Electric train

“ Electricity as a locomotive force is being presented to the public in various forms. There is the ordinary railway, like the Underground, that, cleansing itself, amending its ways, and becoming converted to the new order of traction, has been granted a new lease of life. Then there are new lines laid down, intended from the first to be electrical, with specially designed cars, diving beneath the Thames, and connecting the north and south of London. These are our metropolitan pioneer electric railways. ”

“ Trains cannot bump into each other when CTC is at work. It is a wonderful system of electric wires that run along the tracks, all the way to an office building in a railroad town. The wires end in a long board that’s dotted with lights and small levers. Now when train wheels travel over the rails, the wires carry electric messages to that long board. Lights flash on and tell the man who watches the board exactly where the train is. If he wants it to go onto a siding, he pushes a lever. Electric switches miles away guide the train’s wheels off the main track. ”

“ By the end of 1903 it is hoped that the work will be sufficiently advanced for some trains to be run by electricity. Finally, as the Metropolitan’s engineer-in-chief remarks, there will be no marked novelties, but “the very conversion from steam to electric traction will prove a great novelty and an attraction. New cars of the latest type will be introduced, the stations will be bright and cheerful, the atmosphere pure; travel will be undertaken with a greater degree of comfort, and freedom from disagreeable odours. ”

“ How the railroad companies can persist in using the ordinary locomotive is a mystery. By providing an engine generating electricity and operating with the current motors under the cars a train can be propelled with greater speed and more economically. ”

“ There is still some doubt in the minds of railway engineers whether electric traction is really superior to the steam locomotive on the main railway lines, where distances are great and train loads heavy. ”

“ In suburban railways, where the stopping-places are many and close together, the efficiency of the service depends to a large extent upon the time occupied in bringing the trains from rest to full speed. In this respect the electric train has a great advantage over the89 ordinary train hauled by a steam locomotive, for it can pick up speed at three or more times the rate of the latter, thus enabling greater average speeds and a more frequent service to be maintained. ”

“ With one locomotive pulling a long train it is entirely different, as the adding of a number of cars is counteracting the traction of the former, and must be equalized by a corresponding weight of the locomotive, thus furnishing a dead load of no benefit, and besides, necessitating an increased motive force. In making up a train of these independent car motors, flexible electric connections will enable the engineer in the front car to control all the motors, and thus operate the whole train. ”

“ On electric cars the motor is generally suspended from the wheel truck, and a small pinion on the armature shaft gears with a large pinion on a wheel axle. One great advantage of electric traction is that every vehicle of a train can carry its own motor, so that the whole weight of the train may be used to get a grip on the rails when starting. Where a single steam locomotive is used, the adhesion of its driving-wheels only is available for overcoming the inertia of the load ”

“ In many areas, too, one of the running rails carries a small electric current, and as soon as it is occupied by the passage of a train the signals are automatically locked against any other trains trying to enter that portion of the track. ”

“ The siren soared again, closer at hand, and then, with no anticipatory roar and clamor, a dark and sinuous body curved into view against the shadows far down the high-banked track, and with no sound but the rush of the cleft wind and the clocklike tick of the rails, moved toward the bridge—it was an electric train. Above the engine two vivid blurs of blue light formed incessantly a radiant crackling bar between them, which, like a spluttering flame in a lamp beside a corpse, lit for an instant the successive rows of trees and caused Gloria to draw back instinctively to the far side of the road. ”

“ Apart from such a large project as the electrification of the District and Metropolitan Railways, there is scarcely a municipal authority in Great Britain which has not in hand some scheme of electric railway, tramway, or lighting. It is as well to think that electricity is not the agent of the future, but of the present, and an era which has already dawned. ”

“ I mean to say that the first experiments in the use of electricity as a motive power were along the electrification of the steam locomotive. Everybody realized that if a motor could be built powerful enough and speedy enough to drag a heavy freight or passenger train over the ordinary railroad right of way, the cost of railroad operation would be enormously decreased. ”

“ It is thus able to be accelerated rapidly after a stop, and also climb steep grades without slipping its wheels. Nevertheless, there are circumstances which favor the employment of a locomotive at the head of a train, as in steam practice. This is the case in lines where a train of coal or ore cars is drawn by electric mining locomotives. Many such plants are in operation, and, at the same time the electric power is used to drive fans for ventilating, pumps for drainage, electric hoists, etc., besides being used for lighting the mines. ”

“ From a few miles of crude tramways the world has in a century built 500,000 miles of steam operated and 100,000 miles of electrically operated roads; instead of spragging the wheels we rely on the automatic high-speed brake; the coupling of cars has become an imitation of the action of human hands instead of risking their destruction; each train finds the condition of road ahead and protects itself by the agency of electric circuits and semaphores, the sequence of whose operation discloses on behalf of safety any obstruction of the route ”

“ The Electric Telegraph has also been found a valuable auxiliary in ensuring the safe working of large railway traffics. Though the locomotive may run at 60 miles an hour, electricity, when at its fastest, travels at the rate of 288,000 miles a second, and is therefore always able to herald the coming train. The electric telegraph may, indeed, be regarded as the nervous system of the railway. ”

“ On the other hand, an electric locomotive weighing 75 tons and having a tractive effort of 34,000 lb at 6 m. per hour will exert a pull of about 27,000 lb at 25 m. per hour. From this it is clear that an electric locomotive may pull a heavier train at a fair speed than can a larger steam locomotive. ”

“ Collisions, our broker quickly perceives, are impossible, there being no switches, and notwithstanding the multitude of passengers (some{43} twenty thousand per day) there are never more than two cars on the line at a time, and there are no stoppages between the two termini.
For signalling purposes, the line is divided into four sections of about five miles each, and as the train passes by, its electric motor automatically operates the signal and immediately “blocks” the section behind it, so that the train following cannot advance until its leader has cleared the five-mile division. ”

“ Ninety-five per cent. of the world’s electric tramways are worked on the overhead principle. The distribution of electric energy is by means of a wire, called the trolley wire, upheld by insulated brackets on poles twenty feet above the ground, along the entire track, which is divided into sections, each section taking its current from the main conductor-wire, which is laid underground, through the iron poles. Should any one section of the trolley wires meet with mishap, only the cars working on that section are stopped ”

“ A 100-ton electric locomotive can haul a train of 800 tons under the same conditions. The total train weights are thus 580 and 900 tons and the electric locomotive weighs 100 tons less than the steam locomotive, resulting in the consequent saving in the ton mileage of dead weight.
The operating conditions and the reliability of service are improved in all classes of traffic by the substitution of electricity. The construction of the electric locomotive is far simpler. The steam locomotive comprises fire box, boiler, steam engine and facilities for handling coal and water. ”

“ A series of subterranean ways extending many miles have been constructed to enable merchandise traffic to pass through without interfering with passenger trains on the surface railways. The company possesses one of the finest electric stations in the world, and electrical apparatus for the working of train signals is in operation. ”

“ Tube railways are intensely disliked by some people, and as heartily appreciated by millions of others. That they are an advantage in many ways is unquestionable, though they are not yet without defects. Motor-cars (electric or petrol) , to those who use them, appear to be the safest and most delightful of vehicles, but here again perfection has not been reached. ”

“ On every hand signs are evinced of the direct influence upon the general prosperity, comfort, and pleasure of all classes of people by a cheap and rapid electric tramway service.
The electric system admits of an easy extension of routes, and is of all systems the simplest to work. The cars can be readily backed or diverted in any direction. They are roomy, clean, well lighted and ventilated, and, if necessary, can be heated; the seats are comfortable; and the speed is double that of horses, while, without any fuss, gradients of 1 in 8 can be tackled. ”

“ The increase of traffic brought with it the demand for larger as well as speedier cars with a shorter 'headway' or interval between one car and another. The capacity of a horse car is limited by the fact that it is not convenient to harness more than two horses to a single vehicle. But with electric cars there is no extraneous limitation to carrying capacity. Large double-decked cars with seats for seventy passengers are now quite common. In America it is a frequent practice to attach 'trailers' to the cars, making a short tramway train. ”

“ With electric traction the rate of acceleration has risen to about 18 inches per second per second. On the Liverpool Overhead Railway a rate of 36 inches per second per second was reached in certain tests. Heavy starting currents are, of course, necessary to bring a train from rest to full speed at such a rapid rate, but it is quite possible for the electrical engineer, without being unduly extravagant in current, to accelerate a train more quickly than the passengers would find comfortable. ”

“ The real full-size car, which he is now constructing, may be pulled with other cars by any kind of locomotive using electricity or petrol or steam, or each of the wheels may be a driving wheel. He would prefer to generate electropower on his train, and to drive every wheel with an electric motor. His wheels are so independent of one another that they can take very quick curves and vertical inequalities of the rail. The rail is fastened to sleepers lying on ground that may have sidelong slope. ”

“ Anticipating railways and electric tubes, he would probably, with the marvellous fertility of resource that distinguished him, have formulated a plan whereby a given circular space in the metropolis would be divided into sections, a mile square, with a station in the centre and at each corner, so that all within that area would have access to a railway, at no point more than half a mile distant, the tube railways below the surface, and others above, converging at a great central depôt. ”

“ Dismissing all these systems, we turn to electricity, as admittedly the best agent for tramway traction, and, until some marvellous discovery displaces it as a force, likely to remain and to become universally adopted.{132}
Blackpool was first in the field with an electric tramway in 1883. Several other provincial districts followed suit, including Bristol and Stockton-on-Tees. London, in 1900, welcomed the completion of Mr. J. Clifton Robinson’s great scheme for electrifying that portion of the London United Tramways running between Hammersmith and Kew. ”

“ In Plate VII. is seen an electric locomotive hauling a train of coal waggons in a colliery near the Tyne, and it will be seen that the overhead system is used, the trolley arm and wheel being replaced by sliding bows. In a colliery railway it is generally impossible to select the most favourable track from the railway constructor’s point of view, as the line must be arranged to serve certain points. This often means taking the line sometimes through low tunnels or bridges where the overhead wire must be low, and sometimes over public roads where the wire must be high ”

“ But if a man buys a horse and gives it in charge of the gardener’s boy, he is likely to have trouble with his horse. In the same way, if a man buys an electric carriage and expects his coachman to look after it, he only naturally does have considerable trouble. There are several companies prepared to look after and maintain in continuous use, not only the batteries, but the complete carriages, and this is greatly improving the reliability of the electric car, and allaying the fears of those anxious to have such carriages. ”