People's Pilot, Volume 3, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 March 1894 — A Locomotive's “Cough.” [ARTICLE]

A Locomotive's “Cough.”

The cough or puff of a railway engine is due to the abrupt emission of waste steam up the stack. When moving slowly the coughs can, of course, be heard following each other quite distinctly, but when speed is put on the puffs come out one after the other much more rapidly, and when eighteen coughs a second are produced they cannot be separately distinguished by thi ear. A locomotive running at the rate of nearly seventy miles an hour gives out twenty puffs of steam every soo ond—that is, tea for each of itx twe eylindem t