The Future of the Railway.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLV, Issue 4, 27 July 1910, Page 34

The Future of the Railway.

ELECTRIC AND GASOLENE CARS REPLACING THE STEAM LOCOMOTIVE.

IT looks like a race between the gasolene motor-car and the electric locomotive to decide which will do most to give the steam locomotive the harder push toward the scrap heap. Day in and day out on many branch lines in America, sleek steel ears, like sharp-nosed torpedo-boats on wheels, slip along at from 40 to 00 miles an hour with passengers gazing out through airtight windows into a smokeless atmosphere. They are gasolene motor-cars, one type of many that have been adopted or are being tested on many railways. These motorcars and electric locomotives already in practical use, point to the beginning of a revolution in transportation, which has gone on in the last few years, almost as notable as the substitution of the steam locomotive for the stage-coach.

It will be some time yet before the steam locomotive will cease to be the best and cheapest mechanical horse for the main trunk railways; and the locomotive builders go on improving their steam freight behemoths and passenger flyers as if they were in business for all time. But within the last year alone, the change to electric power began on railways with heavy passenger traffic, especially near great cities, has been so ■enormous, land the experiments with motor-cars have been pursued so swiftly and successfully that the transformation is already advanced enough to foreshadow' the decline of the steam locomotive. Electric trains, where the traffic is, or can be made, dense and steady; gasolenedriven trains, where the traffic is light and uncertain: cars that will run either in trains or alone by their own locomotive power, so that a train may start for even a small number of people, and so that empty cars need not be hauled when not required—these are the novel machines that are opening a new era in transportation. They are just beginning to push the steam locomotives out of several important departments of work. Their results will soon show' whether they can invade the field of longdistance passenger transportation and long oi' short-distance freight transportation. the two fields which the steam locomotive continues to dominate. Why are the railways being electrified? In Switzerland, in Italy, in Sweden, because coal is dear and waterfalls are cheap. In the United States and in England because trolley competition has become so menacing to the railways, and because the public, taught by the trolley lines that it is possible to travel without being forced to breath smoke and collect cinders, have demanded relief from present railway conditions, and the railways have been disposed to heed. Millions of travellers entering and leaving New' York used to be obliged to suffer a very purgatory passing through a tunnel that led one man to say that if he should go to

Hades he wished to go on one of the two roads that used the tunnel, because then he would be glad when he got there. When one morning, several years ago, a terrible accident took place in the mist and gas and steam and smoke of this tunnel, it became plain that relief must soon come, and electric trains were installed. A significant point in the adoption of electricity is the introduction in suburban traffic of the cars like the familiar ones of the Elevated and subways. Their advantage is that every car, or almost every ear, is a locomotive in itself. When many cars are made up into a train, the motors on all the live ears help in propulsion, though the control is held by the first, where the engineer has his post. The beauty of this equipment lies in its flexibility. The number of cars in a train can be made to vary with the traffic. Cars can be dropped off or added at any station. The practice of railways has been to run trains at long enough intervals to give some assurance that they can be filled. With the new equipment, there can be a much greater frequency, for at any hour of the day when few- people normally wish to travel, a long enough train can be provided, or even a single car, for the few W’ho do. At rush hours heavy trains can be sent out at frequent intervals. The swift acceleration of electric cars makes it possible to run many trains at high speeds, and yet make many stops.