to pivot outward in either direction, making it possible to load or unload automobiles from way station platforms on either side of the track.

The drawbridge set-up makes double-deck loading equally practical. When the lower .level has been cleared, a switch at the operator’s post starts a reversible electric winch which unwinds to lower one end of the hinged upper deck. Then a second switch eases the car down the incline and out onto the station platform. Another set of switches reverses the process to load. When it reaches the horizontal, spring bolts lock the upper deck automatically.

As a safety measure, these must be manually withdrawn before the deck can be lowered. Another manually operated bolt locks the superstructure in line with the chassis when loading is completed. The cars are fastened securely in their wheelways by chocks and tiedown cables before the train starts. Except for manual unlocking, all operations are by push-button control, easily handled by unskilled attendants.

The car-carrying coach could be a potent factor in the railroads’ struggle to revive its once great passenger traffic. Instead of waging a losing battle with the automobile, it adds a new utility to the family jalopy by putting it on rails. It extends our firmly ingrained habit of chucking a whole mess of stuff into the back of the car and hopping off for a three or four hour drive to Aunt Elsie’s. By making a simple phone reservation and tooling in to a main line station, you will be able to stretch your doorway-to-doorway trip clear across the country! When are the railroads going to wake up and give us this long overdue convenience? When are we going to be able to take our cars with us on the train?

The New 20th Century Limited
JETTING new standards for comfort, beauty and luxury in railroad transportation, the new 20th Century Limited of the New York Central System operates on the fastest schedule—16 hours— ever made in regular service between New York and Chicago, flashing over the rails at speeds up to 80 m.p.h. The Limited consists of 62 cars and 10 streamlined locomotives operated in four sections. The train is the first all-room type in America, the sleeping cars consisting of roomettes, bedrooms, compartments and drawing rooms, there being no berths. The public cars—lounge, observation and dining cars—are all of new and unusual design, featuring colored lights, circular tables and attractive drapery, as shown in the accompanying photos. The new 20th Century Limited marks the 36th anniversary of the world-famous train’s first run.

Talkies to Entertain TRAIN Passengers
TALKIES are soon to be one of the amusements provided for passengers on de luxe trains of leading railroad lines. These “Talkie cars,” designed by William D. Knox, of Birmingham, Mich., are being built for several railroads at a cost of $60,000. They will be decorated like a modern theater, and show latest pictures. Special roller bearings and sound-proof walls will eliminate noise.

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Rocket Train Faster than Sound

TOMORROW’S train will be too fast for a timetable. Leave New York at 12 noon for the coast, and you’ll arrive in Los Angeles at the same time, the same day!

How’s that? At 1,000-mph your train will travel as fast as the sun in its apparent motion across the earth from east to west. You’ll pace the sun through every time zone from Eastern Standard to Pacific Time as your wheel-less train glides across the continent in three hours on its graphite-lubricated slippers. It’ll take the sun three hours to race the same distance, and you’ll flash into L.A. in a dead heat—at the same time you started!

Such a super train is depicted here by MI Artist, Doug Rolfe. Its pattern is the Army “sled” recently tested at Muroc Air Base by the Northrop Aircraft Co. With five solid-fuel rockets it streaked along its standard-gauge railroad track at 1,019 mph, far faster than the speed of sound.

The sled originally was designed to help plane engineers crack the 750-mph barrier of sound and test air models at supersonic speeds. Before the sled shot off the rails and buried itself in the desert, however, it set a world’s record for speed on land and opened the way for a revolution in transport and rapid dispersal of our sardine-packed cities. •

UPSIDE-DOWN TROLLEY
THERE has been much talk and conjecture recently on the possibility of employing a series of elevated monorail systems to help relieve the growing traffic problem that has been plaguing our country’s highways and railroads in the past few years. Well, just in case you might be thinking that a monorail is something brand-new, take a look at these photos that MI has dug up on a suspended trolley that has been in operation in Germany for over 50 years, is still unduplicated.

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Rail Detectives Victors in War on Crime

WHERE are the James boys and the “Bill” Daltons of yesteryear? What has become of the picturesque train robber who, with a gun in each hand and his eyes boring his victims from above a black silk handkerchief, backed away to his pony, Hung the Wells Fargo pouch of gold across his saddle bow, cut loose with a parting volley of bullets, and galloped off across the prairie trails to lead pursuing posses through nights of hard and fruitless riding?

Gone? Not a bit of it! He has changed his game, that’s all. He may have lost his picturesqueness—which any railroad detective will assert he possessed only in fiction—but he has simply turned to new paths in his hopeless struggle against law and order. His pony has been superseded by the automobile. Smooth concrete roads are his prairie trails of today. And his loot is carried away in carload lots by motor truck.

For the masked desperado of other days, a gunman still, has gone to robbing freight trains; not that it is less hazardous, but because it holds out a false lure of greater profit. At a recent meeting of railroad detectives in Chicago, one veteran estimated the railroads in Illinois alone lost approximately $10,000,000 i n merchandise through freight car thefts in 1922. Other officials, however, say this figure is far too high and point out that the losses are constantly decreasing.

One of the greatest factors in cutting down the number of robberies is the railway police—or special agents, as they are better known. Through the organization of squads of “train riders,” picked marksmen, armed with shotguns and rifles, who convoy valuable shipments, thievery is being made too costly to be profitable. Other rifle squads, riding in high powered motor cars, are nightly patrolling the highways that parallel the rights of way. Any of these men, if asked about the days when the Younger band and the Daltons made life miserable for trainmen and passengers in Missouri, will declare the depredations then were insignificant as compared to the problems the railroad police have to meet today.

It was the late William A. Pinkerton, the man most feared by train and bank robbers during the years they terrorized the west, who stripped the Missouri desperadoes of the halo of bravery and the garb of glamor bestowed upon them by the writers of lurid fiction. In an account of the operations of the principal holdup gangs between 1875 and 1907, he pictured them all as a lot of “cowardly assassins,” and so they remain to this day.

Just as a crime wave swept along in the wake of the civil war, so the epidemic of train robberies followed the world war, according to the special agents. History repeats itself. At first the thefts were mostly of silk. Then special guards were placed aboard the trains and the number of these robberies declined. One such recent shipment was valued at $12,000,000. It was carried in forty-six cars and accompanied by twenty-five armed guards. Then prohibition came, and the thieves turned their attention to alcohol and liquor.

This class of robbery reached the peak in 1920 and 1921.

Now all these shipments are heavily guarded until they reach the consignee.

“There hasn’t been a silk robbery in a long time now,” said one veteran, “and we haven’t lost a quart of alcohol in months.”

Just after the war came a series of mail robberies in which the loot ran into millions. Most of these holdups were committed, however, either after the mail sacks had been thrown from the trains or were being carried to the depots. These thefts became so numerous the war department placed armed marines on all mail trains and also on the postal trucks. There hasn’t been a big mail robbery since.

It used to be that most freight car thefts were committed in the yards at the large terminals, but these yards are now efficiently patrolled, 1,800 special police being assigned to duty in the yards of the Chicago district alone. The result is that the majority of robberies occur on the road while the trains are moving. How, the average person asks, can a whole freight car load of stuff be stolen while the train is going- forty miles an hour? Listen to Chief J. Boyle of the Pullman Company’s police force, and a member of many a posse that chased old-time train robbers across Missouri. He describes the modern method of operation as follows: “The thieves are tipped off as to the number of the car and the kind of goods it contains. They hide on it and pry open the door after the train leaves the yards when the darkness hides the thieves from the train crew. The rumble of the wheels drowns out the sound as they begin throwing out the packing cases, cartons, barrels or boxes. The thefts always are committed where a highway parallels the tracks, where their confederates can pick up the loot with motor trucks.”

To stop this practice, roads are using shotgun crews in automobiles to patrol the highways near the tracks. Occasionally these squads come upon the thieves in the act of loading their trucks and the battle is on. The train riders usually ride in empty gondolas so they can watch both sides of the cars. Many a running battle over the lurching tops of box cars is fought between them and the thieving gangs, but the public seldom hears of the incident. A few lines in the newspaper announce that John Jones, a railroad detective, was found shot to death in the so-and-so yards, and that’s the end of it. “Talk about the James boys !” exclaimed L. J. Benson, chief of a force of nearly 3,000 detectives employed on the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul system. “Some of these freight thieves have got them beaten forty ways. Get into a pistol argument with some of these birds dodging in and out among freight cars on a dark night and you’ll get all the fun you’re looking for.

And I have yet to hear of one of my men going the other way when under fire.”

Another feature of the special agent’s work is the protection of passengers on crack trains from swindlers and gamblers. For instance, a passenger on one of the fast limited trains running between New York and Chicago was approached by a stranger who asked if he played bridge. Responding in the negative, he was informed that but one other member was needed to complete the foursome and that, although bridge was their favorite game, pinochle would be played if he so desired. The passenger refused, but shortly after noticed a young man trailing the inquirer back to a compartment, and later return with a rather discontented look upon his countenance. The two struck up a conversation which ultimately drifted to gambling.

Overhearing the conversation, a gentleman, apparently an ordinary business man, joined in the discussion, and later solicited their co-operation in an endeavor to “get the goods 011″ the two card sharks who occupied the compartment. His credentials proved him to be a railroad detective. After dinner the special agent and one of the passengers adjourned to the club car to enjoy a quiet smoke and a social game of cards. It was not long before two men approached, and one, the individual who had extended the invitation to join his party for a game of bridge or pinochle, suggested that they go back to their compartment and have a little game.

This invitation was accepted, and as the detective started to shuffle the deck of cards with which he had been playing, one of the strangers suggested, “Let’s get a brand new deck.” He rang the porter’s bell, and in a few minutes the game was on. As it progressed, the bids were raised and the winnings of the gamblers increased.

Departing in seemingly good faith, the victims sought the porter. The detective made known his identity, and a rapid succession of questions that form a part of every grilling caused the porter to admit that he had supplied marked cards. The confession was drawn up in writing, signed by the porter, and the two swindlers were arrested at the next stop.

Few people realize that they are purchasing personal property insurance, if it may be termed as such, when buying railway tickets. The detectives, however, also act as a guard against pickpockets and wearing apparel thieves. One tells of a passenger who had fastened a highly valued, diamond stickpin on the underside of his necktie which he, in turn, placed in the pocket of his trousers upon retiring. The next morning it was missing and later was recovered from a pawn dealer.

Assisting county authorities, the special agents also conduct investigations of the causes of the death or injury of employes, patrons and trespassers and help in the promotion of measures for public safety.

In the Chicago district the crossing watchmen on the Pennsylvania railroad help to gather data in a campaign to prevent careless driving by motorists.

COMPRESSED AIR DRIVES LOCOMOTIVE 125 MILES AN HOUR

Will steam power give way to compressed air for driving locomotives and hauling fast passenger trains? That is the vision of William E. Boyette, of Atlanta, Ga., whose amazing challenge to the iron horse—a monster truck-shaped locomotive propelled by compressed air—was about to undergo a trial run between Atlanta and Jacksonville, Fla., at this writing. The forty-foot locomotive, illustrated above, is designed to attain a maximum speed of 125 miles an hour. Its power is obtained from air compressed to a pressure of 400 pounds to the square inch and carried in tanks behind the cab. Should the pressure in the tanks drop below 360 pounds, a pump operated by electric storage batteries automatically replenishes them. Besides high speed, Boyette claims the advantage of exceptional economy in operation.

Pullman Cars Go Modernistic

COMFORTABLE modernistic furniture and indirect lighting for night reading purposes are features of the new steel and aluminum alloy Pullman observation cars. A buffet containing a broiler, coffee urn, and a refrigerator is also featured.

An observation parlor seating six persons is located at the rear round-end of the car, and a lounge seating 20 persons on sofas and seats occupies the remaining car space.

Novel ‘Land Yacht’ Carries Retired Naval Officer to Work

“YOU can take a sailor away from the sea but you can’t take the sea away from a sailor,” runs an old adage, long known among seafaring men. Such seems to be the case with W. H. Slater, a retired naval officer of Kent, England, who has constructed a novel land yacht with which to travel the five miles to and from his job, which is that of lighting wharf lamps along the riverside. Mr. Slater’s novel land yacht is made from an old truck chassis, and is powered by canvas sails, as shown in the photo at the right. Traveling over the rails of a former colliery, the yacht develops a speed between ten and twenty-five miles per hour, depending upon the winds. Although such a vehicle does not heave and roll like a ship in rough seas, it undoubtedly brings back memories to an old sailor as he shifts his sails to take advantage of every puff of wind, to say nothing of the wear and tear it saves on his legs. In a dead calm, of course, the yacht won’t travel.

Enjoy the Finest

BETWEEN CHICAGO AND THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST

It costs no more!

“CITY OF PORTLAND”

This delightful Domeliner is the finest and fastest between Chicago and Portland, with through Pullman to Tacoma-Seattle.

It is the only train to Portland featuring three types of Astra Domes; a Dome Lounge, Dome Coach, and Dome Diner (exclusive on Union Pacific) with three exquisite dining areas—the Dome, and downstairs the main dining room, and the Gold Room for private parties.

Pullman and Coach equipment is the very latest in design, providing both relaxing comfort and convenience. And, of course, the money-saving Family Plan Fares apply on all Union Pacific trains.

• • •

Through Hertz Rent-a-Car service, we can have a car waiting for you at your destination.

UNION PACIFIC RAILROAD

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Cars That Fly

YOUR car of the future may have no wheels. It may not even touch the road as it races along the turnpike at speeds well above 100 mph while you and your family sit back and enjoy the ride—without fear of accident or injury.

This revolutionary new mode of travel was recently unveiled by the Ford Motor Company in the form of the Glideair—a wheel-less vehicle that rides on a thin film of air a fraction of an inch above the road.

Says Andrew A. Kucher, Ford’s vice president in charge of Engineering and Research: “We look upon Glideair as a new form of high-speed land transportation, probably in the field of rail surface travel, for fast trips of distances of up to about 1,000 miles.” A gas turbine or turbojet engine would supply the power to both levitate and propel the Glideair. Instead of wheels the vehicle would employ “levapads,” a Kucher-coined word. Tiny jets of air would stream through holes in the levapads, supporting the vehicle. It is significant to note that levapads have already been designed to fit around a standard rail. They raise the vehicle from the rail and keep it away from the rail sides.

There are also others with their fingers in the wheel-less vehicle pie. Noted designer Carl Reynolds recently showed off his concept of a car without wheels which he forsees by 1978. Mr. Reynolds says, “The highway cruiser, or large passenger car will float, or literally fly a short distance above the road supported on air compressed by turbine-driven ducted fans.”

“In the wheel-less car,” Reynolds goes on to say, “the driver’s controls will be automated to simplify safe and effortless driving. . . Inter-city expressways will have electronic equipment for driver information as well as for traffic control and guidance… The car without wheels will negotiate fairly rough terrain, even travel over smooth water!”

Piasecki Aircraft Corp. has a Sky Car in the works for the not-too-distant future. It will be an offspring of their 59-K, one of two Flying Jeeps being developed for the Army. The 59-K, which is “well ahead of schedule,” according to the Army, is designed to combine the utility of ground jeeps with the hovering capabilities of small helicopters.

The Sky Car will be the civilian version. It will have no wings or conventional propellers and will be pow- ered by two horizontal three-bladed rotor-props, one at the front and one at the rear, which will support the craft on two columns of air.

Both rotor-props will be shielded for safety and the Sky Car will hold a driver and three passengers. It will be able to fly down narrow streets or get above heavy traffic. It will also have powered wheels to drive it in and out of the garage or congested areas.

According to Piasecki, the Sky Car will cost little more than a high-priced motor car of today.

Ford also envisions what it calls an aero-car. Dubbed the Volante, the vehicle would be powered by means of three fan units arranged in a triangular pattern to provide lift and thrust somewhat like a helicopter.

That’s the story of tomorrow’s vehicles. How soon they’ll appear above the roads is anybody’s guess. Scientists are currently experimenting with the means to power such vehicles. One thing is certain—cars that fly are on the way; you may be parking one in your backyard in just a few short years. •

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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.

Crux of the explosive situation is the determined efforts of the City Supervisors to do away with a sizeable segment of the ancient cable car system which, it is claimed, has been operating deep in the red for too long a period to be ignored. In the interests of economy and a more modernized transit system, the city fathers have curtailed about half of the cable car lines and pro- posed changes that a goodly portion of the Frisco citizenry just don’t see eye to eye with. Atomic power and jet propulsion notwithstanding, Frisco-ites just won’t give up their beloved little cable cars and woe betide the practical politician who threatens to consign them to limbo. Whether this is actually the case in the current ruckus is a matter for debate, but the city’s cable car lovers aren’t for debating. They’re just for keeping their cable cars and hang the expense.

Cable cars were born in San Francisco during the early 1870′s and only in that city do they still live. Back in those formative years the boom town of Frisco, having outgrown its level britches, was beginning to push up into its many hills. The higher it pushed the harder the pull became on the city’s harried horse car system, and many was the struggling nag that slipped and lay injured on the fog-soaked cobblestone hills.

The sight of these suffering animals proved too much for young Andrew S. Hallidie, an engineer who had developed powerful cables of twisted steel wire and had started a company to manufacture his metal rope. “Why,” thought* Hallidie, “couldn’t the cables be used instead of horses to pull the cars up Frisco’s hills?”

He went to work on the idea and soon came up with an acceptable design for a cable railway and grip car. With the help of some backers, construction began in May 1872 on a line that extended six blocks up the steep Clay Street hill from Kearney to Jones. Having no precedent to go by, the job was a tough one. But came the deadline of August 1, 1873, Hallidie was ready to show the skeptical city fathers that his “idiotic and fantastic” project would actually work.

At 5:00 a. m. on that historic day Hallidie made his first trial run. So confident was he that instead of playing it safe and making the initial run up the hill, where if something went wrong at the start he wouldn’t crash down six blocks of near precipice, Hallidie chose to start at the top of the hill and come down. This confidence evidently was not shared by the first grip man who took one look down the steep, fog-shrouded hill, turned pale and disappeared.

Shrugging his shoulders, Hallidie took the grip wheel himself and began to turn it. The car “took rope,” moved over the brink and descended smoothly down the 20 per cent grade at an even 9 mph, thus beginning a new era in urban transportation. Cable cars soon spread, not only throughout San Francisco but into most of the large cities of the world. The cable had successfully replaced the horse, but. . .

Close behind came the electric trolley and little by little the gallant little cable cars have given ground until now only San Francisco, the city of their birth, still retains them.

Basically, the operation of the cable car is very simple. Having no motor of its own, it merely hitches a ride on a perpetually moving underground cable to which it attaches itself with a pincer-like “grip” that hangs down through a slot in the street and is controlled by a hand lever in the forward section of the car. The endless cables that run for miles under the city streets are powered by huge 750-hp electric motors located in two main powerhouses. One. the Washington-Mason Bam, handles two lines with three cables of 10,000, 12,000 and 16,000-ft. lengths respectively. These cables ride at an even speed of 9 mph over a series of huge wheels and pulleys which require constant lubrication. There are pulleys at the sides of the cables on curves, on top of the cables in valleys and under the cables on the hill crests. The gripman who controls the car must know when to release his grip at the right moment and coast over the spots where pulleys would jam it.

There are also places where cable car lines cross and the gripman on the lower cable must “drop rope” and coast across the intersection in order not to jam his grip into the crossing cable and tie up both lines. Suspense rides high at these busy intersections especially when two or more cable cars, approaching from different directions, arrive at approximately the same time. One such intersection, at Powell and California Streets, is situated on the peak of a hill where cars climbing up from three directions can’t see each other. Though a crossing guard tries to control the traffic, there’s many a near miss to add thrills for the cable car riders.

At the end of the line a quaint scene takes place amidst the towering structures of this modern day business world. The conductors hop out, put their shoulders to the car and push it onto a huge turntable. Then, still using their own muscle power, they swing the car around on its “lazy Susan” platform and when it is in position for its return journey they push it off the turntable and back onto the tracks.

During this process the car fills to the bursting point with passengers who delight in riding every available inch in, on and around the car that they can possibly squeeze into. During peak hours it is not uncommon for the tiny cars to take off with a load of 135 sardined passengers hanging on.

San Francisco is a city with a flavor all its own and one of its chief condiments is this antiquated little cable car system that still operates as an integral part of .the transit system. The people love ‘em and ride ‘em daily to and from work. Many shoppers park their cars on top of Nob Hill and ride the cable cars down to the shopping district.

As G. L. Fox, General Manager of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, says, “If you ride them,you’ll observe two things: One, they go up some pretty doggone steep hills. And, two, you’ll probably get scared to death. You’ll wonder that they don’t have more accidents than they do but the fact remains that they have a pretty fair safety record. Whether this is because the cars are so difficult to control that their operators have to be awfully careful, or whether it’s just a stroke of luck, I don’t now.

Controlled by the grip, the cars can move forward only as fast as the cable travels, which is 9 mph. Smooth starts are rare and impractical because slipping the grip is a frowned-upon practice that tends to shred and wear out the cable. The cars have nothing like modern air brakes but depend for their stopping power on a set of soft pine blocks that bear down on the tracks, metal brake shoes which press against the wheels and an emergency brake that jams a metal wedge into the cable slot. Between the gripman who handles the rail and front wheel brakes and the conductor who helps out on steep grades with the rear wheel brakes, they pretty much get the car stopped where they want it.

This, of course, all contributes to the thrills and excitement of cable car riding as does the gripman’s shouted warnings to “L’kout for the curve!” and the musical ditties he raps out on his all-important bell. The cable car operators of San Francisco are born comedians and have become well-known characters throughout the years. With pure rhythm and timing they can rap out anything from the familiar Shave and a Haircut, Shampoo to the Anvil Chorus on their car bells. Last year they held a bell-ringing contest, the din of which resembled many popular tunes.

But quaint and lovable as they are, San Francisco’s cable cars have been righting a constant battle for survival since even before the big earthquake when the electric trolleys began replacing them. Little by little, the newer transit developments whittled down the cable car lines until today only a skeleton of their former prominence remains to serve the people and capture the fancy of tourists and visitors.

Having lost most of the lines to progress, the people now jealously guard their remaining cable cars against any attempts to discard them. Prominent champion of the cable cars is Mrs. Hans Klussman, chairman of the Citizens’ Committee to Save the Cable Cars, who has lead more than one successful battle against City Hall in support of her beliefs. She is largely responsible for a charter provision which requires the city to keep the Powell Street line in continual operation. This line cannot be discontinued without a people’s vote and another amendment to the charter.

Says Mrs. Klussman, “We formed our committee in March of 1947. It was just an emergency committee and we were going to go right out of business as soon as we saved the cable cars, but we’ve had one fight after another ever since. One year they tried to take off the Jackson line and we managed to save that.

Then they didn’t want to buy the California line which, prior to 1949, was privately owned, but we fought that. Then after we got the people to vote on it, the politicians in City Hall didn’t want to go through with it. At one time the cars were out of commission for seven months but we got them back. We pulled them right out of the grave that time.

“When election time came around, suddenly all the people who wanted to be elected came out for the cable cars—promised to keep them, and so on. But now that they’re in office we’re having the same trouble all over again.”

On the other side of the fence is Public Utilities Commissioner Jim Turner who favors a proposal that would cut out about half of the cable car lines and consolidate the remaining lines into one permanent system operating out of one powerhouse.

Says Mr. Turner, “Cable cars have been a problem for many years. They’ve been outmoded as long ago as the quake when the then-new electric trolleys were replacing the Market Street cable cars that were ruined in the fire. They’re costly to operate and in spite of their popularity they’re operating at a deficit of close to $300,000 a year.

“Last January,” continues Turner, “the Municipal Railway, which operates the cable cars, came to the City Board of Supervisors and said, ‘We’re going to need $4,000,000 to keep the system as it is. We’re losing money.’ “The Board of Supervisors blew its top. They gave orders to us at the Public Utilities Commission to ‘show us how you can economize and knock that figure down.’ The P.U.C. did as ordered and, through the charter, drew up this economy program. Rather than provide the money, the Board of Supervisors agreed to the plan by a 7 to 4 vote.

The proposal which was passed by public vote on June 8 is to consolidate a permanent cable railway system of three major lines into the one Washington-Mason Power House. The traditional Hyde Street Grip, famed in song and story, will be rehabilitated, given new rails and a third turntable.

“The claim is made that the resulting cable car system will be reduced to the status of a ‘tourist trap.’ Nothing is farther from the truth. We will be retaining a very substantial cable railway system—5% miles long—which our computations indicate will gross better than $1,000,000 annually. That is not small business—nor a tourist trap.”

But Mrs. Klussman does not agree. She contends that the P.U.C. proposal will result in a mutilation of the cable car system with eventual doom inevitable. Her committee is busy getting up another initiative petition to put back all the cable cars and restore the service to what it was as of January before the curtailment She has until September first to collect 55,000 bona fide signatures in order to get it on the November ballot.

Opposing her and siding with the P.U.C. is a third group, The Cable Car Festival Committee, which is headed by Mrs. Emily Martin. This group feels that the P.U.C. plan is the only workable solution to the cable car problem and plans are afoot to hold an annual Cable Car Festival with the merchants of Chinatown, Fisherman’s Wharf, Nob Hill and the International Settlement joining in.

Whatever the outcome, the San Francisco cable car problem is not a light one—nor is it a purely local one. Letters flow in from everywhere offering aid and encouragement to the Klussman group and begging the Chamber of Commerce to please not do away with the cable cars.

The San Francisco cable cars, it seems, belong not just to the San Franciscans, but to the whole country which has taken them to its heart. •

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.

The car is driven by a 400 horsepower airplane motor with a propeller and weighs 20 tons.

A single pair of wheels fore and aft support the body, which is eighty-five feet over all. The huge propeller, shown in the photo above, projects from a point at the stern and is slightly tilted upwards to help keep the car on the tracks. Two types of brakes, railway and automobile, are utilized to bring the monster to a smooth stop. The car is the invention of Herr Frantz Kruckenberg, director of the Traffic Experimental station, which is devoted to the study of swift, cheap transportation.

Jap Train Will Do 450 mph (They Say!)

PROFESSOR Hisanojo Ozawa of Japan has designed a radically new type of train that he claims will do 450 mph, whizzing by jet propulsion between upper and lower rollers. Recently he tested a model, which did a modest 25 mph but functioned perfectly as a mechanically guided missile. A problem: how do you get around curves? Professor Ozawa has the answer: curve lines of no less than 2.48 miles radius. •

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.

When these great pieces of buzzing, roaring mechanisms like those used by Capt. Campbell at Daytona Beach, reach their maximum speeds of over two hundred miles per hour they are getting close to the limit of traction; that is the limit where, due to the great force applied to the wheels, the wheels will do nothing but slip helplessly around. As a matter of fact, in these super-machines, a great deal of the energy fed to the wheels is dissipated in this manner.

Anybody who has had the opportunity of holding the hand on the tire of a racing car after it has been driven at the rate of a hundred miles per hour for several hours will be very forcibly reminded of this loss of tractive power through excessive speed.

The tires will be so hot that they will almost burn the hand.

With the still greater demands for speed and more speed, the engineers are beginning to ask themselves when, due to the problem outlined above, we shall have reached the limit.

But why not take to the air with planes that will not have to depend upon weather conditions; planes that will move through fogs, snow and wind as easily as do our largest and most powerful locomotives. Not only will they do this but they will also reach prodigious speeds of over five hundred miles per hour by practically eliminating all friction with solid materials.

The rail flyer will do these things. It really amounts to a captive airplane, which, when its power is turned off, will descend gently to its guiding rail, its gyroscope holding it perfectly vertical even in the face of driving winds. Surely this would provide new luxury of travel with one hour between New York and Buffalo and a little more than two hours between New York and Chicago.

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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.

A crude form of this material has been serving man since the dawn of history. Glass, commonly thought of as that brittle stuff that boys like to smash with baseballs and slingshots, is in this generation being brought to such strength, lightness and flexibility that the glass industry is now looking toward a new era, not so far off, when bridges, buildings and car bodies will be built of glass that is stronger and lighter than steel. And from Oscar G. Burch, Vice President in charge of research for the Owens-Illinois Glass Company, a very sound and serious-minded engineer, comes the word that the tubed train may some day take over the long haul business.

Long distance trains, according to Mr. Burch, may abandon today’s exposed tracks and rocket across country in glass tubes, propelled at airplane speeds by compressed air. He also envisions glass-sheathed spaceships and entire cities built beneath air-conditioned domes of lens-clear crystal. So far, says Mr. Burch, we have achieved a paltry one per cent of the theoretical strength and use potential of glass. As small an increase as ten per cent will be ample to turn his seemingly bizarre predictions into solid actuality!

As far as we know, however, Burch’s test-tube railroad is an entirely new concept, and one which intrigues your editors. We have pondered its engineering problems and possibilities and herewith present our own preview of tomorrow’s transparent trains.

First of all, it must be emphasized that Mi’s tubular train will not replace today’s open-face local and commuter services. It is intended, rather, to complement these by adding airplane speeds to long distance railway runs. The possibilities of its fast, round-the-clock service, unchecked by snow or storm, should reverse present trends in passenger travel and give the airlines a real run for their money. Zipping through its glass sheath from New York to Florida or coast-to-coast at 300 mph or better, our crystal flyer can combine the distance-devouring zoom of aerial flight with the safety and comfort of surface travel.

While conceding the practicability of structural glass for tubular railroad tracks, we could not however, go along with Mr. Burch’s method of propulsion. The use of compressed air, we felt, in- volves too many problems of generation and control. A string of power stations would have to be spaced along the line to evacuate the tube ahead of the train and build up propulsive pressures behind it. In addition to the expense and complication, this system would limit the operating headway by preventing trains from following one another at reasonably frequent intervals.

There was also some question as to the public’s willingness to be shot along in devices not under direct human control. Your editors concluded therefore, that each individual train should be driven by an engineer and propelled by a self-contained powerplant capable of controlling the pressures generated by its passage through a closed tube.

The most obvious answer to these specifications is the jet engine. With an airplane-type nose intake, this could suck in air from in front of the train and blow it out behind. By thus creating a partial vacuum ahead and pressure astern, our jet could either raise the speed or reduce the power requirement with a consequent increase in the vehicle’s overall efficiency.

There is, however, a serious objection to the conventional jet engine operating on a petroleum-base fuel. It expands the working fluid—air—by mixed combustion and the gases expelled from its tailpipe would soon taint the air in the tube. Succeeding trains would rapidly concentrate the carbon monoxide content to a poisonous level. Therefore, the standard chemical fuels were out. We had to find a heat source which could expand the working air without contaminating it. In this atomic age we had not far to look.

The new type of atomic heat generation unit in which the reactor core is surrounded by a built-in heat exchanger and the whole encased in composite shielding, will eventually be light and compact enough for locomotive use. This is the plant for our tubular train. From it, molten sodium is piped through shielded ducts to a cylindrical heat transmitter enveloping the jet engine’s “combustion chamber.”

Compressed air entering the chamber is heated and expanded without coming into physical contact with the sodium. It then blows out the tail-pipe as clean as it came in. This operating air, as previously noted, has been drawn into an intake beneath the nose of the leading unit and carried the length of the train through ducts built into the lower sides of each car. Between the cars, flexible connectors—larger versions of today’s air brake hoses—span the coupling gaps.

Upon reaching the rear power unit, the air flows into twin jet engines mounted on either side of the reactor. There it is compressed, expanded by atomic heat and ejected rearward to produce the propelling thrust.

Mi’s train differs radically from today’s iron horse in that its wheels and tracks are used only at low speeds and stops and function chiefly as a landing gear. While loading and unloading in a station, the wheels are lowered to bear the weight of the train. After starting, they continue to carry the weight to a diminishing degree as the train moves forward. During this gradual acceleration, the air ahead of the train is compressed to an increasing degree and forced to flow backward around the cars through the space between the trains outer surface and the tube’s inner wall.

When the train reaches a certain speed, this surrounding layer is compressed to a point where it supports the vehicle’s weight. Thereafter, the train retracts its wheels and literally “flies” through the tube like an airplane test model in a wind tunnel. Having no “hot box” wheel bearings or track forces to consider, airline speeds are easily attainable.

In designing the train itself, your editors drew liberally from ACF Industries’ high speed Talgo Train. With an unusually low center of gravity, short, close-coupled car units and steerable, automobile-type wheels, the lightweight Talgo can snake around turns at 80 mph or more. All these characteristics are essential to tube transit, where smooth-surfaced curvability is a must. About the only mechanical changes necessary were to make the wheels retractable and provide a bottom “keel” to prevent lateral rotation within the tube. Like the Talgo, the basic MI car is 60 feet long, broken into three articulated units. Each unit is equipped with one pair of rear wheels, its forward end pivoting on the pair ahead like the body of a trailer truck.

Here, however, the Talgo resemblance ends. Circular in section except for the bottom keel, Mi’s cars are double-decked to gain floor space and make maximum use of interior space. The vestibule platforms and doors are set midway between the levels, with short stairways leading up and down to the two decks. They are designed so that the platforms rest on top of the wheel wells, thus conserving space. There is an adjoining lavatory on the lower level.

In line with the latest trend in air travel, the cars are divided into two price classes. The lower deck offers coach service with a maximum-capacity arrangement of forward facing seats in conventional railway style. They are ultra-modern, individually tilting chairs with adequate leg room, set one step above a sunken central aisle. Windows are the continuous-strip type of steel-strong, structural glass and form the side panels of the car. Above are individual reading lights and racks for luggage and clothing.

The upper deck features deluxe, chair-car accommodations which like its present railroad counterpart, is a reserved, extra-fare service. Paired seats are placed diagonally to fully exploit the vista-dome windows. They are set far enough apart to permit full reclining position for night runs. The triangular floor areas on each side enable the traveler to enter or leave without disturbing his seatmate. Porter or hostess service will be provided.

The first-class diner is on the upper level of the unit adjoining the rear power car, with a capacious kitchen and pantry positioned above the engine room. The atomic heat which drives the train and generates its auxiliary electric power, may also be tapped for cooking. A dumbwaiter connects the upper pantry with a similar one below. This serves the more modest priced grill car on the lower level. Both diners are inter- connected and the traveler can take his choice. Placing the eating facilities at the rear will present no undue hardship as trains will be limited in length and scheduled for frequent runs on short headway.

This is MI’s visualization of Mr. Burch’s tubular railway. It is a composite of several research projects now under intensive development and although it may seem like a pipe dream now, the imminent perfection of structural glass and aircraft atomic power-plant will suddenly catapult it into the realm of solid practicality. As for the Talgo Train, that little gadget has been running for half a decade now, speeding passengers at a safe 100 mph clip.

The tubed train is only one of the startling innovations in the use of glass envisioned by the researchers of Owens-Illinois and other manufacturers. The diminishing supply of metal resources makes it imperative that new construction materials be found, and glass-makers are convinced that all the properties of metals can be developed in glass.

They see the day fast approaching when the pressure of increasing world population will lead to the erection of entire glass cities in desert and arctic regions—cities constructed on glass columns, enclosed in glass domes, heated and air conditioned by atomic power. Inside the glass cities of the future will be glass homes, glass furniture and glass cars, planes and trains—all combining the structural strength of steel with the transparency and beauty of crystal.

But before these things exist, it’s possible you may see Mi’s A-powered trains in glass tubes, zipping from coast to coast at 300 mph—a fitting beginning to our new series on the Amazing Marvels of Tomorrow!

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.

This car is an electrically driven coach running on a mono-rail alongside the track on which the express train runs. The passengers board the transfer car, which accelerates rapidly as the train approaches until the speeds of the two are equal. The monorail car is then automatically clasped to the side of the Pullman, passengers get on and disembark from the train, and when all is in readiness the transfer car disengages itself from the train and slows down, returning to the station under its own power.

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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.”

I did see Jellinghaus and I got the whole story of the rocks. Better still, I got other yarns that made my blood course faster than any tales ever told of scientific detectives of fiction.

To get the full measure of a great railroad system’s fight with thieves it is necessary to consider the state of affairs that existed at the close of 1920. In that year robbers had taken from the trains and stations of the New York Central a total of $2,596,560. The Central was not the only road that was suffering from these bold criminals. For a long while conditions had been growing steadily worse until in 1920 the total loss by robbery on the rail- roads of the nation was $12,726,947. Last year the robbery loss of all the railroads was less than $1,000,000.

Affairs were in such a state that something had to be done. How well it was done on the New York Central may be shown by another total. Remember that the robbery loss in 1920 was $2,596,560, and then contrast with that the total loss for 1930, which was $2 7,936. When Jellinghaus gave me those figures he grinned. Then he wrote down another figure.

“This,” he said, “is the proportion to which the robbery loss has been reduced in ten years.”

I LOOKED at what he had written. The figure was 1.1 percent. That comes pretty close to being a perfect score.

“That change was not worked by keeping books,” I said. “How was it done?”

“Well,” he said, “some men were killed; some were wounded; a lot went to jail— car burglars, pickpockets, sneak thieves, crooks of all kinds. Our lines ten years ago were infested with thieves. Now it is different. Hoboes avoid our lines as carefully as they avoid work, and as for pickpockets, when one of them is seen around one of our stations he is pretty likely to keep his hands in his own pockets.”

“But how?” I persisted. “How about those rocks and Professor Berkey?”

The answer to that was an interesting revelation of the growing use of scientific knowledge in detective work. The rocks I had seen on Professor Berkey’s table had been found by an amazed grocer when he opened a packing case that was supposed to contain cheese from a Mediterranean port.

Other complaints began to pour in from other merchants who h?.d found rocks in boxes supposed to contain cheese. If the substitution had occurred anywhere along the New York Central the railroad would be liable to the shipper for the full value of his cheese. Who could say where those rocks came from? Well, a geologist might, and consequently specimens were taken to Professor Berkey.

“This is lava,” said the distinguished Columbia geologist. “It is a peculiar form of lava and I can guarantee that it came from just one place. Mt. Vesuvius.”

THAT was one robbery about which the New York Central could cease to trouble itself. The ship that had carried a cargo of cheese across the ocean to New York had stopped en route at Naples. Obviously the substitution had occurred there. The railroad was not responsible.

The switching of rubbish for merchandise is a common trick of freight thieves. The motive is always the same—to delay discovery of the crime as long as possible; and, of course, an empty box would arouse the suspicion of the first person to handle it. Among railroad men this sort of thing is spoken of as a concealed loss.

Sometimes it happens that the rubbish exchanged for stolen goods leads the detectives unerringly to the thieves. Once a ship that had left the Amazon loaded with crude rubber was discovered, when preparations were made to unload her, to be partially filled with rocks. Where had the substitution occurred? The ship was tied up at a railroad pier, but in her log was written the record of a five-thousand-mile journey. Were the thieves in South America, the West Indies, New York, or aboard ship?

Specimens of the rock were submitted to Professor Berkey. He identified them as pieces of concrete, and the concrete had been made from Long Island sand. The trail was hot! A concrete pier was being demolished in the immediate vicinity of the ship’s berth. That was bringing the crime pretty close to the men responsible.

OCCURRENCES of this sort illustrate a most important factor in the lowering of the robbery losses of the New-York Central and other American railroads. The railroad police have learned how to localize crimes.

There had always been a force of railroad policemen, and some of the individuals were first-rate men. But there were not enough of them and they were not well organized. There had always been a simple way of telling approximately where the robbery had occurred, but it had not been used. Every freight car when loaded is sealed with a string of tin looped through staples on the sliding door and doorframe and fastened with a small ball of lead.

A CHILD might break that seal, but once broken no amount of ingenuity could disguise the fact that it had been tampered with. But what was the good of discovering, at the end of a freight car’s journey, that it had been tampered with somewhere on the American continent? The problem was to discover at what points freight cars were being looted.

That was one of the first things to be done in clearing up the mystery of the annual disappearance of all manner of goods, silk, cigarettes, automobile tires, canned food, and other kinds of merchandise worth millions of dollars. Consequently arrangements were made to have freight trains moved through a corridor of police inspections.

Between Chicago and New York a tram might stop several dozen times. Nevertheless it was provided that each time there was a stop every seal had to be examined. If a policeman at one stop reported all seals intact and the one who made the next examination discovered that several were broken, that bit of information was a vital aid in recovering the stolen goods and capturing the robbers.

EAST of Buffalo the New York Central police are under the command of Chief James D. Roosa, who weighs about 220 pounds when he is in condition, as he generally is. For some time all his men had been getting regular pistol practice. At night before they rolled into bed, and in the morning as their feet touched the floor, they would practice. They would draw their guns in a manner taught them by an expert, aim at the doorknob, and then squeeze the trigger. Of course they always went through these exercises with unloaded guns. The point is they practiced as faithfully as old-time gunmen of the West. Also they were given frequent opportunities to fire their guns on a range using as a target a swinging silhouette fashioned in the shape of a man.

On a farm in the hilly region south of Niagara Falls, N. Y., there was a man who also practiced with pistols and rifles incessantly. This supposed farmer’s hired hands also practiced. The man’s name was Perry. He was a Westerner and something of a sinister mystery to his neighbors; but he was no longer a mystery to Chief Roosa and some of his detectives.

They were convinced that this man was the leader of the most daring gang of freight thieves in the United States. Almost any one of the daring freight robberies within a radius of one hundred miles from Perry’s farm might justly be attributed, they felt, to this toughest of all car burglars. But how to catch him?

Chief Roosa stopped shaving for a couple of days; so did ten of his best men. Then, when they closely resembled a collection of tough hoboes, they started north for a section of the railroad known as the Falls Road. It runs from Oswego to Niagara. In some manner Chief Roosa had learned that an attempt was to be made to rob a particular freight car loaded with costly furs.

IT WAS a dark night when that fur car was shunted back and forth in the railroad yards until it had become part of a freight train. Secreted within the car were a couple of tough looking citizens who rode silently in nests they had formed for themselves in the bales and boxes of freight.

Hours later the men within the sealed car heard above the clamor of its thirty-mile-an-hour speed the sound of feet on the roof. Then a heavy body scraped against the side of the car. They waited tensely. The door was pushed open. A strip of blue light relieved the gloom of the car interior. The shooting began at once. It was by no means a one-sided battle.

The invader answered them shot for shot for a space. Then for a second or two that passed as slowly as hours there was no firing. The two men in ambush heard a body crash heavily to the floor. Again they heard steps on the roof, fired up, and waited expectantly. But nothing happened. That other thief had jumped from the moving train into the darkness.

When the freight train stopped at the next station two more of Chief Roosa’s men joined the pair in the car. The man with whom they had fought was dying.

Chief Roosa’s men hastened back to the point on the right of way where the gun fight had begun. There they found and made a prisoner of a dazed person they identified as an old car thief known as Shanahan. Him they locked in jail, but where was Perry?

Perry, the prosperous farmer, came to the jail boldly to see about getting the release of his hired man and was promptly locked up. Sufficient evidence was dug up to bring a conviction and a prison sentence.

Perry, Shanahan, and a fourth man were given long terms in Atlanta penitentiary because in robbing a shipment in interstate transit they had committed a Federal offense.

Silk was one of the great prizes luring car burglars ten years ago. In 1920 the value of the raw silk stolen from cars or stations of the New York Central was $426,965. During the last five or six years not a dollar’s worth of silk has been lost by the road. This is in spite of the fact that a small bale of silk, easily carried by a man, is worth about S500 and there have been times when that value was $900. All this thievery was stopped completely by policing shipments of silk.

THERE were some bottles containing brilliantly colored powders standing on the desk of Chief Roosa when I was in his office recently.

“Are you going in for chemistry?” I asked him.

“No,” he replied, “but sometimes chemistry helps us.”

Then he explained about the bottles. A railroad with scores of thousands of employees and with many other thousands of persons, messengers, truckmen, and other visitors having access to its premises, may suffer from sneak thieves. Sometimes they take baggage; sometimes they rifle desks.

The sum of their activities if uncontrolled might make a serious dent in the income of a railroad. Consequently such characters must be frightened into good behavior. The railroad has not the time to reform all the pilferers in the world. It has to be satisfied to keep them from stealing.

“Our method,” explained the chief, “is quite simple. We always catch them.

“If we get a few complaints about objects disappearing from baggage, and everything that vanishes even though it is worth only a few cents is reported to us, we get busy with those little bottles. We place some of the powders in those bottles in the desks that are being looted; or rub it on baggage placed as bait.

“Usually the thief is not a very daring person anyway but what nerve he has vanishes when he discovers that his fingers have become stained with indelible marks that will not wash off, scrub them as hard as he may. Then along strolls a railroad policeman. All he is looking for is someone with stains on his fingers. Usually a thief trapped in that manner hasn’t enough nerve left to lie about the matter.”

Record keeping can be a science, and the localizing records of the New York Central police are certainly kept in a scientific manner. Sometimes the property of passengers disappears from coaches or Pullmans. The missing articles are catalogued in two ways by a sort of cross indexing that may be reached through a reference to the type of article or the place on the train where the happening occurred.

IT would not be fair to say too much about this system, but one illustration will serve to show its effectiveness. Several passengers on trains running in and out of New York had reported that their money had been stolen while they were sleeping in their berths.

The robberies were not confined to the same Pullman nor even to the same train. Nevertheless the records in Chief Roosa’s office indicated that a certain colored porter might be responsible. It was revealed by those records that he had been aboard every train on which a robbery had occurred. Sometimes he had been the porter of a car in that train, but the robberies never occurred in his car. At other times he was a dead-head passenger. Finally he was dismissed. Then another robbery occurred.

A wealthy man woke up one morning and began to squawk because his trousers were missing. They were found beneath a berth farther down the car. The pockets were empty. The man said they had contained $115. One of Chief Roosa’s men was aboard the train. He spotted the dismissed porter riding on the train as a passenger and took him into custody. The man was carrying a revolver and that made it possible to arrest him. In his pockets $115 was found. New bills, unwrinkled.

THE colored man protested with heat that it was his money. While he was serving out a six-month sentence for carrying a revolver without a license, the railroad policemen kept on investigating. They went to the bank of the man who had been robbed. The cashier remembered that this rich man was always cranky about getting new bills when he cashed a check.

The bank records revealed that the money had been paid from a bundle received from the Federal Reserve Bank. A check-up revealed that the serial numbers of the bills in that bundle had included the same serial numbers of the bills found in the colored man’s pocket. In the face of that evidence he decided to confess.

It is in that painstaking investigation and preparation of evidence that you can find a portion of the answer to the question as to how the New York Central with its property spread over half the continent has been able in the last few years to protect that property against thieves. It has protected it and is protecting it while all the cities through which the lines of the New York Central run have been suffering as never before from the depredations of thieves. Science has helped; so has the freedom of the railroad’s police from the interference of gang politics; likewise marksmanship.

There have been plenty of gun fights in the last dozen years but now that it is pretty generally known that the railroad policemen have become crack shots there is less and less necessity for shooting. The pistol expert who teaches these men, traveling all over the lines to do so, is Captain Jack Smith, who formerly worked with Annie Oakley and traveled as an expert shot with the 101 Ranch Show.

It is not uncommon for communities along the New York Central to appeal for the aid of one of the company’s crime specialists in emergencies. All of them are officers of the states in which they operate.

LIEUTENANT Joseph Genova of this A unusual force of industrial policemen is so accomplished in tracking murderers that his services are often loaned to small towns bewildered by a mysterious crime.

One puzzling mystery solved after painstaking work by the New York Central men concerned a dynamite explosion at a mine tipple. A box of caps found at the scene of the explosion was traced to a place many miles away where dynamite had been stolen. The man who was arrested for the dynamiting had thought he had a pretty good alibi. At the moment the explosion occurred he had been talking to the local chief of police. How he arranged that was explained when it was revealed that with the dynamite he had taken 250 feet of fuse. While that was burning he had had ample opportunity to stroll into town and engage the chief in conversation.

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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.

Americans are due to ride the first of these superspeed trains this year, possibly as early as next fall. That’s when delivery is expected of a substantial part of a fleet of 50 self-propelled electric passenger cars, capable of a record-breaking top speed of 150 m.p.h. Assembled in engine-less trains of four to 10 cars, they’ll immediately go into actual passenger service on the Pennsylvania Railroad’s 226-mile line between New York and Washington.

At the same time or soon after, three to five passenger cars propelled by gas turbines are scheduled to inaugurate extra-fast service on the New Haven’s 45-mile run between Boston and Providence.

U. S. sparks the program. The exciting new high-speed trains will be the first result of a three-year, $90-million U. S. program to speed travel on land. Sponsored by the Department of Commerce, the bold project has just been launched by Congress’ passage of the High Speed Ground Transportation Act of 1965. Its initial aim, which might be called “High Speed Now,” will be to demonstrate how far today’s technology can boost the speed of railroad travel on existing electric and non-electric lines. A longer-range aim, “High Speed in the Future” will be to look into unconventional systems of ground transport that may revolutionize intercity travel within the next 15 to 20 years.

To get High Speed Now trials going on the New York-Washington run, the government will put up the money to buy 28 of the 150-m.p.h. cars. The Pennsy, maintaining that a conclusive test will take 50, plans to buy the rest. They may be under construction by the time this is read. While prospective bidders still awaited detailed specifications at this writing, advance reports of the cars’ features indicate that they’ll be the finest passenger equipment in the world.

The stainless-steel cars, 85 feet long and extra wide for spacious comfort, will carry 80 passengers apiece in reclining seats. Four mighty, 150-hp. electric motors, one to each axle, will provide the power required for their speed. Air-operated sliding doors, remotely controlled, will expedite passengers’ entry and exit to save time at station stops. Snack bars will serve light meals. Built in will be electric heating, no-draft air conditioning, low overhead racks, reading lights. Within the cars, despite their speed, there will be no more noise than in a modern executive office.

Entirely new to railroading today are self-propelled gas-turbine cars, the kind to be tried on the Boston-Providence run. A preview of them is given by plans to build one for the Long Island Rail Road. Designed by a leading car maker, the Budd Co., this car will be driven by two gas turbines of 450 hp. each, mounted on the wheel trucks at each end. Hydraulic transmissions will deliver power from the turbine shafts to the car axles. The light weight of modern gas turbines, about one pound per horsepower, especially suits them for high-speed rail cars on non-electrified routes.

Why no locomotives? Engineless trains, whether of electric or gas-turbine cars, will oiler many advantages in high-speed service. Even distribution of weight throughout the train will give faster and smoother acceleration and braking. It will also spare the track the terrific pounding that would be administered by a heavy locomotive’s two-mile-a-minute pace. At the end of a run, the self-propelled cars will permit a quick turnaround, needing no switching engine to make them up into new trains of any desired length.

Superspeed trains will need an improved right-of-way, to make their ride safe and comfortable. So the Pennsy is bettering its already top-class trackage between New York and Washington—by straightening curves, strengthening bridges, improving systems of signals and overhead-wire power supply. It will raise station platforms, too, to the level of the new cars’ sliding doors.

Especially intensive upgrading will make one 20-mile length of straightaway track, between New Brunswick and Trenton, virtually a high-speed proving ground for the new cars. On this stretch, passengers are likely to see what a train can do all-out.

On the New York-Washington run, the Pennsy plans to operate the high-speed glamour trains every other hour. They’ll alternate with conventional ones, pulled by its husky GG-1 electric locomotives.

Today, the fastest New York-Washington train takes three hours and 35 minutes for the run, and most trains require four hours or more. The new trains are expected to cut the time to less than three hours, with four stops on the way. Nonstop New York-Washington runs, to be included in the trials, may approach a phenomenal 2/2 hours. There will be nonstop runs, too, between various pairs of cities on the route. Allowing for the time it takes air travelers to get to and from outlying airports, passengers living or working near rail terminals may find these train trips actually faster than going by air.

What’s the hurry? By racing planes with trains, U. S. planners hope to woo travelers back to the rails—seemingly, the only way to cope with tomorrow’s outsize transportation needs. Travel between U. S. cities has doubled in the last 15 years, and will reach staggering proportions in a couple of decades more. Highway building can’t keep pace. Sites available for new airports are so remote from city centers that New York is seriously considering one 50 to 60 miles away. For people going on trips of up to 400 or 500 miles, super-fast trains could be the answer.

To find out, the logical laboratory is the densely populated “Northeast Corridor” between Boston and Washington, whose cities are fusing into one continuous megalopolis, or supercity. What’s learned in trials there can ultimately be applied to mainstreams of travel throughout the country.

The high-speed New York-Washington and Boston-Providence trains will operate for a demonstration period of a year to 18 months. That will conclude the experiment so far as the government is concerned, and the U.S.-bought cars will then be sold to the railroads on which they were running. Whether to continue the speed runs will be up to the railroads themselves. That should depend on the glamour trains’ success in attracting passengers—and collecting ticket statistics that tell the story will be a vital part of the federal project. Since the outcome admittedly is a gamble, the railroads understandably have felt unable to risk the experiment on their own.

U.S. experts consider spending federal funds a worthwhile gamble to try to start American trains whizzing.

Speed records so far, for U.S. diesel and electric trains on scheduled runs, are 82 m.p.h, for the Burlington’s diesel-powered Morning Zephyr and 71 m.p.h, for the Pennsy’s electric-powered Manhattan Limited—both for less than 50 miles. Abroad, France’s famed Mistral express averages 80 m.p.h, for 318 miles, one stop included. But all these marks have lately been eclipsed on a remarkable Japanese railway, the just-opened New Tokaido line between Tokyo and Osaka.

A Japanese example to shoot at. Setting world records, engineless Japanese trains of self-propelled electric passenger cars hit a top speed of 126 m.p.h. They cover the entire 322-mile distance, two stops included, in 190 minutes—for an average speed exceeding 100 m.p.h.

Encouraged by this example, U.S. experts nevertheless are wary of copying it. Built from scratch especially for high speed, the new line cost about $1/2 billion—and a 450-mile counterpart of it between Boston and Washington would have a price tag between three and four billion. Instead, the federal program favors a much more modest outlay to show what can be done on today’s U. S. lines—and, meanwhile, to investigate coming developments that may make even a Japanese-style high-speed railway obsolete.

Seen ahead are systems of land travel to carry passengers at 100 to 250 m.p.h., or more—in vehicles so radical that their tracks no longer are called railways, hut “guideways.” More than half the federal program’s funds will go for the first really thorough study of a variety of these far-out schemes.

“New concepts that appear to merit investigation include mass transport of automobiles on rail ‘ferries,’ vehicles sup- ported by a layer of air, and rail-guided systems that differ from conventional track,” says Secretary of the Interior John T. Connor. Accompanying illustrations show examples of some of the unconventional ideas he’s talking about. Thus the current program will seek to learn, not only how fast our present railroads can carry us, hut what may come next.

Fast Polish “Torpedo Car” Powered by Diesel Engine

Poland’s “torpedo train,” a streamline rail car that travels ninety-three miles an hour, bears the reputation of being one of Europe’s speediest trains. It is driven by a Diesel motor with automatic clutch, operating on an extremely economical basis. The car, one of several in service on Polish railroads, carries eighty-six passengers. The engineer’s cab is set back from the low, protruding radiator.

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. Burning fuel oil, the gas turbines will be serviced by a separate railway tank car, although the smaller model will carry sufficient fuel to operate for six hours. The turbine unit will be coupled with a 3600-r.p.m. generator through a reduction gear. If necessary, the mobile plant could be installed by only two men and operated by one.