TRAINS OF THE FUTURE

Evening Star, Issue 21636, 3 February 1934, Page 2

TRAINS OF THE FUTURE

SPEED DF 110 MILES AN HOUR Magnificent trains like the Flying Scotsman are doomed. In their place, American railway experts predict, will come aluminium expresses with a speed of 110 miles an hour (writes the New York correspondent of the ‘ Daily Mail ’). Their three carriages, luxuriously fitted, weigh only eight tons, the same as one sleeping Pullman of to-day. Railway experts, who have watched the running of these new streamlined motor-driven coaches, say that in the very near future all the present equipment will be mere junk fit only for the scrapheap. Only goods trains, they say, will continue to be hauled ty heavy locomotives. This dream of an astonishing new era in railway transportation is foreseen by American experts as coming true as early as next spring, when the first of the aluminium trains ordered is to be running on the Union Pacific Railway. A second train now under construction is scheduled to run between Chicago and Los Angeles. The other great American companies, it is argued, must follow suit in the great competition for passengers. On the Great Western system in England a new streamlined motor-propelled coach is now in service, and a coach with a Diesel engine is being tried on the L.N.E.R. What railwaymen are talking about today is the starting of a revolution which must change every aspect of modern train travelling. All engine-drivers must learn to become motor drivers, and stokers will no longer be wanted. Sleeping coaches, too, it is thought, will be diminished in number owing to the high speed of these racers on rails, and great expensive dining cars are likely to be discarded. People, it is argued, no longer want heavy meals in trains. A glass of beer and a salad sandwich is more to the taste of travellers today. This is what they say is due for the rubbish heap: 50,000 passenger coaches, representing an investment of £300,0' V|

4.000 dining cars which cost £40.000,000; thousands of engines, each of which cost £12,000. The greatest era of railway equipment building is foreshadowed as a certainty beginning in New York.