MAKING & MENDING. ROLLING STOCK FOR RAILWAYS.

Evening Post, Volume LXXXI, Issue 26, 1 February 1911, Page 3

MAKING & MENDING. ROLLING STOCK FOR RAILWAYS.

RAW MATERIAL TO FINISHED ARTICLE. A TRIP THROUGH PETONE WORKSHOPS. No engineering establishment is much to look at from the outside. A collection of grimy sheds surrounded by heaps of iron in various stages of manufacture and rustiness ; grimy chimney stacks and furnace cupolas belching out smoke ; trucks and cranes bearing material from place to place ; and grimy men moving about their work amid an indescribable din and clatter — the first impression is saddening. An atmosphere of strife with refractory nature weighs over the spot; the noise is of the clang and clamour of metal to metal, fighting for the mastery. There is nothing of the trim neatness and orderly process of textile manufacture seen in woollen mills ; nothing of the clean exterior of a freezing works. Aii engineering shop is the old smithy and forge enlarged and modified, but in essentials unchanged. Nobody can do the practical work of an engineer moulding metals to his will with clean hands. MOULDING MOLTEN METAL. So it is with Petone, the greatest engineering works in the North Island — the same atmosphere of smoke and grime, the same noises of escaping steam and banging steel, the same apparent disorder ariS chaos in the midst of real order and system. Step inside and watch the process of making and mending locomotives, and their freight. You will understand better then. Take the foundry first, where liquid metal is poured into moulds to assume, when solid, whatever shape is desired. It is a gloomy shed with grimy perspiring men busied about rows and blocks of material that look like ironsand. It is black and depressing. In each block there is a funnel-shaped hole, into which the metal is poured. When all is ready a ft'orkman takes a long spiked steel rod and pokes and prods at a hole in the side of the building overhanging a slanting trough. Presently there is a hissing, a spurting, and a bright glare in the gloom, and out comes a glowing stream of white-hot molten metal. It pours in a brilliant cascade over the edge of the spout into pots large and small. These, when full, are seized in tongs, borne away (instantly to the sand moulds, and tipped. The hot metal rushes in bubbling, spitting and rumbling like a live thing. Enough metal has been taken. The man with the rod, the guardian of the furnace, takes a lump of fire-clay and plugs up the aperture from the furnace. It is the same old process in essentials that was used cenkiries ago by the first men of the iron age. DRESSING THE CASTING. The iron cools in the mould, and jforms a casting. It comes out a rough and scraggy duplicate of the wooden mould that formed the shape in the sand. It is then taken away and stripped of its useless excrescences. Then it goes to •the machine shop to be dressed and turned and smoothed until it is ready to do its part in the running of the railway service. It may go through several machines, according to the nature of the work it is required to do. It may be a casting pure and simple, some fundamental fixture in a' machine, standing like a torso to bear great burdens, but not to move. Such was the framework of* a new steam hammer built in the shops. The casting weighed three tons, and to the engineer will afford some indication of what Petone can do. But if the casting be for a moving part, it will require turning in the lathe. Thus cylinders and piston bushes are fixed on the revolving axis of the lathe, and elowly rot-ate against a sharp chisel, which pares off a thin shaving of solid steel. The work is automatic. All the machinist has to do is to watch and regulate his machine. It was not so in the early days of engineering, when Boulton and Watt were turning out their engines. The cutting tool had to be guided by hand then. Yet the screwcutting and cylinder-boring of those times were wonderfully accurate. The man was more than the machine then. Now it is otherwise. FORGE AND ANVIL. So much for cast metals. That is half of the work. The other lies in the smithy and the forge. Here in a new shop, still only half occupied — for the boilermakers have yet to move in — are rows of forges with anvils alongside^ It is just the same old primitive jolly blacksmith without ' 'the spreading chestnut tree," and the rest of the v stage properties. But "the large and sinewy hands" are there, slam-banging a monstrous sledge-hammer on 'the red-hot steel. The bigger work is done by the steam-hammer, the delicfifcy of which is the subject of many stories. You can tap a gold watch without breaking the glass, and you can send down a blow that knocks a lump of hot iron into a pancake. Nowadays one does not essay the watch-act, but takes it for granted. It has been, done and, doubtless, Petone could do it again with her home-made steam-hammer. In the blacksmiths' shop is one interesting exhibit. It is a block of iron about five feet square lying on the ground, and on it is a circular clap of steel attached to it. This was used for bending the iron at the top of the cattle trucks used to carry the large animals in Wirth's Circus. The arc of the curve that . would take fat bullocks, would not accommodate th& proportions of Liaay, the hippo, and her friends the Jumbovian elephants. This is just a sample of the emergency work that Petone is called on to do at a moment's notice. THE LOCOMOTIVE HOSPITAL. Out of the smithy into the erecting shop. Here are four or five locomotives, large and small, from a great TaihapeTaumarunui X compound, weighing 95 tons — the largest and heaviest narrowgauge loco, in the world — to a, little oddity in the shape of a Dubs tank engine, such as you see on the BlenheimPicton line or shunting about the wharves here. Heaver knows how old the little fellow is, but he was well and truly built in the first place, and has faithfully served his masters, and they are not going to see him scrauped without an effort. A patch on his fite-box, a liner to his cylinders, new brasses here and there, and he will be good for a few more years. When the time does come for his final retirement on superannuation, and the last rites of the scrap-heap, he will be remembered with good words by such of his drivers as live and know his record. For there is a personality and idiosyncracy about locomotives that no other engine possesses. Ask any driver o! experience. So with the Manawatu Baldwin, the old Fell engine, and even the Taihape giant. Their day will come sooner or later, when the superintendent of the locomotive hospital can pass them for service no more. But they have one consolatiou. Their bodies and bones will go from the mortuary to the scrap-heap through the crematorium of the fiery furnace, and Phoenix-like issue forth in new shapes and forms to serve the country once again.