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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!

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Train Picks Up and Drops Passengers Without Stopping

IF RAILROADS generally adopt a plan suggested by Rupert Wales, a Buffalo, N. Y. inventor, passengers on non-stop express trains will be able to get off and on at small wayside stations while the train rushes past at top speed. This feat will be accomplished by the use of a mono-rail transfer car, according to Mr. Wales.

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.

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Wonder Subway Built Under Skyscrapers on Stilts

Propping up multi-storied skyscrapers on stilts, burrowing beneath railway tunnels, digging out huge chunks of solid rock, thousands of workmen have just completed the most amazing engineering job of its kind on record—the construction of New York City’s newest subway, which is the very last word in underground transportation luxury.

by THOMAS M. JOHNSON

ONE winter day 62 years ago, wheels turned in the first underground railway ever operated in an American city. Really it was a block-long subterranean pneumatic tube, through which a steam-driven fan blew a singe 18-passenger car, then sucked it back. Twenty-eight years ago the first train ran on a permanent American subway; a work-train of wooden-railed flat-cars, but it began an epoch that has greatly changed life in many large American cities. This modern epoch of subways culminated where it began, in New York City, at 12:01 September 10,1932, in the opening of the world’s newest subway, which has also been called its most superlative subway. It is the first completed link in a great and unique new chain, the only railroad under, upon or above ground in the Greater City, that is built and operated by the city itself. Its building has embodied every lesson learned in underground railways since 1870, and experts from all over the world have come to see it.

The most superlative single feature of the new Eighth avenue subway is already drawing crowds. It is the station at Forty-second street, near the theatrical and hotel district. This is the biggest underground station in the world, with twice the capacity of London’s famous Piccadilly Circus station. It is 1,200 feet long, the platforms extending under five, and mezzanines under four, of the busiest city blocks in the world. This station will also connect underground with the subway that crosses Manhattan and the East River to Queensboro on Long Island To build the world’s biggest subway station was a giant engineering feat, made more difficulty by the fact that Manhattan Island is almost solid rock, with a thin coating of soil. So for every cubic yard of earth excavated, there had to be 2-1/2 cubic yards of rock, the totals being 45,000 and 111,000 or 156,000 cubic yards in all. But there was more to it than that.

There were great skyscrapers and other smaller buildings to be underpinned so they would not fall crashing into the pit, and a myriad sorts of accidents to be averted by careful handling of the water mains, sewer lines, gas pipes, power cables (of which there were 100) and 15,000 pairs of telephone cables. Then once these dangers had been met and the hole safely dug, into it had to go 15,795 cubic yards of concrete, and 4,000 tons of structural steel. And that was only one station of the 28 on the new subway.

In the finished Forty-second street station are several features that are superlatively new. There is a new lighting system, to eliminate shadows entirely in this thronging crossroads underground. There is improved ventilation. There are no curved station platforms, all are straight-edged, to cut down accidents, especially to passengers slipping as they get on and off trains. There is a new plan of wall decoration, with tile in colors varying with the parts of the route, to help prevent passengers missing their stations.

For the passengers, also, has been developed what transit experts say is the most superlative subway car in the world. It was designed by a picked board, who were told: “Here, fix us up the best car that runs underground. Go the limit.”

The result is the dark-green steel car, painted “City of New York,” of which 300 are now roaring up and down the subterranean galleries. Each car is 60-1/2 feet long, 10 feet wide, and 12 feet high. There are five fans in the ceiling, and ventilation shutters so arranged that air passes continuously in one side, and out the other. The car is lighted by 22 bulbs, each wired independently, and four emergency bulbs, which go on when power goes off. All bulbs are “left-handed”—a mean trick on pilferers.

But to the passenger, be he visitor or New Yorker, the greatest improvement will seem to be that he can get on and off the new cars more quickly than the old—which, of course, means shorter waits at stations, and quicker runs. Although the new cars are seven feet shorter than the type hitherto newest, they can be loaded and unloaded in one-third less time. And they hold 40 per cent more passengers than the cars still running on the original I. R. T. New York subway. Of the 280 passengers a new car will hold, only sixty will be seated, while 220 stand, and of the 220 only 52 will have the support of the white porcelain grips or stanchions.

But to compensate for this “standing room mostly” which New Yorkers have come to consider unavoidable, there are four pairs of doors on each side of each car, permitting entrance or exit in eight hies or lines. Also injury to passengers caught in closing doors is minimized by rubber cushioned edges, and a device that makes the door stop, but not, as in older cars, rebound. The cars have no vestibules. They cost $38,000 each.

Another wonder is the achievement in underpinning. The builders of the new-subway had to prop up every sort of building, from two-story dwellings, to the newest steel skyscrapers. Yet all the time the occupants went placidly about their affairs, often ignorant that deep in the bowels of the earth beneath them, their buildings were being “put on stilts.” The monument to Columbus at the entrance to Central Park is 75 feet high and weighs 724 tons, but it was easily picked up and reset atop a new pedestal resting upon the Eighth avenue subway.

Far more difficult was the crossing of three existing subways. These had to be underpinned securely, without interrupting trains, while beneath, men dug the tube.

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Ball-Shaped TRAIN Pulled By Magnets

THE “bullet-flash,” most radical idea in railroad design since the recent advent of streamlining, has just been conceived by a Swiss engineer. Based on electro-magnetic principles, the new ball-shaped iron horse is expected to roll on standard-size rails at a speed as high as 300 m.p.h.

The outer rotating ball contains a stationary inner chamber for carrying passengers. Giant magneto arcs, located at 300-yard intervals, are expected to provide the pulling power. After passing under an arc, the ball automatically throws a switch shutting off the electro-magnet and is attracted to the next magnet-arc on the rails.

One of the special features of the unconventional “bullet-flash” is that it can be operated over normal rails and roadbeds without radical changes. The one-wheel system is claimed by its inventor to be especially practical for use in mountainous areas.
The engineer displayed his model to railroad officials. If further tests are satisfactory, a full-size test train may be built in Switzerland.

A RAILWAY that FALLS Down Hill

GERMAN engineers have recently proposed the building of novel “roller coaster” railways for use on short runs between cities and suburbs. The ingenious yet simple construction of this railway, which literally gets its power from falling down hill, is well shown in the accompanying drawing.

Each waiting station is elevated forty or more feet in the air, and passengers are lifted to the platform in an elevator. The train, consisting of two or three cars, awaits them on a level stretch of track beside the station. An endless chain drive, traveling underneath the track, engages the bottom of the leading car and pulls it past the station far enough to start rolling down the incline under its own momentum, exactly like the cars in a roller coaster. Sufficient speed will be generated to carry the train to the next station, where the chain drive lifts it to the top ready to repeat the performance.

The main advantage of the system is that no locomotive or power car is required in the train, eliminating the need for much heavy equipment.

Old Railway Thrills Tourists

TOURISTS visiting Cincinnati, Ohio, are thrilled by a ride on the local Mt. Adams Plane Railway, which was erected in 1877 to carry street cars up a 980-foot incline. Only the demand of sight-seers has saved the novel railway from being abandoned in the march of progress, over two million persons using the railway annually.

The lifts of the old railway are drawn by four cables and operate in balance, one ascending while the other descends. Street cars using the lifts are kept on an even keel while traveling the 28.9% grade.

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Home on a Train

SOME hobbyists let their hobby occupy them night and day. Well, the reverse is true of Dr. John Payne Roberts. He occupies his hobby!

For Dr. Roberts and his wife make their home in an old railroad car which is a prize exhibit of the Museum of Transport, located in Kirkwood, on the western outskirts of St. Louis. The Museum contains a remarkable collection of old railroad equipment.

The 75-year-old train was last used as a private car by John W. Barriger, president of the Monon Railroad. It was retired last year and acquired by the Museum. The car was already air conditioned and electrically equipped so it was a comparatively simple matter for the Roberts to make the other changes necessary to convert it into a comfortable, permanent home.

Now, it’s a St. Louis showplace and people point them out as a couple of hobbyists who literally live with their hobby.—Robert A. Hereford.

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Air-Rail Line Spans America in 48 Hours

RECENT inauguration of regular 48-hour New York to Los Angeles or San Francisco air-rail service by the Transcontinental Air Transport, Inc., in which the Pennsylvania railroad is financially interested, is interpreted as the outstanding commercial aviation development of 1929 in the United States.

The 48-hour trip by air-rail across the continent is compared to the 81-hour trip by fastest all-rail routes. And scarcely had the T.A.T. been launched than plans were under way for reducing the time. The T.A.T. is expecting to offer a supplementary service which will be all air from Columbus to the Pacific Coast.

Patrons of the T.A.T. can now board the “American,” a de luxe limited train of the Pennsylvania railroad, in New York in the early evening, spending the night in a sleeping car. In the morning they are transferred to a waiting airplane in Columbus, Ohio, and a daylight flight is made to Dodge City, Kansas. Stops are planned en route at Indianapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City and Wichita. After dinner at Dodge City an Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe trail takes the passengers on another night journey in a sleeper. At Las Vegas, N. M., the final lap by air either to Los Angeles or San Francisco, arriving late that afternoon.

Efficient terminals have been established along the route, motor-car tenders effect the transfers from trains to airplanes. The ships are the tri-motored Wasp-powered Fords. And these ships are piloted by a corps of 34 pilots. The first pilots secured for the corps all had at least 3,000 hours in the air with at least 500 hours on tri-motored planes, and relief pilots had nearly as good records. The service is expected to prove valuable to business men and others to whom time is money.

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A Century of Railroads on Parade

OLD AND NEW fashions in American railroads are on exhibit at Chicago’s lake front in a Railroad Fair celebrating 100 years of railroading in the Middle West. Pioneer locomotives with steam up run alongside the newest steam and Diesel-electric trains, while some cars yet unbuilt are shown in mockup form.

Marking the 100th anniversary of the first run of a steam locomotive from Chicago, then a muddy frontier outpost, the Fair has assembled millions of dollars worth of rolling stock to dramatize the progress of the century.

Thirty-eight of the nation’s railroads proudly strut their stuff. In an outdoor pageant real locomotives puff on and off the giant stage under their own power. A rodeo, an Indian village, a small-sized reproduction of Old Faithful that really spouts and scores of other features make the Chicago Fair the end of the line for rail fans.

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Gliding Cars Planned for new Railway

TRAINS THAT WOULD SKIM TRACKS AT HIGH SPEEDS PROPOSED IN DARING TRANSPORTATION SCHEME IMAGINE a flying railroad in which captive airplanes serve as cars. Skimming through the air, the streamlined cars are expected to attain speeds up to more than 200 miles an hour. A cage of rails restrains them from actually leaving the track.

That is a brief outline of a project for a high-speed transportation system put forward by a New York engineer, Walter H. Judson, pioneer aviator and formerly chief engineer for a railway car manufacturer. In Judson’s opinion, all engineering details have been worked out. With the cooperation of makers of railway and electrical machinery, structural steelwork, and airplane equipment, he has prepared a complete plan.

Judson’s plan calls for a light-weight structure of steel with a roadbed of trough-shaped cross section. Two bottom rails will be faced with rubber; these will support the flying car, with its pressed-steel wheels, while it lightens itself with increasing speed. A pair of side rails will serve as buffers and prevent sidesway. L-shaped rails at the top will complete the cage and prevent the car from lifting itself completely from the track.

The fifty-foot coach, encased in a streamlined shell of light metal alloy, will resemble an airplane fuselage shorn of wings. Wind-tunnel tests show, Judson says, that the curvature of the roof provides sufficient lift at full speed to raise nearly all of the car’s weight from the rails. Guide wheels with rubber tires are expected to restrain the car if it should leave the rails entirely, while similar wheels limit sideward movement.

A compact geared turbine will drive the propeller. Steam is supplied from an oil-burning boiler in a rear compartment, and exhaust steam from the turbine will pass through a condenser, enabling most of the water to be recovered and used over again.

The coach Judson plans would accommodate from thirty-six to fifty-four passengers. Its crew would consist of pilot, mechanic, and porter. There is no conductor.

For transcontinental service and other long hauls, Judson proposes the use of a flying train of from three to ten coupled sections, instead of the individual coach. A power car at the front would pull a string of passenger or freight-carrying sections, ending in a tapered observation car or caboose, at from 100 to 180 miles an hour Judson says. The cars will be coupled in such a way as to avoid wind drag from vacuum pockets forming between them.

Since an ordinary brake would quickly burn out if applied to a vehicle traveling at such speed, the propeller will be made to serve as an air brake. This will be done by reversing the pitch of the propeller blades so that they push the air ahead of the car and retard its motion. When the vehicle has thus been slowed to ninety miles an hour, steam-operated brakes will be applied to I-beams at the sides of the trough and bring the car to a halt. A full stop from a speed of 200 miles an hour can be made in 7,800 feet, Judson calculates.

An automatic signal system, he says will make it impossible for one car to approach closer than three miles’ distance to another. When a danger signal is picked up electrically from an inductor cable running along the center of the trough, the propeller blades will reverse of their own accord and the steam brakes operate after the proper interval. If any foreign object falls into the runway, an emergency signal is automatically flashed to oncoming cars and the usual action of the propeller brake is accelerated. The pilot has no signals to watch, but can talk with other cars and with the train dispatcher through a “wired wireless” system using the same conductor that carries the signals. These safety features and the absence of any grade crossings greatly reduce the chance of accident, Judson believes.

Windows will be sealed and fresh air provided by an air-conditioning system with an inlet at the front of the car.

Judson announces that a fifteen-and-a-half-mile demonstration line is planned for New Jersey, to serve a community as yet unnamed. Both coaches and trains will be run according to the plan, and will make the trip to a terminal connecting with a New York ferry in six minutes. Commuters and sightseers, Judson says, will be offered an opportunity to use the line, although its principal purpose is to show the feasibility of the system for larger-scale application. He declares its use would bring Chicago within five and a half hours of New York City, and San Francisco eighteen hours from New York. First of the longer runs contemplated by Judson for his system are lines connecting Jersey City and Atlantic City, N. J., with Philadelphia, Pa.

Twin Amphibian Cars for Monorail

Swift, Overhead Trams to Be “Equipped with Floats to Cross Water Like Boats AMPHIBIAN trains that can whiz above desert sands on an overhead rail, or plunge into the water to ford a river, are contemplated by the Soviet Government in an amazing plan to tap mineral wealth in Turkestan. They are to travel three projected monorail lines of unprecedented design, totaling 332 miles in length and crossing deserts and rivers.

A single overhead rail on concrete standards could be erected at low cost along these routes, engineers estimate. Air-propelled cars with twin, cigar-shaped hulls could straddle the track and glide along it, at speeds reaching 180 miles an hour, according to calculations based on tests of models at Moscow. The cars would be equipped with Diesel-electric drive, and each one would carry forty passengers or an equivalent freight load. Where the longest of the projected routes crosses the river Amu-Daria, a mile and a quarter wide, it is proposed that amphibian cars be used. On arriving at the shore the cars would leave the overhead rail and cross the river as a boat. Soviet engineers are reported already surveying the route.

Chicago’s Freight Subway Does the Work of 5000 Trucks

ONLY one out of a thousand residents of Chicago realizes that his city has an extensive subway system. No people ride in this subway, however, except the operators of the trains, for it is purely a freight subway. The photo above gives some idea of how the loop district is undermined by a network of tunnels; practically every department store and large business establishment has underground connections with the freight subway. Deliveries are made directly from the railroad freight yards to the underground receiving rooms of store buildings. The freight subway, with its 150 electric locomotives and its 3,300 freight cars, handles a volume of tonnage each day equivalent to that carried by 5,000 motor trucks.

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New Rail Car Runs on Air-Electric Perpetual Drive

FROM coast to coast by rail in 24 hours, traveling literally on air—that is what W. E. Boyette of Atlanta, Georgia, claims for his invention, a railroad engine that runs almost entirely on air.

Air for fuel—speeds of up to 125 miles an hour on rails—low transportation costs-—these are possibilities conjured by Boyette’s air electric car. After being started by batteries, the car needs only air to keep it running—a close approach to perpetual motion.

Inventor Boyette claims his invention is quite simple, even though it is contrary to all principles of engineering.

Large tanks on the sides of the car are pumped with compressed air by a starting air compressor which is driven by an auxiliary electric motor and 4800 pound storage battery set. Compressed air then operates the air engine connected to the driving wheels, bringing the car up to speed.

As the car moves, a large air compressor directly connected to the front wheels pumps air back into the tanks. An electric generator connected to the farthest rear pair of wheels is continually charging the batteries. Thus the movement of the car refills the air tanks and partly recharges the batteries.

With the engine pulling two passenger coaches over a 250 mile rail run, it is said that about $2.50 worth of electricity for fully charging the batteries at the end of the run will be the only fuel expense.

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The NEW ERA of RAILROADING

IT took ninety years to start the revolution that set the streamline train on its time-shattering career. You knew that revolution had come when you read that the fiery old iron horse had been stabled and in its place, trailing a string of coaches straight and smooth as an arrow’s shaft, was no grimy black engine but a strange new power car of “cobalt and sarasota blue, golden olive and pimpernel scarlet.” Like an arrow the streamliner shot across the country, caught the public imagination, beckoned a new generation that thought the railways outmoded and slow to come for a thrilling hundred-mile-an-hour ride in this aluminum bullet.

A new era in railroading was beginning, yet its seeds were buried ninety years ago. For the streamline train was first prophetically suggested in a British patent granted in 1846 to Sir Henry Bessemer, inventor of the Bessemer steel process. He proposed a “wedge form” for the piston carriage of “atmospheric railways,” to ” diminish atmospheric resistance and allow the carriage to move at higher velocities with less power. The wedge form may be used both in the fore and hind parts of carriages or of trains, in addition to the closing of the intermediate spaces.” In 1865, as the American Civil War closed, U. S. patent No. 49,227 was issued to S. R. Calthrop for a train designed to diminish wind resistance, but the train was never developed. At the turn of the century the “Windsplitter,” America’s first streamline train, was given trial on the Baltimore & Ohio tracks in Maryland. It was designed by F. U. Adams of Chicago, a newspaper man. It never was placed in scheduled service, and the streamline idea slumbered on.

The epoch of the streamliner was born, at last, of necessity. In 1920 the railroads carried a peak-year load of 1,235,- 000,000 passengers. In 1933 only 433,-000,000 passengers chose the rails for their thoroughfare. Passenger-miles dwindled from forty-seven billion in 1920 to a little more than sixteen billion in 1933. What drastic, dramatic gesture could lure back the lost passengers to the railways?

The streamliner was the answer. Dramatic “packaging” for the traveler. Mighty power plants wrapped in color — “sarasota blue and pimpernel scarlet,” for one—that would draw thousands every day to watch them roar by, and would pile up a waiting list of passengers.

The railroads borrowed style from giant air transports and from streamline automobiles. But speed called for more than mere styling, and the railroads went to the automotive manufacturers for an engine that would haul million-pound trains—built at a cost of -a dollar a pound—across the continent day after day at eighty and ninety mile speeds without breakdown. Speed was nothing new to the old iron horse, for a record of 127.1 miles per hour marked up by the Pennsylvania’s Broadway Limited in 1905 has yet to be challenged by today’s fast trains. Even today the Chicago and North Western’s conventional steam “400″ matches the better than mile-a-minute pace of the streamline steam “Hiawatha” and the Diesel-electric “Zephyr” between Chicago and St. Paul. But sustained speed, a thousand miles nightly from Chicago to Denver, two-thousand-mile sprints from Lake Michigan to the Pacific, called for an engine with long-distance stamina, and the Diesel was given the assignment.

Climb into the massive yellow power car of the “City of San Francisco,” one of the newest and most powerful of the growing fleet, and watch the engineer start his eleven-car streamliner on its journey of two nights and a day to the bay city from Chicago. Half-way across Nebraska this speedster will overtake the steam train that left Chicago eight hours in advance.

The Diesel-electric engineer is half automobilist, half electric motorman. His “fireman”—an obsolete term—climbs down into the grey power room that resembles the engine room of a great ship, starts the Diesels as you would start an automobile engine, and rejoins the engineer in the cab. Three auxiliary motors have already been running, furnishing power for lights, air-conditioner, brake lines. Given the “highball,” the engineer releases his brakes, sets the motor in “series” and advances the controller to “Speed 2.” The mighty locomotive starts forward almost imperceptibly— a jolt is all but impossible with articulated, shockproof coupling—the controller is advanced again and the purr of the Diesels becomes a roar as the electric drive draws more and more power. When the train reaches a speed of thirty miles an hour the controller is thrown back, as if to shift gears; the motor is switched from “series” to “parallel” and again the controller moves forward. There are eight speeds oh the controller. At sixty miles an hour the engineer switches beyond ” parallel” into the high cruising range, and the streamliner hits its stride.

Like an automobile, the Diesel is watercooled and the crew must keep its temperature around 160 degrees. Dials in the cab show the engine temperature, train speed, and air-brake pressure. There are warning lights to indicate overheated motor and low lubricating oil. Instead of semaphore signals, the automatic train control flashes a light in front of the engineer if the track ahead is obstructed, and if he fails to reduce speed in acknowledgment of the warning, the train is automatically brought to a stop. Temperature of the motors can be controlled by shutters at the front of the locomotive, regulated from the cab.

At the end of the 2,260-mile run they park the big streamliner over a greasing pit and give it about the same care you give your automobile after a week-end trip. They vacuum and scrub the cars in-side and out, man the grease guns and fill the oil and water tanks. The Diesel itself they leave pretty much alone. It’s good for a few hundred thousand miles with scarcely a look. And that is why the Diesel-electric is stealing the show from the steam locomotive, which can travel just as fast. It takes no less than four steam engines—a change every 500 miles—to pull a passenger train from Chicago to the coast, with many another stop for coal, or fuel oil, or water. Half-hour stops for servicing are common. The Diesel spurns relief, stops no longer than ten minutes to refuel, keeps ordinary stops within a minute’s span. The “City of Denver” pauses just forty-five seconds at Boone, Ia., for change of crew. It is this saving in operating delays, and its endurance at high speed, that enables the Diesel to clip twenty-two hours from the transcontinental time of the steam trains.

Too, the Diesel economizes in fuel and water, as well as in maintenance cost. It burns a relatively inexpensive fuel oil. It needs no boiler water, thus eliminating a cost item for such railroads as the Santa Fe, which must haul water in tank cars as far as 100 miles in dry regions of the southwest.

But the Diesel-electric locomotive still costs approximately two and one-half times as much as a steam engine, and its life span is unknown. No steam locomotive has been put to the test these Diesels are meeting. A decade may prove the old iron horse supreme, after all. Meanwhile the glittering streamliner of the new era has brought speed and glamour—and passengers—back to the railroads.

Endless BELT TRAINS for Future Cities

TRANSPORTATION of city inhabitants through subway or overhead tubes on endlessly moving belts, providing more speed and comfort than our present systems of passenger service, loom as a possibility, according to Norman W. Storer, engineer of the Westinghouse Electrical Co., who has developed the idea.

As described by Mr. Storer, the system is an arrangement of continuous trains or belts of cars, running on parallel tracks. There is a stationary loading platform along the entire course of the system.

Passengers board the first local train at any point, and it stops every 50 seconds for a period of 10 seconds. When the doors close, a gong sounds and the local platform starts moving. Now there is another signal and gates open for a second platform, or express, on which the passenger takes the major part of his trip. After ten seconds the gates close and the local slows down for another stop, while the express picks up to a 22 m.p.h. speed.

Noise of the system is at a minimum, and passengers are delivered at no more than 300 feet from their streets. All stations are controlled from one central point, all elements being so timed that there can be no hitches.

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Gyroscope Monorail Car to Travel 300 Miles per Hour

This German monorail will revolutionize rail transportation. At 300 miles per hour it will meet the challenge of the air transport lines.

RAILROADS may challenge the increased popularity of air travel by developing a superspeed monorail car. Balanced by gyroscope and controlled by radio, the gyroscope monorail would be capable of more than 300 miles an hour, its inventor claims.

The gyroscope, not a modern invention, has only recently been applied to transportation. It steadies ships in storm tossed seas. It aids in the automatic control of airplanes in flight.

Applied to rail transportation, the gyroscope will permit much greater speed without sacrificing safety. In fact, Raymond C. Buchardt, engineer of the Telefunken company, of Germany, who designed the gyroscope monorail, claims his superspeed car provides greater safety than is now possible.

Car Stands Upright on Monorail

Buchardt’s monorail has all the latest developments in streamlining and makes use of airplane features to guide the car on its single rail. The gyroscope monorail stands upright on its single rail, while present monorails are suspended from the rail.

The gyroscopes are used to balance the car on this single rail. They do away with the side sway that would be present were great speeds attempted with the suspended monorail.

Radio Will Replace Block Signals

“Because of the terrific speed of more than 300 miles an hour, the ordinary block signal will be impossible for the trans-continental monorail,” said Mr. Buchardt, “Signals would not be visible and in fog, rain or smoke the vision of the pilot would be entirely obscured.

“To meet this difficulty I propose to use the radio to transmit signals and orders to the pilot just as transport planes are now controlled. Radio messages from a dispatcher’s office would tell the pilot when to slow up and would warn him of any dangers ahead.”

The enormous air pressure created by the great speed would throw an ordinary car from the rail. Buchardt has solved this problem by designing a long, sloping curve on either side of the car, which he calls a “wind catcher.” The air pressing against this “wind catcher” would hold the car on the rail.

In his experiments with his invention, Buchardt found that the monorail would have trouble taking curves. The car took the curve perfectly, but the centrifugal force nearly threw it off the rail after completing the curve.

For that reason stabilizing fins were placed at the front and rear of the car along with a large rudder. The forward fin also houses the radio antenna.

The gyroscope car is driven by two large propellers at either side of the rear end of the car. One gyroscope would be housed in the forward end of the car and the other in a rear compartment. Power would be supplied by Diesel engines.

The rail used would be round and the wheels curved in such a way as to form a ball link.

The traction system type of monorail would be much smaller than the car used in cross country runs. The latter would be a double-decked car with the pilot housed in a third deck forward.

The trans-continental type would carry approximately 100 passengers.

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Grow Up, Railroads!

BY JACQUES MARTIAL

THE year 1869 was a fateful one in the history of railroads. It was during that year that George Stephenson won the “Battle of the Gauges” over his opponent Brunei, the famous engineer of the Great. Western Railways.

This “victory,” which decided in favor of the narrower gauge of 4 feet 8-1/2 inches, was a fundamental error. From it stem practically all the ills of the present-day railroads. Greater speed, cost of operation, volume, comfort, loads, economy— every possible progressive step needed today is prevented by the initial shortsighted decision won by Stephenson. History is not clear as to how the odd figure of 4 feet 8-1/2 inches was arrived at. Some say it was based upon the distance beteen the Romans’ wheel ruts. Others claim that Stephenson simply found it in the distance between the wheels of his own cart.

Brunei’s original design for the track of the G. W. R. was 7 feet, and when the fateful decision was made 1,500 miles of broad gauge was already in existence. Brunei had obviously visualized future progress of rail transportation and claimed rightly at the time that by using his wide gauge he was able to have a more powerful locomotive and therefore greater speeds, loads, service and economies.

The narrower gauge of 4 feet 8-1/2 inches has stuck. It is today the international standard used all over the world, with the exception of a few countries who have a wider gauge, such as Spain and Portugal with gauges of 5 feet 5-3/4 inches, Russia largely with 5 feet, Eire with 5 feet, and the main lines of India with 5 feet 6 inches.

With this narrow track railroad engineers have already attained the maximum of possible results. On American railroads—without doubt the best and most efficient—top speed has reached about 130 miles per hour. The cruising speed of the best light stainless steel trains is approximately 80 mph.

This speed, which would have seemed fantastic to George Stephenson, is today slow compared with those of airplanes and is totally inadequate for the future development of the railroads. It is an inescapable fact that to develop modern railroads to fulfill present and future demands we need speed up to 250 mph—and this can’t be obtained on the present tracks.

Of course, to reconvert all our lines to a broader gauge would be costly and difficult, but it could be done under a progressive program. Conversion would have to be done on a national scale with Federal assistance.

In order to develop our rail- roads to meet present and future needs we must do the following: 1, Complete the electrification of all the roads. 2, Widen all tracks beginning with one double track from North to South along the Atlantic coast and one from East to West on a central line. 3, Design and build rolling stock for high speed and greater service loads.

The present steam engine is as antiquated as the old Wells Fargo coach. The diesel engine dominates at present but it can be widely improved. Tomorrow’s power is sure to be electricity created by numerous electric and atomic power plants.

Railroad designers now have all their ideas compressed within a prison of 4 feet 8-1/2 inches and cannot escape. All they can attempt is what they have been trying lately—vertical expansion, which means the double decker. But where does this lead us? Straight to speed reduction! It is no solution at all. Let’s have a look at the new designs needed for high-speed trains. First, we must have a rail gauge of something like 10 feet with a 3-rail track. Reenforce-ment of the road-bed may be necessary, or the rail itself may be made bigger— 10 to 12 inches—to carry the heavier loads. The line should be as straight as possible, with inclinations proportionate to the new high speeds. The present car height should be reduced from 13 feet to about 11 or 11-1/2. The present 40-inch wheel could be retained if technical improvements are made. Roller bearings must be used, and strength added. The car floor should be lowered from four to about two feet above the top of the rails, which means it will have to rise above the trunks; this will be but a small inconvenience to passengers, however, if the rise is graded smoothly. By lowering top and floor we lower the center of gravity. Also, lowering the top permits the proper speed line. The width of the car could be then increased to 18 feet at the base and tapered to approximately 13 or 13-1/2 feet at the top. The front of the engine would be given a graded slope at least 16 feet long in order to bring increased pressure to bear on it and so keep it firmly on the rails at high speeds.

Such a car would have a serviceable inside width of 18 feet, eight more than the present ones.

Design possibilities are manifold.

Travel by rail would have comfort and luxury like that on crack ships.

Russia’s Giant Snake Train Rolls Speedily on Steel Balls

AN ELECTRIC train which travels on steel balls instead of wheels has been tested in Russia with remarkable success.

The speedy train, which was designed by a young Soviet engineer named Yarmolshuk, resembles a giant reptile weaving about the countryside. The inventor declares his final design will have a running speed of 190 m. p. h.

Huge balls under each car roll on a single concave concrete track, greatly reducing rolling friction. Gyroscopes in each car keep the train balanced even on the sharpest curves, and curved guards along the track prevent the train from tipping.

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Robot Ticket Agent Books Train Space in 45 Seconds

ELECTRONICS is now making train reservations at New York’s busy Pennsylvania Station. And the new semi-automatic system gets your space in 45 seconds—the old method sometimes took 45 minutes.

The big saving in time is made by eliminating all direct contact between the ticket seller and the file clerk who actually assigns train space. This clerk now receives teletype requests only for space known to be available, and need not waste time in looking up vacant space and then relaying this information to the ticket seller. The Intelex, developed by International Telephone and Telegraph Corp., is already being used on the Pennsylvania’s New York-Chicago trains. By next year it will handle all reservations.

1. When customer asks for reservation, all clerk has to do is turn dial to code for train and date. He hears recording that lists all space still unsold, thus knpws at once what is available.

2. Ticket seller’s penciled order is then tele-typed in code from ticket office to the central file room in the station. Files contain cards, called “diagrams,” listing space in each car of train. All assignments of space must be made . from diagrams to insure against duplicate sales.

3. Teletyped order automatically makes correct file shoot out of cabinet. Order is also printed on receiving teletypewriter. Clerk, called “distributor,” writes order serial number in diagram, then teletypes back to ticket office the space and car number she has assigned.

4. The 45-second transaction is finished when the ticket seller gets back completed teletype giving information he needs to write and sell ticket. Typical teletype strip is superimposed on photo above. This one says, in code, that T. P. White wants a duplex room to Chicago on the Broadway Limited leaving New York July 1. “XH W9″ at end assigns him duplex H in car W9.

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Can Trains be Run by Perpetual Motion

The fallacies surrounding many ideas in perpetual motion are set forth in this interesting yarn which recounts some of the impossibilities suggested to solve the age old problem of getting power from nothing. Wheels with over-balance, sponge engines, gold leaf machines, and a railroad which appears as though it might actually work are recounted.

by HJALMAR LUERSSEN

OF ALL the mechanical brain-bugs that repeatedly surge over the country, the perpetual motion bug holds all records for depth and duration of sting. The perpetual motion idea has been recurring in cycles and minor cycles for over a thousand years, or since the birth of scientific thought, and magazine editors have recently noted that the virus has again affected inventors.

Thus it is we have at present a wave of all manner of hare-brained schemes for extracting power from nothing. Among these schemes is a fantastic idea for running a train over an epicyclic track, using cones attached to the sides of cars instead of the regular flanged railroad wheels. Gravity is supposed to furnish the power and keep the train running on the level.

Will it work? Will gravity run such a railway?

Let us see. Let us revert to a familiar form of illusion called the “cone and track” experiment, familiar to all students of high school physics. In this device a cone will appear to roll uphill when placed on a track which runs uphill and diverges outward. The coned wheel will move toward the high point on the track and the tips of the cones will be resting at the highest point on the track when your hand brings it to rest.

In reality, however, the center of gravity of the cone fetches up at the end of the track in a lowered position. Hence the cone really runs downhill while appearing to run uphill.

And looking into the annals of perpetual motion history, we see that over a hundred years ago one Jaime de Bonheur proposed the building of such a railroad. Not lacking in ambition, he. His idea encompassed and envisioned a railroad of this order built around the world! The subject of this idea has been treated very cleverly* by Stewart Rouse, nationally prominent cover artist, in this month’s Modern Mechanics. Of course, for reasons just mentioned, it will not work unless the whole path of the train was continually downhill. It would not run on the level any farther than from the bottom to the top of one of the track humps.

This subject is a fascinating one.

Plenty of men have gone crazy trying to solve the riddle of perpetual motion. Plenty more will go dotty as time goes on — that’s a sure-fire bet. Even the artist, Leonardo da Vinci, the greatest mind of his time, could not withstand the temptation to present to the world a perpetual motion scheme. He designed a wheel on the oft invoked principle of over-balance but soon came to the conclusion that he was pursuing a phantom. The idea of permanent over-balance, as an endless source of power as contradicting as it appears returns constantly as a principle of eternal motion.

During the year 1640, the Marquis of Worcester announced the production of a wheel, which was to be kept in constant motion through swinging weights. The test took place in the presence of King Charles I and his entire court in the Tower of London. Nothing is recorded regarding the success of the demonstration, at any rate the invention has sunk into oblivion which in itself would indicate that the wheel of the Marquis of Worcester did not run eternally.

In former times, patent offices were not quite as rigorous. In England alone, more than 600 patent rights were granted on perpetual motion machinery. The first one of these patents was published on March 9th, 1635, and concerned of the many wheels with permanent “over-balance”.

In 1770 already the philosopher, Sir James Ferguson, tried to convince the world of the impossibility of perpetual motion. He, too, built a machine with swinging levers and shifting weights, which was to prove the impossibility of the principle of permanent over-balance.

But in spite of that people kept on inventing. When the first bicycles with chain transmission were put on the market, the idea to gain something from the nothing received a new impetus. One inventor conceived the exceedingly simple idea that an endless chain hanging loosely over the crown of a wheel would create an overbalance.

Even Leonardo da Vinci, the greatest technician of his time, could not withstand the temptation to present to the world a “perpetual motion.” He designed a wheel on the same principle of over balance, but was to rest principally on one side of the wheel only and a secondary roller or wheel was to guide the chain in such a way, that it would always run onto this one side, of the large wheel only. With a real heavy chain, the inventor hoped to be able to set a dynamo into motion. But the chain remained inmovable, for the two parts could not be brought out of balance.

The absurdity of a permanent over balance becomes evident at once, if one considers that it takes the same amount of power to lift a weight as is gained by lowering same. Not only can nothing be gained in that way, but the loss of power resulting by friction, will inevitably bring the machinery to a stop after it has been set in motion.

About twenty years ago, a wheel was on exhibition in a show window in Berlin, which was turning for hours and which was considered by naive onlookers as the long hailed “Perpetuum Mobile.” If the onlookers had been more patient and had stayed long enough, they might have seen a man appear in the show window about every half hour, to set the wheel in motion again.