Flatcar

“ A caravan of cars pulled into the lot like a Tim Burton version of a funeral, a long train of funnycar hearses with jacked-up rear wheels and leaning chimney-pots, gargoyles and black bunting with super-bright black-light LEDs giving them a commercially eldritch glow. Mixed in were some straight cars, and they came and came and came, car on car. The hawkers got out more stuff, spread it out further, and waited while the caravan maneuvered itself into parking spots, spilling out into the street. ”

“ Many people living at the present time, who have grown up amidst the exceptional and possibly very transient characteristics of this time, will be disposed to regard the traffic in the streets of our great cities as a part of the natural order of things, and as unavoidable as the throng upon the pavement. But indeed the presence of all the chief constituents of this vehicular torrent—the cabs and hansoms, the vans, the omnibuses—everything, indeed, except the few private carriages—are as novel, as distinctively things of the nineteenth century, as the railway train and the needle telegraph. ”

“ The car is a short caboose, fashioned like a small, ill-shaped back kitchen, and it has no more wheels than a one-horse wagon, which gives it an uneasy and suggestive way on the track. A brakeman sits with his head swung out at a window. The conductor sits with his watch in his hand. Nobody has any business there at all. The engineer is doing his best to make a distant station, and get upon the side-track before the Express wants the road. ”

“ This last was just as soon as personal examination had reassured him with respect to his automobile—superficially an ordinary motor-cab of the better grade, but with an exceptionally powerful engine hidden beneath its hood. A car of such character, passing readily as the town-car of any family in modest circumstances, or else as what Paris calls a voiture de remise (a hackney car without taximeter) was a tremendous convenience, enabling its owner to scurry at will about cab-ridden Paris free of comment. ”

“ On each of all three sides of us lies a big main road. On every one of these three roads there’s no end of motor traffic nowadays. I ought to know, for I live on one of them. I reckon there are at least forty cars of one sort or another pass my house every hour.”
“Not first thing in the morning!” interrupted the Chief Constable sceptically.
“I’m giving you an average,” said Walkinshaw. “From five o’clock onward, anyhow. Do you think one car would be noticed out of the hundreds that come and go? Rot!”
“Where did they put their car while they came to the Sceptre?” ”

“ The darting flash of wagons, brittle and uproarious of wheel over the asphalt’s crevices or the weave of tracks. The heavier trucks, plunging along with perched, gesticulating drivers, that gave forth their rumble like a flood of undertone shot through with lighter notes. The dull-rhythmed matrix—the crowd’s shuffle—wherein the metallic urge of cars, the tangent flurries of light wheels, the impress of thick masses glowed and hummed and pounded while the air swung response. And through it all, catching it up, knitting it together, the web—the web whereof now Quincy grew aware. ”

“ MOTOR-CARS AND PUBLIC HIGHWAYS
Who can place a limit to the development of motors! The time may arrive when tram lines will disappear, the roads themselves being of steel and forming a broad rail upon which self-propelled coaches, omnibuses, cabs, and cars will ply in every direction, and far and wide into the suburbs. ”

“ In the case at bar the defective wheel on an automobile moving only eight [NE1057] miles an hour was not any more dangerous to the occupants of the car than a similarly defective wheel would be to the occupants of a carriage drawn by a horse at the same speed; and yet unless the courts have been all wrong on this question up to the present time there would be no liability to strangers to the original sale in the case of the horse-drawn carriage. ”

“ They are grown-up baby perambulators upon two wheels; the driver sitting up behind, where the handle would be, and drawing the reins of interminable length over the top of the vehicle. Picture it in your mind, and then wonder, as I did, what power of attraction keeps the horse upon the ground; what prevents his flying into the air when the driver settles down into his seat. A pair of low, folding doors take the place of a lap robe; you dash through the street at an alarming rate without any visible guide, experiencing all the delights of a runaway without any of its dangers. ”

“ Pepperdine?’ he said. ‘I wondered who was getting out—it’s not often that this train brings us a passenger.’
‘Two of us this time,’ answered the man thus addressed as he quickly descended, nodding and smiling at the station-master and the booking-clerk; ‘two of us this time, Mr. Simmons. Ah!’ He drew a long breath of air as if the scent of the woods and fields did him good, and then turned to the open door of the carriage, within which stood a boy leisurely attiring himself in an overcoat. ‘Come, my lad,’ he said good-humouredly, ‘the train’ll be going on—let’s{9} see now, Mr. ”

“ The ’twenties of the nineteenth century were almost as remarkable for those early horseless vehicles, the steam carriages, as the present era is for petrol-driven and electric motor-cars. Railways, too, began early to threaten stage-and mail-coaching; and long, whirling, and involved controversies on road and rail traffic occupied the columns of the press, and overflowed into innumerable pamphlets.
Few people had sufficient imagination to foresee an era of mechanical locomotion ”

“ The hum of a self-starter reached me faintly, and a moment later there rolled slowly forth a dark-blue touring-car of luxurious aspect, driven by a chauffeur whose coat and cap and goggles gave him rather the appearance of a leather brownie, and bearing in the tonneau Miss Falconer, elaborately coated and veiled. ”

“ The specification of the patent says: 'In many classes of railway cars, and particularly those used upon the elevated and other city railways, it has been found necessary, in order to prevent passengers from falling from the train, and also to prevent persons from attempting to get off or on a car while in motion, to provide the entrances to the car platforms with gates, by which they can be closed except at the proper times. ”

“ In no other way could they accommodate all that rushing traffic of the swift cars and the lean, torpedo-like trams that with a splendid service link up the heart of the town with the far outlying suburbs. And even though the streets are broad the automobile is becoming too much for them. ”

“ Richard stood up in the cab and looked around. He saw a congested flood of waggons, trucks, cabs, vans and street cars filling the vast space where Broadway, Sixth Avenue and Thirty-fourth street cross one another as a twenty-six inch maiden fills her twenty-two inch girdle. And still from all the cross streets they were hurrying and rattling toward the converging point at full speed, and hurling themselves into the struggling mass, locking wheels and adding their drivers’ imprecations to the clamour. The entire traffic of Manhattan seemed to have jammed itself around them. ”

“ All talk of the automobile races, all thought of the Chosen Trio's pursuit, thus far so ridiculously fruitless, were forgotten. True, Mr. Gaines and his loving friends were in Queensville; and true, that small city lay almost twenty miles distant. Still what do twenty miles count with an automobile at one's disposal? Yet even this thought did not more than once occur to the four chums. ”

“ A good many carriages on red baize platforms, but so beautiful in paint and varnish that one had an uneasy feeling that they had never known the road, and that no amount of handle labour would bring a grumble of life out of them. One car was going about, which I confess would have had more of my respect had I known that it was the car of the never-giving-in Mr. and Mrs. Koosen. ”

“ Barefooted peons—men, women, and children—came racing across the fields at the shriek of our claxon, to obtain a closer view. It was now three years since the first automobile had crossed this trail—an achievement hailed at the time by marveling editorials in the local Central-American press—and motor traffic was becoming a fairly regular thing, but not so regular that the novelty had diminished. ”

“ When the door is shut, the plate, E, closes up over the step, D, and this prevents the wheel from throwing dirt upon said step, as clearly shown in figure 2; but, as soon as the door is opened, the plate, E, turns on the pivot device, d, h, at its lower end, thus uncovering the step and serving as a fender to prevent the occupant's clothes from coming in contact with the hind wheel of the carriage, as represented in figure 1. The yielding plate, E, acts as a spring to hold the door either open or shut, and also prevents said door from striking against the wheel, when opened. ”

“ Every one, of course, emerged from seclusion only at the ultimate moment; and, far from holding any lengthy conversation with Miss Falconer, I was lucky to stumble upon her in the vestibule, help her descend, find a taxi for her at the exit, and see her smile back at me where I stood hatless as she drove away.
While I waited for my own cab I found myself beside Mr. John Van Blarcom, who eyed me with mingled hostility and pity, as if I were a cross between a lunatic and a thief. ”

“ His cabriolet was gorgeously painted—a bright red; and wherever we went, City or West End, Paddington or Holloway, North, East, West, or South, there was the red cab, bumping up against the posts at the street corners, and turning in and out, among hackney-coaches, and drays, and carts, and waggons, and omnibuses, and contriving by some strange means or other, to get out of places which no other vehicle but the red cab could ever by any possibility have contrived to get into at all. Our fondness for that red cab was unbounded. ”

“ In this position a man has to stick close to the end of only one of the two cars he is riding between, for there is always danger of the cars breaking loose and dashing him to instant death upon the tracks beneath. He can hold on to the [Pg 70] break rod with his hands and the car bumper affords him a narrow standing room.
It was six long, weary hours later—just sunrise—when, more dead than alive, I stepped from the train in Flomaton, or rather I fell off the train in Flomaton. ”

“ You will then run the machine out to the street and stop at the curb, jump out, and, as though you had forgotten something, hurry back to the garage. You must not be away long—enough only to permit, say, a passer-by to glance into the car and satisfy himself that it is empty. You understand, of course, Benson, that the hood must be down—no closed car to invite even the suggestion of concealment—that would be a fatal blunder. ”

“ To be sure, a tram often leaps the rails—but what matter! It sits in a ditch till other trams come to haul it out. It is quite common for a car, packed with one solid mass of living people, to come to a dead halt in the midst of unbroken blackness, the heart of nowhere on a dark night, and for the driver and the girl conductor to call, “All get off—car’s on fire!” ”

“ These primitive conveyances are without springs, and for long journeys are generally furnished with two ponies or mules yoked in tandem fashion, none but those who have experienced travelling in these barbarous vehicles can realize the horrors of its joltings, Irish jaunting cars have the nearest approach to the motion, but any one fresh from the luxuries of a London handsome cab, or a Paris voiture, will probably decide to run by its side rather than run the risk of dislocating a limb, or injuring their spine in its locomotion over the deep ruts of a celestial highway. ”

“ Round that car there really is a light of romance and of adventure, a glamour that isn't at all the glamour of his opulence. In those days he did look upon a motor-car mainly as an instrument of pleasure, and not as a vulgar advertisement of his income. ”

“ Street cars are not needed in the city. Nearly all London streets are in as good condition for driving as our Central Park roads. There are eight thousand hansoms, four thousand four-wheelers, and two thousand omnibuses, so that you are not obliged to walk on account of the absence of cars. The four-wheeled cabs, or “growlers,” as they term them, are dilapidated, uncomfortable vehicles, which lack new springs, and are dirty both inside and out. The horses and the drivers are old and superannuated; they have all seen better days in private carriages or hansom cabs. ”

“ In front of the niche, standing in a place where it had been backed from the road on the "reverse," was the blue automobile. Leaning against the automobile were the two motor cycles; and from the tonneau of the car, as Grattan and Bunce approached with their prisoners, arose the form of Pardo. ”

“ While standing upon the summit, a train of cars—came whizzing along at a fine rate. I saw for the first time people riding on the tops of cars as on a coach. The train was bound to Versailles, and as the distance is short, and probably the speed attained not great, seats are attached to the tops of the cars, and for a very small sum the poorer classes can ride in them. ”

“ A vehicle dash whose lower bar is provided exteriorly with a channel or recess, the metal on either side of the channel or recess affording a bearing for the dash-foot or other portion of the vehicle to which the dash is connected, for the purposes specified; (2) a cash whose lower rail is composed near or at the ends of two thick portions united by an easily perforated web, for the purposes specified ”