Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 27, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 January 1913 — GO TO THE SPECIALIST [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

GO TO THE SPECIALIST

HE IS THE MAN RESPONSIBLE FOR RAILROAD EFFICIENCY. Whan Greater Speed Is Desired or a> Question of Safety Is Involved, It Is the Expert That is Depended Upon. It is not very many thousand yearv ’ago that primitive man was in a sav-

age state not much higher or better than that of the wild animals with which he Was in daily contact, and upon, the killing of which he* depended very largely for his food. All; the needs of the, individual ma n were supplied by the same individual, and society was an exceed-: ingly simple organization. Today

one man, or a group of men, supplies us vrith our shoes, another with our food, another with our books, another with the tools with which we work, and so on. Probably the ordinary traveler never gives more than a passing thought to the operation of a railroad and what it means. Of course, if the diningcar is full, the poor service of that particular road comes in for comment, though the fact that the patrons of a railroad can travel between Chicago and New York at the rate of fifty miles an hour, and have all the comforts that they have at home, hardly calls for passing comment Why should it? We are so accustomed to. unusual luxuries that most of them have become necessities. The problems of railway management, operation, construction, and maintenance are too numerous even to mention, but perhaps something as to ope phase of railroading will serve to give at least a glimpse of the intricate mechanism of the railway industry. Railroads for the most part buy their cars, locomotives, rails, bridges, and signals. In some few instances the equipment is built by the roads themselves in their own shops, but this is the rare exception and not the rule. To supply the needs of the railroads there has grown up an enormous industry known as railway supply manufacturing. These railway supply manufacturers are the specialists to whom the railroads go for a thousand and one things. When the railroads wanted to increase the speed of their locomotives they went to the builders, and if the designing of a faster locomotive was a comparatively simple thing, which it was not, even, after that had been settled came the question of safely Increasing the speed of trains. How was this to be done?* Here again the railroads went to their specialists, the manufacturers of railways supplies, and the problem of safety running high-speed trains was solved in the air-brake. Even the ordinary layman Is familiar with the name Westinghouse. But the running of high-speed trains safely Is dependent upon something more than the airbrake. Probably not one man in a thousand, who travels upon a railroad, has any Idea that the efficiency of the entire braking apparatus may be impaired by a poorly designed and constructed brake beam. What a brake beam Is. and what its duties are, are quite unknown outside of the railroad field, and yet here is a structure, weighing comparatively but a few pounds, that is called upon to take the power of the air-brake and apply it to the rapidly revolving wheels of the train, not occasionally, but hundreds of times upon a single trip. Without this brake beam, high-speed trains would be impossible.—By Bruce V. Crandall In Harper’s Weekly.