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TYPE OF ELECTRIC LOCOMOTIVE USED IN THE SOUTHERN LUMBER DISTRICT

average passenger haul on those roads means that they are steadily losing the short-haul business, which a younger and more vigorous rival is claiming for its

own.

Inch by inch the field is contested, and slowly, sullenly, the locomotive is giving way before the insistent trolley. A dozen years ago it was only the car horse and the cable in the towns that were threatened by electric traction. Then the trolley poked an inquiring tentacle over the city limits into the suburbs. The results were satisfactory, and swiftly the electric lines flung their spider filaments from town to town, until now great sections of the country are cobwebbed with them. The trolley map of eastern Massachusetts looks as complete as the steam railroad map. If you have a little time to spare you can go on an electric car to almost any part of southern New England that you could reach by a locomotive, and to a good many parts that you could not.

In Massachusetts last year four times as many passengers were carried by electric cars as on the steam roads. Of course that was due chiefly to the dense city traffic, but still the city street-car systems were pretty complete seven years ago, and the trolley passenger business has doubled since that time, while the steam passenger business has actually declined. The electric mileage of the State

has increased by from 9 to 18 per cent. every year since 1894. In 1901 the increase was 242.7 miles. In the same year the length of steam lines was reduced by 1.39 miles.

In Connecticut, where there are no very large cities to inflate the trolley figures, and where one great steam railroad system is supposed to be the feudal proprietor of the entire State, there were 20 per cent. more passengers on the electric lines in 1900 than on the steam roads. And that is the way the tide is running everywhere.

In its early development the trolley had four advantages. It could run separate cars at frequent intervals; it could take on and let off passengers anywhere along the road; it could take people near their homes and offices; and it could pay a profit at nominal fares. Per contra, it had the disadvantage of less than railroad speed, not because there was any difficulty in making an electric car that could go as fast as a locomotive, but because the trolley track as a rule was laid on the surface of the public highway, crossed all intersecting roads at grade, and was a thoroughfare for vehicles, pedestrians, and domestic fauna. These characteristics still prevail over most of the electric mileage of the country, but as the trolley lines have grown longer and the need for sustained high speed has become more ur

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AN ELECTRIC LOCOMOTIVE OF SUFFICIENT POWER TO DRAW TWENTY-FIVE LOADED FREIGHT CARS

gent, the tendency has developed to build the roads on private rights of way and to operate them by steam railroad methods.

Go, for instance, to Indianapolis, and take a spin of fifty-three miles to Muncie over the lines of the Union Traction Company. You do not have to calculate your train time by a nautical almanac. You can go at any hour of the day. You will travel in a car as large and heavy as a standard railway coach, over a track built almost entirely upon the company's own ground. It will take you two hours to make the run on an express car, or two and a quarter on a car making all stops, but of that twenty-five minutes are lost within the city limits of Indianapolis, where the through cars have to accommodate themselves to urban traffic on the local tracks. The fastest limited express train on the parallel line of the Big Four covers the same distance in one hour and thirteen minutes. The local trains take ten minutes less than two hours. The electric cars cover part of their schedule at the rate of a mile a minute. Each car is driven by motors of 300-horse power. Imagine three hundred horses galloping in a procession a quarter of a mile long, with a street car trailing along behind, and you can begin to realize a little of the meaning of the electric revolution. To keep this power under control there are

air brakes, with independent motor compressors. The track over which you skim on this Indiana road is as well graded, as solidly constructed, and as thoroughly ballasted as the Pennsylvania Railway. Instead of a "starter" to turn the cars loose and leave their subsequent fate to Providence, there is a regular train despatcher, who keeps watch of every one as carefully as if it were the Empire State Express. Only, instead of sending his orders by telegraph, he uses the telephone. every switch the wires come down to a box, from which instantaneous connection can be made with an instrument at the motorman's elbow. There is no ringing up Central. The train despatcher is always at the other end of the wire, and a simple "Hello" will get his attention.

At

This is a fair example of the modern interurban roads in actual operation to-day. On the Buffalo and Lockport line the present cars go in places at the rate of fifty miles an hour, with an average outside of Buffalo of thirty-three miles, but the General Electric Company has submitted estimates for machinery to develop a schedule speed of seventy-five miles an hour. If that rate could be kept up it would carry you from New York to San Francisco in less than two days. If a track were laid around the world on the eighty-fifth parallel of latitude, a car going at that

velocity from east to west would keep up with the earth's rotation, and beat Joshua's miracle by holding the sun in one place all summer.

The Indianapolis, Lebanon, and Frankfort Railway, now under construction, has arranged a schedule that calls for a maximum speed of sixty miles an hour. The seventy miles from Lafayette to Indianapolis are to be covered in two hours. The motors on the Albany and Hudson line work up to sixty miles an hour, and on the Nantasket Beach to forty. On the Lorain and Cleveland road the highest speed is fifty miles.

Southwestern Missouri is the home of an ambitious little electric system which shows in a small way how railroads are affected by the new competition. It has thirty-one miles of track, connecting Joplin, Webb City, Centerville, Carthage, and Galena, Kansas. The fare is one cent per mile about one-third of the usual western railway rates and books of a hundred five-cent tickets are sold for $4.50, which brings the rate down to nine-tenths of a cent a mile. Under pressure of the merciless competition the parallel steam road has come down to the same figures. The "Empire County Express" runs from Joplin to Carthage, nineteen miles, in an hour, with ten stops. It goes at intervals of an hour and a half, and half-hourly local cars are distributed between. The competing steam road runs a train every two hours, which makes the trip in fifty minutes, but

does not reach the business centers of the towns. To overcome this disadvantage it offers free omnibus rides in Carthage and Webb City.

The trolley line that covers the forty miles between Seattle and Tacoma has to compete not only with the steam road, but with flying steamers on Puget Sound. Reversing the usual order, it was built purely for through traffic across a country providing practically no local business, instead of growing from a local into a through line. There are roads that draw their current from steam-driven dynamos, and others from waterfalls; but this has the distinction of being the first one planned to operate by glacier power. Mark Twain found traveling by glacier in Switzerland insufferably slow, but when Western enterprise harnesses the ice streams of the mountain, called at one end of the line Rainier and at the other Tacoma, it will not be satisfied with anything less than forty miles an hour.

But there are many cases in which the plain, ordinary trolley car of commerce, without any of the twentieth century lightning express improvements, can beat the locomotive.

New Rochelle, Mount Vernon, and Yonkers, for instance, are situated on three lines of railroad, radiating like three sticks of a fan, from a pivot at New York. you wish to travel by train from any one of

SNOW-PLOW, FREIGHT, AND MINING LOCOMOTIVES

If

these points to any other, you have to go in along one stick to the pivot and then out another stick, at a considerable

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cost of time and money. To go from the Harlem station in Mount Vernon to the Hudson River station in Yonkers takes nearly an hour, even if you make close connections, and costs fifty-three cents. You can compass the same points by trolley

an hour for express trains at two points between One Hundred and Forty-ninth Street and Bronx Park, and of about sixty-seven miles an hour at one point between Bronx Park and Mount Vernon. Similar speeds are to be attained between

INTERIORS OF FUNERAL, PRIVATE, SMOKING, AND OBSERVATION TROLLEY CARS

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in twenty-six minutes at an expense of five cents.

Farther out on the same sticks of the fan are Larchmont, White Plains, and Tarrytown. The trolley binds them all together with a direct connection. It takes you from White Plains to Tarrytown in forty minutes. for a nickel. It is not possible to make a train. connection at any time during the day that would cover the distance in less than an hour and five minutes, and usually the time

would be from an hour and a half to two hours. The railroad fare is ninety-five cents.

The highest development of American electric railroading is seen in the plans of the New York and Portchester Railroad, which has secured its right of way and franchises over the bitterest opposition of the steam lines, and has its preparations complete to the last detail. The road is to have four tracks, two for local and two for express trains, built on its own right of way. It will have regular passenger stations all along the line. The run sheet shows a schedule speed of over sixty miles

New Rochelle and Larchmont, and between Mamaroneck and Rye. For the entire run, including stops, the speed will average 39.9 miles.

The express trains will run from One Hundred and Thirty-second Street in New York to Mount Vernon in twelve minutes and twenty-two seconds, which is perceptibly better than the time of the New Haven steam trains, and very decidedly better than the time of the Harlem trains. There is to be a corresponding advantage in the run to New Rochelle and Portchester.

A comparison of the schedules of the New Haven and Portchester lines will help us to realize something of the change in local transportation made possible by electric traction. The New Haven line runs eight trains from New York to Portchester between five and seven o'clock in the evening. The electric road will run twenty-four local and twelve express trains in the same time-a local train every five minutes and an express train every

There are eight stopping places on the New Haven schedule between New

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THE LANGEN MONO-RAIL, SUSPENDED RAILWAY AT ELBERFELD-BARMEN, PRUSSIA

York and Portchester, but not a single train stops at all of them. Every one of the twelve electric express trains is to stop at each of ten points, and for all that the distance is to be covered in less time than by the steam trains. The electric local trains will make twenty stops, and they will do the trip in exactly the time required by a local steam train that makes

seven.

On December 23, 1901, the EverettMoore syndicate ran the first through electric car from Cleveland to Detroit, a distance of nearly two hundred miles. The run from Cleveland to Toledo was made in five hours and a half, under the disadvantage of continual delays by construction gangs. The ordinary express train time between those points on the Lake Shore Railroad is three hours. Experiments now in progress on the electric line justify the belief that the trolley cars will soon be doing it in four.

There are several great ganglia from which the growth of the national electric nervous system is proceeding.

One is

Boston a mighty solar plexus of interlacing filaments extending from Portland to Long Island Sound, and pushing steadily toward a connection with the great electric trunk lines of the West. Another is Buffalo, where Niagara power invites capital into every sort of electric

enterprise. Another is Pittsburgh, whose trolley lines radiate in every direction for fifty miles or more, covering Western Pennsylvania, pushing into Ohio, bridging almost the entire distance between Pittsburgh and Cleveland, and reaching toward West Virginia and Maryland. Another is Dayton, Ohio, the center of a system that projects in one direction to Cincinnati and in the other to Urbana, covering nearly half the length of the State from south to north. Another is Cleveland, the headquarters of the Everett-Moore syndicate -the Dean Richmonds and Commodore Vanderbilts of the infant electric railway system of the United States. Another is Indianapolis, from which trolley expresses on three hundred miles of interurban roads shoot at sixty miles an hour to the principal towns of Indiana. But the greatest of all is Detroit. There electric traction is full grown-no longer a timid intermediary between house and office, it leaps boldly three hundred miles at a spring. Its flying shuttles weave their web across Ohio in one direction and across Michigan in the other. Lines actually built extend from Detroit to Port Huron, Bay City, and Kalamazoo, and their extensions now under way span the entire State of Michigan, and lead straight through to Chicago.

In January, 1901, the Detroit, Rochester, Romeo, and Lake Orion Railroad con

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