Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 249, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 October 1913 — MAKES FASTEST TIME [ARTICLE]

MAKES FASTEST TIME

FRENCH TRAIN HOLDS WORLD'S RECORD IN THIS RESPECT. Average Speed of 75 Miles an Hour la Maintained for a Distance of 185 Miles, from Paris to Calais. At this time of the year the most Anglo-Saxon place in France is a railway station in Paris —the Gare du Nord, says a correspondent. But how few of the passengers to the coast realize they travel by the fastest train in the world —at a speed of 75 miles an hour! For an aeroplane this is not remarkable, but here we have a ponderous thing of 400 tons, and which carries 400 passengers. This is certainly an age of speed sensations.

The distance of 185 miles from Paris to Calais is covered in 3 hours 10 minutes. The average for the two daily trains is 57 miles an hour. But there are gradients to be mounted, there are checks at signals to be made up, there are <t junctions that must be passed through cautiously, and curves to be rounded where the speed must drop to below forty. The high average of 57 miles is only kept up by traveling over the long straight reaches of the line, where it Is perfectly safe to do so, at 75 miles an hour, the highest speed allowed by law in France. Describing his ride on the engine on one of these Paris-Calais trains, a journalist compared it to a small earthquake. The floor of the 86-ton engine he said swung from side to side. The thick steel rod to which I was holding quivered and jerked as If it were lose. The needle leapt up the dial in a series of convulsive little jerks. We shot past a local train on another line as a motorcar overtakes a rabbit. We hurtled through tunnels black as a mine, where the roof pressed down on one till eardrums were fit to burst with the din, and where the sweating stoker, Jerking open the whitehot cavern of a furnace, gleamed red as he swung his shovel, like a demon of Hades. At last, the train pulls up alongside the steamer in Calais harbor. It had, taken four tons of coal and 140 cubic feet of water to take us there. Yet none of the passengers even glanced at the new $25,000 engine that had brought them on their homeward way at this wonderful speed.