ELECTRIC TRAINS

Southland Times, Issue 19831, 30 March 1926, Page 10

ELECTRIC TRAINS

A TRIAL TRIP. STEEL AND WOODEN CARRIAGES. Not as a steam train starts—rattling its couplings and buffers, and quivering into action—but with a silent, comfortable glide, an electric train of two carriages slid out of Central Railway Station on a trial trip to Mortdale says the Sydney Morning Herald aid. A party of journalists and Parliamentarians had been gathered on board to examine the capacities of the train, thal, within a few weeks will be carrying passengers over the line. To one of the new steel carriages had been coupled a converted wooden carriage, that the powers of each type might be observed. One scarcely knew that the train had left the station, so smoothly it commenced to move, and as one watched the platform falling swiftly behind, one felt the exhilaration of slipping over a polished surface like ice. With an almost imperceptible jolt the carriages gathered speed, and a suburban train, puffing laboriously out, bumping an uneven way over the points about Redfern, dropped behind almost as though it were standing still. The driver moved his lever on another point, and the whir that came shrilly from the driving wheels, half as high as a man, grew more piercing and insistent. But it seemed a little unreal to be speeding along at 50 miles an hour without a Locomotive, an accessory to which we have become so used. One felt as though the train had run away backwards down a hill, or that—by some mischance—a tram had got on to the train lines. Before one realised it, the train had stopped. There had been no head-spliting screech of brakes, and the shock of decelleration came as a minute jolt through the upholstery. IN THE STEEL CARRIAGE.

But all that, to tell the truth, was the experience of those who sat in the wooden carriage that had been converted from its old purpose of travelling behind a stem engine. One must tell a different tale about the steel carriage, whose smooth, graceful lines promised a rich and rigid comfort. The train started again, leaping to a speed of 10 miles an hour, and rushing rapidly to a mile a minute almost, like a hound at the heels of a hare, and this time one had no illusion that the ground and not the train was moving. In the all too familiar manner of a suburban train the jar of the first leap forward shot through the stiff steel frame. The carriage swayed—not more uncomfortably than suburban carriages usually do —and every uneveness in the rails seemed to be multiplied in their transmission to the seat. There was no sun, but the earth and trees steamed in the sulky, lowering heat, and in the carriages one perspired. The train rushed along at a speed sufficient to make a breeze on the stillest of days, but in the corridor the air, fresh and untainted by smoke or the odour that well-oiled engines give off, was unstirring. It was tantalising to sit behind a window twice as wide as those which ventilate the ordinary railway carriage, watching the trees away in a brisk south-easter, and yet feel on one’s face not a cool, moving finger of air. And that is the great and important weakness of these graceful carriages, for one can raise the windows only about nine inches, which is just sufficient to turn the breeze to one’s toes, a not altogether satisfying place. It, seems absurd that this should be so in a carriage of steel—the material of which ovens are made. One shudders to think what these metal cylinders would be like on a day like last Wednesday, when the sun pours down with a penetrating bitterness. They are well ventilated, it is said, and no doubt this is so, but in this country it is necessary that a vehicle, in which many people are to be concentrated, should be so designed that a breeze plays through it. Steel retains heat like nothing else, and in these carriages it is untempered by a draught of wind. The steel carriages, of which the department expects to have 100 on the road by next September, are the pivot and power of the train. They carry the motor —and for this reason—because their tremendous bogey wheels must be rigidly and powerfully sprung—they are less comfortable than the converted wooden carriages. Coupled alternately with these they will impel the trains at a speed greater than locomotives can give, and at a cost much less. WANTED—A BREEZE. One can imagine that in a less rigorous climate, where the steel’s capacity to retain heat and the windows’ incapacity to rise more than a few inches is a virtue, these trains would be regarded as the acme of comfort. Thus it is with the London tubes. But here, where man’s most insistent need for four or five months is a breeze, one is inclined to sigh not for steel carriages, but for something like trains on certain parts of the Continent, which carry an open deck. It is only fair to say, however, that the railway engineers have done their best to overcome this disability of the carriage, by carefully insulating it. If the space between the inner and outer sheetings on the body, sides, and ends, and between the ceiling and roof, there is a special asbestos cell insulation, and the inside panel plates are covered with a heavy green baize. Yesterday it did not seem as though their ingenuity succeeded as they planned. There is a wealth of interesting detail in the trains. For instance, bne wondered what would happen if the driver dropped dead at his post, for there is only one man in the control compartment. One found that this danger was guarded by the control known as the dead man’s handle. To apply power the driver has to press this lever down, and immediately he removes his hand from it air valves automatically cut off the power and apply the brake. Hundreds of features like this make the train a source of interest and delight, and the public will find it a faster and cleaner method of travel than the locomotive drawn carriage.