Tube, Train, Tram, and Car; or, Up-to-date locomotion. Arthur H. Beavan

      FIG. 1. QUEEN VICTORIA’S TRAIN ON THE GREAT WESTERN RAILWAY

      Western Railway, or the ten-wheeled giant[2] for the Great Northern Railway, fifty-seven feet over all, weighing 100 tons, and capable of reeling off its 65 miles an hour with ease, electricity steps into the field, displaces the stately engine—resplendent in red, blue, green, or chocolate paint, glossy as the coat of some highly trained racehorse, and gleaming with polished brass and steel, finished in all its parts with exquisite accuracy, the very embodiment of energy under perfect control—and from some unpretentious-looking building afar off, drives our trains with unseen but resistless force, at the rate, if desired, of a hundred miles an hour!

      The construction of an ordinary steam locomotive is an intricate operation, necessitating machine-shops, erecting-shops, foundries, forges, etc., covering acres of ground, as at Crewe, Doncaster, Derby, or Swindon. Not a hundred engines are exactly alike in pattern, and each one is supposed to be composed of over five thousand different parts, all of which have to be stowed away in a necessarily limited space.

      “How is steam utilised by the locomotive?” is a question asked again and again (and not by children only) ever since Stephenson’s engine started on its triumphant progress from Stockton to Darlington and back, and which, I venture to affirm, only a small percentage of travellers, even in 1903, can answer “right away,” as our American cousins would express it.

      Briefly, then, as follows: Raised up on high is the mighty boiler. Remove its plates, and running through its entire length will be seen a cluster of some two or three hundred brass tubes, in diameter that of a penny-piece. At the rear of the boiler, on a lower level, is the fuel fire-box, with its grate and ash-pan, while in front is the smoke-box, surmounted by the familiar chimney or funnel, called in the United States the “smoke-stack,” in British engines reduced to a minimum of height. Water from the tender surrounds the brass tubes, and when the fire is burning, flames, smoke, and heated gases rush through them, escaping viâ the chimney, but in their passage converting the boiling water into expanding steam, which, when the regulator is opened, is directed by valves into the hollow cylinders—sometimes placed below the boiler, but generally visible outside—forcing by its pressure the pistons backwards and forwards alternately, and, by means of intermediate machinery, transferring its energy to the driving-wheels.

      The exhausted steam, after accomplishing its work, joins the smoke in the smoke-box, escaping up the funnel by jerks, which creates a forced draught through the brass boiler-tubes, and hastens the generation of steam.

ELECTRICITY—THE NEW ORDER

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      Contrast this with electricity, the definition of whose exact nature is a task I must of necessity leave to others, but its adaptation to the purposes of traction can be thus broadly explained:—

      Dynamos or generators are situated at some fixed station, more or less distant, generating electrical energy, whence the current is transmitted along a central steel rail, or, in the case of some tramways, viâ overhead wires, returning to its place of birth by another rail or cable, and completing its circuit. It is “picked up” by a small locomotive fitted with motors that work the driving-mechanism, and thus propels the coaches or cars behind it at varying speeds.

      The rotation of the dynamos is effected either by a torrent, waterfall, or swift-flowing river, absorbed by turbines, or by steam supplied from ordinary boilers.

      In other words, we convert our water and coal into steam, and, indirectly, the heat in the steam into electrical energy; and the heavy locomotive that used to carry its own fuel, and manufacture its steam as it tore along with the train behind it, now leaves tender and boiler at home, and has its driving power, in the form of electric current, forwarded to it per centre rail, to be drawn upon when wanted.

      The system is beautifully simple, and the machinery compact and uncomplicated. Smoke defilement is unknown, and the trains are comparatively noiseless. In short, electric traction is the refinement of mechanically applied power.

      Now let us visit an electrical power station—a small one—and I have in my mind that of the Waterloo and City Electric Railway.

      Hidden away behind a bewildering labyrinth of railway arches, in a cul-de-sac, approached from a back street, not a hundred miles from a great railway station, is a plain, very plain brick building, wherein, for aught one knows to the contrary, such prosaic articles as pots and pans, or cardboard boxes, may be in course of manufacture. Pass through a door, always on the swing, and an unpretending office is reached, furnished in the usual manner, and occupied by clerks engaged upon the ordinary duties of their vocation.

      Access to the engineer-in-chief being granted, he courteously conducts us to the power room, whence issues the energy that drives the trains.

      Imagination had pictured a great hall, filled with ponderous machinery whose component parts are cranks, steel rods, shafts, and toothed wheels, a wilderness of metal, moving with bewildering rapidity and thunderous power, in an atmosphere redolent of lubricating oil, a vision of whirling wheels, an Ezekiel vision of wheels in the midst of wheels, instinct with life, such as the prophet saw 600 years B.C., by the River Chebar, in the land of the Chaldean.