A QUESTION OF TRANSPORT

New Zealand Mail, 8 February 1900, Page 39

A QUESTION OF TRANSPORT

The most modern field equipment sent to South Africa is the Traction Engine Brigade for the transport of supplies. Colonel Templer, R.E., w-as entrusted by the War Office with its equipment, and he has arranged for the despatch of; fifty traction engines and the necessary trucks. The immense superiority of this' mode of transport w-as proved during the recent manoeuvres on Salisbury Plain. A traction engine, with a ton of coal, accompanied by four men, drew a. thirty-five ton load from Aldershot to a camp sixty miles distant in twentytwo hours. To carry the same load seventy horses were required, with thir-ty-five drivers, one captain, two subalterns and five fion-commissioned officers in charge, all, of course, supplied with food, blankets and tents. They occupied three full days in the journey. At the best horse transport covers only fifteen or twenty miles a day, but a trac-! tion engine will easily do from sixty to seventy-five, and a Maxim fitted in front of the engine is considered a fairly good protection, at least against straggling cavalry. The engines and trucks were severely tested over the roughest ground the Long Valley at Aldershot affords, and they very comfortablv covered eight miles an hour. A writer in '‘Pearson’s” Christmas Number states : —They were driven at full speed up steep banks. They charged over all obstacles. They rumbled down vales and depressions, clambering out with laborious puffing; one after another they hurled their vast bulks into and out of a w-ide stream, where an officer’s caravan in the rear of a train would pitch like a house in an earthquake. The ground was scored with the tracks of the Great Bft driving wheels; but although a horse trotting alongside sank up to his fetlocks in the loose, dust" soil, the track of the engines, because, of the width of tlieir wheels, w-as. hardly an inch in depth. Every engine as itvcame from its fitters’ hands, spick and span with every nut adjusted, was proved - with as severe a test as any it is likely to meet in South Africa.” Other obvious advantages of substituting traction engines for horses is that tfi&y Can travel fifty miles a day, month after month, without getting tirei : when they are not at work they are not eating Anything, and they will not suffer any" inconvenience from rinderpest or the deadly tsetse fly. The operations of the Traction Engine Brigade w-ill be watched with interest.

In one turn of twelve hours recently an American steel company turned out 540 tons of steel ingots.