Part 2

There are several engines inside a Diesel-electric locomotive. If one of them gets out of order during the trip, the others keep on delivering power while the one is repaired. The engineer and the fireman sit in the cab at the very front of a Diesel-electric. They can watch the track through front windows.

The cab is at the front of the engine shown on this page, too, but it is a steam locomotive. It burns oil instead of coal, so the cab doesn’t have to be right next to the tender. The men call it the Big Wamp. It hauls tremendously long freight trains across the Rocky Mountains. One siding where the men stop to eat is so long that there has to be a restaurant at each end!

Many railroads are buying more and more Diesels as their steam locomotives wear out. The Santa Fe Railroad’s Diesel at the top of the page is called a 6000 because it has six thousand horsepower.

The New York, New Haven & Hartford uses electric locomotives because it can get power for them easily. The one above is called the EP-4 because it is the fourth model of electric passenger engine the road has used.

All the others in these pictures are steam locomotives, but the T-1 is a special kind. Its name means that it is the first of a type called a turbine locomotive. An ordinary engine lets out its used-up steam in puffs, as if it were panting. A turbine doesn’t, and so it never makes the familiar chuff-chuff noise.

The name on each of the other steam locomotives shows that it belongs to a type that has a particular arrangement of wheels. All Pacific-type engines have four small wheels in front, then six big ones, then two small ones in back. Mikados have two small, eight big, then two small ones. The way to write these wheel arrangements is 4-6-2 and 2-8-2. If an engine is called a 2-6-0, that means it doesn’t have any small wheels at the back. A 2-8-8-2 has two sets of big wheels and two sets of small ones. And 0-8-8-0 means there are no small wheels at all.

HOT BOXES

Have you ever been on a train that stopped suddenly between stations? Perhaps one of the cars had a hot box. Here is how it happened:

Car axles must be kept well greased if they are going to move smoothly. They are fixed so that each end of the axle turns in a bed of oily stringy stuff called waste. The container that holds this bed of oily waste is the journal box, and there’s one for every wheel on a car.

Inspectors always check journal boxes carefully, but it sometimes happens that the oil gets used up while the car is moving. The unoiled axle grows hotter and hotter until the waste begins to smoke and burn. Then the car has a hot box, which railroaders also call a stinker. Hot boxes can be dangerous. If an axle goes too long without grease, it may break off and cause a bad accident.

When the train goes around a curve, the engineer or the fireman looks back for smoking journal boxes. The brakeman in the caboose keeps an eye out for them, too. On many new height trains the conductor or the brakeman can call immediately by radio telephone and tell the engineer to stop for a stinker. But on older trains, the conductor can only pull the emergency air-brake, which stops the whole train fast.

Although a hot box is dangerous, it’s easy to remedy. The box only needs to be re-packed with fresh oil-soaked waste.

Everybody who works on a railroad watches for smoking journal boxes. Suppose a freight train has stopped on a siding to let a fast passenger train go by. The head freight brakeman stands beside the track. If he sees a hot box on the fast train--or any loose, dragging part--he signals to the passenger engineer.

When railroad workers give a good look at a running train, they say that they’ve made a running inspection. Telegraph operators and station agents come out on the platform and make running inspections whenever trains go by.

The newest, fastest cars on both passenger and freight trains get fewer hot boxes than old ones. Their axles have roller bearings to help them turn smoothly, and the oil in their journal boxes is supposed to last for a long time. Still, an inspector may forget to check the oil, or it may leak out.

There’s no waste packed around roller bearings. So, how is anyone going to tell when one of the new cars gets a hot box? Some railroads have solved the problem with bombs! Into every journal box go two little gadgets that explode when an unoiled axle begins to heat up. One bomb lets out a big puff of smoke that can easily be seen. The other spills a nasty smelling gas that is sure to make passengers complain, in case the conductor doesn’t notice it himself.

GREENBALL FREIGHT

Roller-bearings are usually put on the freight cars that need to run at passenger train speed. Greenball freight always travels fast. A greenball train carries fruits and vegetables in refrigerator cars, which are also called reefers or riffs.

At each end of a reefer are containers called bunkers. These hold ice to keep the food cool while it travels. At ordinary stations, men load ice into the bunkers by hand. But a big loading station has a giant icing machine to do the job. It rides along on its own rails, poking its great arms out and pouring tons of ice into the cars.

Suppose you are sending carloads of spinach to market. The icing machine also blows fine-chopped ice, which looks like snow, on top of the spinach to keep it fresh. But suppose you have a lot of peaches that must go from the orchard to a big city hundreds of miles away. First, the reefers have to be pre-cooled. Onto the loading platforms roll machines with big canvas funnels that fit tightly over the reefers’ doors. These are blowers that force cold air into the cars. Now the crates of fruit can be loaded quickly, and the doors sealed shut.

When fruit trains from California go across the high mountains in winter, there is danger that the reefers may get too cold. So the men lower charcoal stoves into the bunkers for the mountain trip. Then the bunkers are filled with ice when they get down into warmer country again.

Some fruits, such as bananas, have to be inspected on the road to make sure they are not spoiling. The inspectors are called messengers.

Reefers also carry meat and fish, butter, eggs, cheese and even fresh flowers.

When a reefer’s cargo is bound for a big town or city, it goes straight through, with as few stops as possible. But there are many small towns that couldn’t use up a whole carload of butter or meat before it spoiled. So the railroads have peddler cars to supply these towns with small quantities of food. The cars stop at station after station, just the way a peddler would. The storekeepers get only what they need, then the car moves on.

TO MARKET, TO MARKET

These two black sheep are railroad workers riding to work in Texas. They really do have jobs at stock pens, helping the men load other sheep into the livestock cars that carry them to market. If you have ever tried to drive sheep along, you know that they get confused and contrary. They will scatter in every direction except the right one. But, if they have a leader to show them the way, they will follow quietly behind him.

So railroaders and stockyard workers often teach certain sheep to lead others up the ramp and into the stock car. When the last one is in, the lead sheep runs out, and the door slams shut. Black sheep are best for the job because they stand out from the usual white ones, and they don’t get sent off to market by mistake.

Perhaps you wonder how it is possible to teach sheep to do this kind of job. The answer is that they get a treat every time they finish loading a car. Some pets like sugar or a carrot, but these two were fondest of a big piece of chewing tobacco.

Stock cars for sheep and pigs have two decks. Cars for cattle and horses and mules have only one. And poultry cars have several. The slits in livestock cars let in plenty of fresh air and keep the animals cool. Since pigs are likely to suffer from heat on a trip, they often get a soaking bath before they go into the cars.

There is a rule that animals must not travel more than a day and a half cooped up in a car. So trains stop at resting pens along the way to let the animals out for exercise and food and water. After a few hours they are loaded again. Meantime the cars have had fresh clean sand or straw spread around on the floor. Some very fast stock trains zoom along at such high speed that they reach the market before the animals need to stop and rest.

Veterinaries and inspectors often work at stock stations, looking out for animals that are sick. Caretakers for poultry and animals usually go along in the caboose.

TANK CARS

Railroaders call a tank car a can. It really is an enormous can with different kinds of lining for hauling different liquids. Milk tanks have glass or steel linings. Tanks for certain chemicals are lined with rubber or aluminum or lead.

Altogether there are more than two hundred types of tank car, and here are some of the things that travel in them: fuel oil, gasoline, and asphalt; molasses and sugar syrup; turpentine and alcohol; lard, corn oil and fish oil for vitamins.

Some tank cars have heating coils that warm up lard or molasses and keep it from getting too stiff to flow out easily. Most tank cars have a dome on top. If they didn’t, they might burst open at the seams when the liquid inside them begins to expand in hot weather. Instead, the liquid bulges up into the dome, and no harm is done.

Wine tank cars have four compartments for carrying different kinds of wine.

Milk tank cars are built with two compartments that tip slightly toward the center so that every bit of milk will flow out. Each compartment is rather like a thermos bottle, with special wrapping around it to keep the milk from getting warm and sour. And the tanks are always filled brim full so the milk won’t slosh around and churn up a batch of butter on the road. Can you guess why milk tanks don’t need domes? Remember the milk must stay cool. Even when the sun is hot outside, the cool milk doesn’t expand, so no dome is needed to keep the tank from bursting.

HOPPERS AND GONDOLAS

A whole train made up of nothing but cars loaded with coal is called a black snake. Since rain and snow won’t hurt coal, it travels in cars without tops. One kind of coal car has sloping ends like the one on this page. It is called a hopper car. You load the coal in at the top, but you unload it by opening trapdoors in the bottom which let the coal drop into chutes.

Coal also travels in gondolas, which are just square-ended bins on wheels. They have to be unloaded by hand or by a dumping machine. It is hard to believe how fast some of these machines work. First a switch engine pushes the car of coal onto a platform underneath a tower. Grippers hold the car tight while it is jerked up, tilted over on its side, dumped, then let down again empty. The whole job takes only a minute or a minute and a half. The empty car rolls away downhill while a full one is being switched into place.

Another kind of dumper, the one you can see in the picture, looks rather like a barrel that can roll from side to side. It, too, tips the car over on its side so the coal can run out into a chute. Then the machine swings back and lets the car drift downhill.

Locomotives and shops use almost a fourth of all the coal the railroads haul. It takes much less coal now to run an engine than it used to take, because engineers and scientists have thought up ways to make locomotives better and better. They figure things so closely they can even tell how much it costs to blow an engine’s whistle--three toots for a penny.

Other things besides coal are often carried in hoppers and gondolas. Ore travels from mines to mills in hoppers. Gondolas haul lumber.

Things such as sugar and chemicals are sometimes carried in covered hopper cars. Of course, these hoppers have tight lids and special linings, and they’re kept very clean, so you won’t find coal dust mixed with your candy.

GRAIN CARS

Early every summer the railroads put a lot of boxcars in the bank. That means they switch the cars off onto sidings all through the wheat-growing part of the country. Then, when the wheat is harvested and ready to be shipped to market, the cars can be drawn out of the bank, filled up with grain, and hauled away.

The wheat gets ripe in the south first. When harvest is finished there, the cars move along. All through the summer the grain cars work their way farther north.

Special grain doors have to be fitted in tight, just behind the regular sliding doors of the boxcars, to keep the wheat from leaking out. The grain doors go almost all the way to the top, but not quite. In a minute you’ll see why.

After the farmers thresh their wheat, they take it to an elevator, which is an enormous storage tower close to the railroad tracks. Then, a chute from the elevator loads the wheat into the cars through the space at the top of the grain doors.

When a car is loaded, a man crawls in on top of the grain and hunches himself along with elbows and toes. He is the grain sampler who works for the companies that buy the wheat. Every once in a while he pokes a gadget down into the grain and brings up a sample from various parts of the car. These samples are enough to tell him whether the whole car is fair, good, or excellent wheat.

There is only about a two-foot space between the top of the grain and the roof of the car. So grain samplers have to be skinny men who can creep about easily.

ODD SHAPES AND SIZES

Besides the ordinary cars that do ordinary jobs, railroads have some cars that have been made for special purposes.

A medical car is really a small traveling hospital. It goes along with construction crews when they have a big job to do far from a station. A trained nurse has her office in the car. She can take care of small injuries or give first aid until a doctor arrives.

One special car looks like a load of big sausages. It is really a sort of boxcar frame into which long, heavy pipes have been fitted so that they wind back and forth. The pipes carry a load of helium gas. Helium is used in balloons and blimps, because it is very light and it can’t catch fire. Even when this car is fully loaded with all the gas that can be squeezed into the pipes, it weighs only a ton more than an empty car. Most loaded freight cars weigh between forty and eighty tons.

Sometimes a factory wants to ship a very tall machine by freight. So the railroad has it loaded onto an underslung flat car that looks as if it had had a bite taken out of its middle. It’s called a depressed center car.

But still the machine may stick up too high to go through underpasses. Then a special department gets to work figuring out what to do. Men who know every mile of track work out a route that has no low underpasses. This sometimes means that the machine will make a dozen detours before it is delivered.

Circus cars are sometimes just flat cars which carry the animals’ cages. But some of them are specially built like stables, with stalls and a storage place for food. Fancy race horses ride in padded stable cars, too.

A pickle car is made of six separate wooden tanks. Men at the pickle works fill them with cucumbers and brine. Then the car delivers them at the factory to be bottled.

TRESTLES, TUNNELS AND THINGS

Have you ever wondered why some railroad bridges across rivers are so very high, while automobile bridges are quite low? The trains look a little scary, rushing along way up in the air. But there’s a good reason why they do it, and those tall trestles are so wonderfully planned and built that they are very safe.

Trains can’t climb hills nearly as well as automobiles can. The slopes that trains go up must be very gentle ones. Even a little bit of up-and-down grade slows a train a great deal. So the men who build railroads try to make the tracks run along as nearly level as possible. Next time you see a high bridge across a river, look at the rest of the country around. You’ll see that the river cuts deep down between two hills. The bridge is built on tall stilts that make a level path for the train from one hilltop to the other.

When trains have to go up or down a very long hill, the builders have a problem. They must slope the

tracks very gradually. In mountains this means that the tracks zig-zag back and forth, with long, wide curves between the zigs and the zags. If you look back at the picture on page 19, you will see how one railroad solved the problem. The rails are laid so that they spiral upward, making a loop. When a very long train travels along the loop, it’s like a huge snake coiled around over its own tail!

Unless it’s absolutely necessary, the builders try not to make curves. Trains run faster along rails that are straight as well as flat. Every bend means that the engineer has to slow down a little.

And so there are two reasons why railroads often have tunnels right through mountains. Instead of climbing far up and then coming down in long, slow curves, the train can run quickly straight through.

Tunnels are hard to dig. They often have to be blasted out of solid rock. So the builders don’t make them any bigger than they have to. Of course, there’s not room for a man to stand up on top of a freight car as it goes through a tunnel. To protect brakemen who might forget, there is a device called a tell-tale close to the mouth of a tunnel. It is simply a fringe of cords hanging down from a tall bar across the track. The cords touch the careless brakeman and warn him to get down right away before he’s scraped off and hurt.

If you started in the morning, it would take you till night just to name the inventions that have made railroading more safe than it was a hundred years ago. Some of them are simple things like a tell-tale. Others, such as air brakes, are complicated. The most wonderful invention of all took hundreds of scientists a long time to work out. It’s called Centralized Traffic Control, or CTC.

To see what CTC does, you’ll first have to imagine a stretch of railroad way out in the country, thirty miles from any station. There’s just one main track, with sidings where trains running in opposite directions can pass each other. Each engineer has his train orders, so he knows whether he’s supposed to go onto the siding or continue straight through. But unexpected things can always happen. If a train is late, it may not get to the siding on time. Then there will be danger of a collision.

That’s where CTC comes in. 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. At the same time, signal lights tell the engineer to stop.

What’s more, CTC has extra safety machinery, just in case the man at the board makes a mistake. If he pushes levers that might make two trains bump into each other, stop signals go on all along the line. All trains come to a halt until the mistake is corrected.

In the old days, trains that ran through western ranch country were often late. The crew who had orders to pull onto a siding knew they might have to wait a long time. So they could just take a walk to the nearest house, wake the rancher and settle down for a visit. If their host was in a good humor, he’d build a fire and cook them a meal. Then, when they heard the whistle of the approaching train, they’d start back in plenty of time to signal as it passed their siding. Railroaders have fun talking about those early times, but they’d really rather have the safety of Centralized Traffic Control.

CTC helps to keep passenger trains moving safely into big cities, too. The man at the board--he’s called the dispatcher--decides which track each train should use. He pushes the levers. Electric switches move. Signals flash to the engineer, and lights on the board show every train moving along.

THE CAPTAIN AND THE CARS

Maybe you think the conductor of a passenger train is only the man who takes tickets and says “All Aboard.” But he really is the boss of the whole train. Even the engineer must follow his signals. That’s why they call the conductor the Captain.

The brakeman is the conductor’s helper. Together they collect tickets or fares and help passengers on and off at stations.

On the slick, fast trains called streamliners the conductor has quite a job to do. Many of the passengers are making long trips, so they have complicated tickets that allow them to stop at several places and then come home again. The conductor has to check the tickets and make sure they are right.

For short trips, conductors and brakemen take care of everything. But a streamliner needs a lot of other people who do special jobs.

The first one you’re likely to meet is the stewardess. She makes passengers comfortable. She answers questions and points out things that are particularly interesting to look at through the window.

At night the stewardess brings pillows to coach passengers and helps them tilt their seats back. In some cars, each seat has a leg-rest that pulls out, making a sort of couch for anyone who wants a nap.

The stewardess usually gives extra attention to children. She may read them stories in the playroom at the end of one car, or give them crayons and coloring books, or play records for them. She even has a supply of diapers for small babies and a refrigerator to keep their milk cool.

A streamliner is really a sort of hotel on wheels. The observation car is like a lobby, with big soft chairs and sofas, tables full of magazines, a radio and desks for writing letters. At one end is a telephone booth where you can call up anyone you want to. This telephone works by radio. The radio operator on the train connects you with a regular telephone operator who completes the call over ordinary phone wires.

If you need a haircut, you can visit a barbershop on the train. Porters will press your clothes and shine your shoes for you. You can buy ice cream sodas at the snack bar. A businessman who wants to do some work can ask the train’s stenographer to type out letters for him. And no matter how disagreeable the weather is outside, a streamliner is comfortable for it is air-conditioned.

Most fun of all are the streamliners that have double-decker cars called Vista-Domes and Astra-Domes. The dome sticks up above the car like an oversized caboose cupola. Like the freight brakeman, you can sit in the upper deck, look out through the windows in the dome and see everything around you. Daytimes there may be mountains. At night, you can lean back in the adjustable seat and watch the stars.