Mode of transport

“ Definition.—As used in this section, the term “transport” includes staying in temporary lodging overnight, common carrier misrouting or delays, stops for food, fuel, vehicle maintenance, emergencies, medical treatment, and all other activity related to the person’s overall journey. ”

“ In primitive societies the transport of goods is effected by men and women carrying them; in civilized societies by the aid of horses and camels, and wagons drawn by oxen; till finally these are insufficient, and railways are created, whose power of transport transcends the earlier methods, as the breathing of a mammal transcends the respiration of a mollusc. Breathing is the special function of an organ—the lungs (or more strictly, the thoracic apparatus) —as Railway Transport is a special social function. ”

“ The primary objects have therefore been, to sketch briefly and simply the development of the transportation systems of the United States, to indicate their importance and mutual relations, to present some practical methods used in the operation of highway transport and to make occasional suggestions for the betterment of the road as a usable machine for the benefit and pleasure of mankind. ”

“ Till railroads shall be built through this country, the best mode of traveling, and the most healthful, is to walk, and ‘wade.’ As for speed in a journey of a few hundred miles, a man on foot will out-travel a bull, or even a good horse. Persons who travel in a ‘tipoia,’ amid the rattle of sleigh bells, and the shouts of their carriers, are not in a position to receive my statement, but I base it, not on a theory, but on facts from the field of action. ”

“ Large and commodious vehicles, for carrying many thousand tons, running over peculiarly adapted level roads, at the rate of forty miles per hour, or one thousand miles per day, may transport men and things, small houses, and whatever may serve for comfort and ease, by land. ”

“ We shall increase the speed of our fast trains, cross the Atlantic in less time, transport the food and clothing and wealth of the world more cheaply, and very possibly add to the fields of invention and the practically available means of transportation the long-looked-for department of aeronautics and aërodromics. We have conquered the land and the water; who shall say that Man is less equal than albatross or sparrow to the task of subduing the elements of the atmospheric world? ”

“ Earths easily removed do not admit of so large a haul, with a given number of excavators, as hard earths. The nature of the ground, form of carts, kind of horses, season of the year, and price of labor are some of the elements entering the problem of transport. ”

“ The transports of the masses are generally prepared artificially by those who need them, and the degree of transport expressed by the crowd shows only the degree of the art of the arrangers of these transports. ”

“ UT—Union Transport, spread the meshes of its transportation service through almost every city of Earth and the hamlets and roads and bus and railroad and airlines between—and even to the few far ports where mankind had found a toehold in space. ”

“ From your experience in Steam Carriages, do you, conceive that it will be necessary to make any alteration of the present roads, such as paving them for the purpose of this mode of conveyance?—No, certainly not; we have found that our vehicles will travel over every kind of road with great velocity, and up the steepest hills ”

“ Transportation is the most exacting, the most diversified, the most far-reaching of commercial and industrial activities. It follows then, under the law of the survival of the fittest, that those who can survive in the art and science of transportation must be the fittest of the fit. ”

“ In planning his journey to these towns he will have to weigh the relative advantages of three routes, and to consider the opportunities offered by three means of locomotion—railway, steamboat, and post-carriage. ”

“ In the improvements you are now engaged upon in your Carriage, are they relative to the size and weights of the different parts, or merely in the conveyance of the goods and passengers?—They are more in improving slight details; the power we have, beyond all question, to propel vehicles of any weight, at any required velocity. ”

“ To do this, let us imagine a railway carriage, full of passengers, to be whirling along at a great speed, its occupants quietly at ease, because, although they are in rapid motion, they are all moving at the same rate and in the same direction. ”

“ The inventive mechanic and the engineer, learned or unlearned, have, in the course of the nineteenth century, given to the world the locomotive and our whole system of general continental and transcontinental transportation, the steamship and all our contemporary ocean and river, freight and passenger lines, the automobile and the beginnings of a new and still more widely helpful system of common highway transportation. ”

“ All nations are being chained together by iron roads or lines of swift steamers, and everybody travels. Locomotion is the order of the day, a sign of the times, and electricity is the great factor that has brought it about. ”

“ In all cases where a horse is used as the means of transit, he must, besides the load which he bears, move the weight of his own body, and a great portion of his strength is thus employed. This portion is found to increase at a rapid rate with the velocity, so that as the speed of his motion increases, the quantity of power which he can spare to his load is as rapidly diminished. ”

“ But when a carriage is drawn or impelled along a hard and level road, the motion which it receives from the first impulse would continue undiminished for a short time, if the road and the faces of the wheels were perfectly smooth, and no resistance of the air. ”

“ The car-lengths, as a freight train stands on its track, correspond to the distance between one steamer-hoist and the next. In like fashion every link in the chain is devised to save every possible foot-pound of energy, every dispensable moment of time. ”

“ In place of consulting dictionaries and dead languages, had my opinion been asked, I would have settled the question at once—by saying—I am a Bona fide Traveller. Because I do really and truly travel. To be whirled along on a railway; borne down the river, up the lake, or across the ocean in a steamer or ship, or driven along the turnpike in a carriage, is not travelling—the persons are merely live cargo. ”

“ The separation of freight from passenger traffic, after the system pursued on railroads, is destined to be an important factor in facilitating the construction of passenger-vessels of increased speed. ”

“ The load transported will either be passenger or freight. Passenger traffic may be classified as business or pleasure. If a vehicle is used mostly for business, first cost and economy of operation may play a more important part in the purchase of the car than if used for pleasure, in which case appearance and luxurious appointments may be the deciding factor. ”

“ Thus the Carriage is preserved from injury, and the materials of the road are not broken: and in surmounting obstacles, instead of the whole Carriage with its load being lifted over, the springs allow the wheels to rise, while the weights suspended upon them are scarcely moved from their horizontal level. ”

“ Old Concord Coach.
Our first conveyance of goods and persons was by water, and the word transportation was one of our sea terms applied to inland traffic. Mr. Ernst has pointed out that many sea terms besides the word barge have received a land use. “The conductor shouts his marine ‘All aboard,’ and railroad men tell of ‘shipping’ points that have nothing to do with navigation. We ship by rail, and out West they used to have ‘prairie schooners.’ Of late we go by ‘trolley,’ and that word is borrowed from the sailors. Our locomotives have a ‘pilot’ each, and even ‘freight’ has a marine origin.” ”

“ You see the conductor glance at his watch as he gives the engineer the starting-signal. You realize that the whole transportation system is merely an enormous piece of clockwork and that it, in turn, is a part of the vaster clockwork of modern civilization. ”

“ Now a locomotive, a railway carriage, or a goods truck is very heavy, and must run on the firm bosom of Mother Earth. But for comparatively light bodies a path may be made which much more nearly resembles the proverbial flight of the crow, or, as our American cousins would say, a bee-line. If you have travelled in Norway and Switzerland you probably have noticed here and there steel wire ropes spanning a torrent or hanging across a narrow valley. ”

“ In the United States three new methods of transportation made their appearance at almost the same time—the steamboat, the canal boat, and the rail car. ”

“ Certain Improvements on Locomotive and other Carriages or Machines applicable to Rail and other Roads, which Improvements, or Part or Parts thereof, are also applicable to Moving Bodies on Water and Working other Machinery. ”

“ Do you consider that supposing the weight of a Steam Carriage were equal to that of a Carriage drawn by horses, that is two tons each, the injury done to the road by horses or by the Carriage would be the greatest?—I should expect that by the horses. ”

“ Here, as in everything else, we see the gradual evolution of transportation, at first by man or beast, and finally by steam and electricity. Early man used himself as a beast of burden, and finally the ox and other animals were made to do service in his stead. ”

“ TRANSPORTATION THE INVISIBLE LOAD OF STREAMS. Of the waste which a river transports we may consider first the invisible load which it carries in solution, supplied chiefly by springs but also in part by the run-off and from the solution of the rocks of its bed. ”

“ These the successive trains carry into the heart of the land everywhere, these and their baggage, to which they continue attached by their very heart-strings, invisibly stretching from their first-class corridor compartments to the different luggage-vans. ”

“ The traffic with which we are concerned does not move on through bills of lading, but the movement is, nevertheless, from points of origin to a foreign or coastal destination, or vice versa, and is therefore essentially through transportation. ”

“ If we just live long enough, we will have lived in every state in the Union.”
But transportation as we understand it to-day refers to the moving of freight, express, and mail, as well as to the moving of men and women. Man himself was the original burden-bearer and became the first transportation system, carrying combined freight and express. ”

“ Not until well towards the middle of the nineteenth century, then, were the conditions of transportation altered materially from what they had been since the very dawn of civilization,—conditions under which one hundred miles constituted about the maximum extent of a hard day's land journey.
The elaboration of railway and steamship lines through which nearly all portions of the habitable globe have been made accessible, has constituted one of the most remarkable examples of economic development that man has ever achieved. ”

“ Auto-transportation companies, maintaining a mixed service of light passenger cars and the heavier, immense autobuses, have elaborated and organized an ideal system for speed and safety in this unsettled region. ”

“ In the general description which we have given of the mechanism for carrying, it will be observed, that the preparation for every carriage is stated to be made during the previous addition, by the disengagement of the carrying claw before mentioned, and by its consequent recoil, urged by the spiral spring with which it is connected; but it may, and does, frequently happen, that though the process of addition may not have rendered a carriage necessary, one carriage may itself produce the necessity for another. ”

“ Would your Carriage displace along the road four horses on each stage?—Two ten-horse Engines would displace the whole number of horses along the stage.
Have you made experiments which enable you to answer these questions?—I was not at all prepared; my principal object bas been to ascertain what power I have to do a certain work; I have paid very little attention to horse power.
Do you think that your Carriage is equivalent to a four-horse Carriage on the road, in the number of persons it would draw?—It is more than equivalent to it, from the circumstance of its being able to do more work. ”

“ No other train, engine or vehicle, except passenger trains, was permitted to travel on the other track between the passing of the pilot and the royal train, and even passenger trains had to slow down to ten miles per hour. ”

“ It only remains to be stated that there is regularly established transportation daily between all the principal points, that the distances are not fatiguing, that the charges are reasonable, and the equipment everything that could be desired. ”

“ How much better, and how much easier, to run two fractional trains in the direction of unbalanced traffic than one light caboose and another dreary drag! The shipper, only a hard-headed business man, takes the same view. ”

“ Here is a really great phase of railroad energy. We find our way to a gaunt freight-house, to whose door no truck has ever backed, and which is hemmed in by many rows of sidings and of sheds. In this building one of the busiest functions of the whole transportation business goes forth by day and by night. ”

“ Baskets, clay vessels, and other household articles testify in the same way to an evolution of the mental views of the people making them. The means of transportation are even more demonstrative. The wagon of the early Briton was like a rough ox-cart of the present day, evolved from the simple sledge as a beginning. ”

“ Train, will rather retard than forward this most important question of transit. People will assume that all systems must necessarily be imperfect, because one has been imported which is capable of further improvement. ”

“ The richest cargo in the world is a cargo of Time, and the locomotive was made to draw it. Yesterday I saw a man who tugged his household goods and gods from East to West in thirty days. To be sure, the roads had three dimensions, length, breadth and—thickness;—who ever knew a migrant to flit in pleasant weather?—but he drove early and late, and tired out the family dog and took him aboard—the dog that had developed his muscles in digging out woodchucks and shaking pole-cats to pieces in the Catskills. ”