Electrons Drive the Wheels: General Electric's Part in the Transportation Advance

I

NINETY years ago Thoreau, the thrifty sage of Walden Pond who boasted that he had traveled widely in Concord, said that if he really wanted to get anywhere all he had to do was to start walking. Either he could hike thirty miles a day or he could work for a day, earning enough to pay fare for thirty miles by stage or one of those newfangled railroads.

That seemed to make sense in 1846 for anyone on a low wage scale, but it did not make sense even then for Thoreau’s neighbor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was bustling about on lecture tours. And now it does not make sense for anyone in America. Thirty miles is still a good day’s march, but the average day’s pay will carry a man between one and two hundred miles by rail or water. What passed for wisdom in 1846 is folly to-day.

In transport, the Middle Ages lasted until almost a century ago, with fifty cents a ton-mile the going rate for goods haulage in most parts of America. In more backward regions mediæval transport still obtains. Since civilized man spends a good part of his time moving things from one place to another, transportation is the best index of social competence. The contrast between China and America can be put in a single sentence: The Chinese coolie, working twelve hours a day, moves goods at a cost of twelve cents a tonmile and gets ten or twelve cents for doing it, while the American railroader moves goods at less than a cent per ton-mile and gets almost fifty times as much pay.

Visitors from foreign lands lift their eyebrows when they hear us apologizing for the so-called ‘railroad problem.’ From their point of view, we have solved all the railroad problems there ever were, with so great thoroughness that they would be satisfied with less than half of the transport advantages we take for granted. I once sat in an automobile beside an American back from years of living in Mexico, while we waited for a long freight train to pass. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is the most astonishing sight the returning native beholds. I had forgotten that freight could move in such enormous quantities on dependable schedules. It is the key to America’s greatness — this celerity and dependability in moving men and things.’

We who stay at home take for granted all the humbler side of transport — the freight trains, the switch engines, trolley cars, tugboats, tankers, and ordinary cargo ships. Their commonplaceness has washed away all sense of triumph in their steady movement back and forth across this vast continent and its surrounding waters, as they carry the essentials of life and trade from point of origin to point of use. Their motions seem as automatic as those of the blood stream, and we seldom pause to consider that they are as essential to social life as the ceaseless flow of the corpuscles is to individual existence. But there is still in us some of the enthusiasm with which our ancestor pioneers gathered at their new crossroads towns in pioneer days to cheer the first trains which linked them to the rest of America, or crowded the levees to see a new queen of the river pass by with her funnels shooting flame. Even yet we are moved by every announcement of faster schedules, by changes in train designs, by improvements in motive power which testify to man’s growing dominion over time and space. The Hindenburg in the air, the Queen Mary and the Normandie on the seas, the speeding streamliners on the prairies and over the mountains — these draw the populace now as did their counterparts in bygone years. Whenever a new streamlined train sets out on a test run, crowds still gather at every station and spectators throng the edges of the right-of-way, in testimony to the common interest in common carriers ready to serve all on equal terms. Every forward step stimulates travel; the public is still speed-minded, and more alert than ever to the comfort and convenience in travel which new designs create.

No small part of these improvements has come to pass through the application of electricity as motive power and of electrical equipment in outfitting trains and ships for passenger comfort and convenience. In particular, one cannot touch the ‘new railroading’ of the modern era without encountering the electron at work — all the way from power tasks to minute and automatic controlling mechanisms for airconditioning, safety, and signaling devices — these, and a host of other changes which have roused new interest in transport both ashore and afloat, all depend upon electricity. It is the purpose of this article to show the part a single great electrical concern, General Electric Company, has played and is playing in the immensely significant transportation advance.

II

Soon after Thoreau said it was as cheap to walk as to ride on a railroad, the telegraph was hitched up to the railroads for train dispatching. Then inventors began tinkering with electricity as motive power, but it was not until 1884 that Edward M. Bently and Walter H. Knight ran their first street car in Cleveland. Four years later Frank Sprague installed the first commercially successful street car in Richmond, Virginia; mark 1888 down as the year of doom for the horsecar and the year of bloom for electricity on rails. With the transportation evolution thus begun on city streets, and with short hauls, lowspeed traffic would eventually sweep into open country with long hauls and high speeds, and so change the whole picture of American transportation.

Street railroading was eight years old before electricity came to grips with steam. Don’t wonder too much at the delay. Fifty years of steam railroading had built up a powerful tradition in favor of steam both in the transportation companies and in the public mind. A powerful incentive was required to overcome the twin obstacles of prejudice and expense. The villain in the piece was smoke. Down at Baltimore, the Baltimore & Ohio, in keen competition with rival lines, had to contend with a long tunnel which defied decent ventilation. Electricity was the only answer to its prayer for relief. When the railroad world beheld electric locomotives designed and built by General Electric successfully at work at Baltimore in 1895, steam and electricity really came to grips in a struggle which continues to this day.

New York City, with a difficult smoke problem of its own, looked upon the Baltimore experiment and was convinced. For years two great railroad systems sent their trains down what is now Park Avenue to 42nd Street through railroad yards which stretched for two miles northward. Day and night their train and switching locomotives poured soot upon the heart of the city, at present its cleanest and fairest portion. Municipal pressure for relief from smoke initiated moves toward electrification which brought within the next twenty years truly startling changes to the metropolitan scene. Both the New York Central and the New York, New Haven & Hartford electrified, and these successful installations were soon followed by the Pennsylvania. A subway system, electrically operated from the start, was opened. Grand Central Terminal became the hub of an elaborate complex of underground electric railroading, free from smoke, out of sight and out of sound. Forty acres of valuable real estate were recovered for use in the very heart of the metropolis. A fashionable, high-rent avenue, easing traffic congestion and highly productive in municipal taxes, developed above the now submerged tracks.

In all these transport moves, General Electric research, engineering, and manufacturing still made transport history by taking cars off the surface and putting them underground, by breaking loose from urban limitations through electrification of trackage for considerable distances beyond the city limits, by demonstrating that more trains could be handled on a given amount of track with electricity than with steam. Thereafter electricity would never be laughed down by railroaders serving congested areas. The youngster had made good, paying its way by increased efficiency at the same time that it rendered benefits both to passengers and to municipalities.

Meantime, a cloud was gathering on the railroad horizon — a cloud formed by the exhaust from internal-combustion engines in automobiles. For transport companies, the automobile was early recognized as a threat to revenues. Hence rail interests waited expectantly upon the efforts of Schenectady engineers to adapt the electric motor and generator to the gasoline engine. The result was the gas-electric rail car, which was tested in 1905 and soon after placed in service. Few of those who pioneered the gas-electric car have lived to see the crack streamlined trains of the new era whip across the country for new speed records; but its principle was the same as that of these modern racers — internal-combustion-engine power with electric transmission and control.

The average motorist, who has little or no difficulty in controlling the power of his motor, may wonder why the internal-combustion engine is not similarly controlled through clutches and gears when applied to railway service. The answer lies in the fact that the power to be transmitted in the railway vehicle is from five to sixty times as great as that found in the average automobile. Gear and clutch systems to handle these large powers are as yet impracticable from a weight and maintenance standpoint. On the other hand, the electric transmission system not only meets the requirements of low maintenance, reasonable weight and cost, but provides a flexibility, ease, and smoothness of control quite impossible with the gear and clutch system.

In effect, electric transmission provides for the modern rail car hundreds of gear ratios, available for all speeds between starting and stopping, and these ratios change automatically with load requirements. This is one of the most important contributions of electricity in the field of heavy transport.

In this evolution from the experiments of the eighties to the general acceptance of electricity in the transportation world, General Electric has led the way in three directions — research and engineering, precise manufacturing, and a study of transport problems on a broad scale.

In its long effort to find the one right vehicle for every sort of traffic, General Electric has acquired a most comprehensive overall view of American transportation by both land and sea. Only a few of the many aspects of this broad and intricate field of business can be discussed here, but these will demonstrate that moving goods and persons is emphatically a growing business, still full of unexplored opportunities and pulsing with initiative.

Even in a single city, transportation may have a dozen sides. In New York City, for instance, one meets every degree of traffic flow, from the downtown congestion of rush hours to the almost rural calm of Staten Island. Residential districts like Queens and Brooklyn may reproduce for miles on end the scenes of Indianapolis or Minneapolis, with street vehicles able to carry all traffic, provided that they have been well chosen. Along main arteries traffic must be taken overhead or underground in long, capacious trains in order to relieve street pressure; but in the outskirts slower and smaller vehicles take over the traffic for distribution. Swarms of workers daily use in rapid succession buses, electrified railroads, ferries, subways, surface cars, in getting to and from work. Skyscrapers tend to mass themselves around the point where all these transportation factors combine to render most efficient service.

The acme of the transportation engineer’s ambition is to have each district use the vehicles best suited to it, with the fewest and easiest transfers possible from one vehicle to another. This fond hope, however, is never likely to be realized in a growing city or a progressive country, because traffic densities and vehicle designs are constantly changing.

Now step from city to country, from narrow confines to broader reaches. Consider the factors that railroad engineers must weigh when calculating a change in motive power. In suburban areas where dense traffic must be moved, complete electrification offers most advantages for a distance at least equal to the range of daily commuter traffic, because electric operation permits maximum train movement on a given length of track. Where great cities lie close together, and heavy freight traffic develops side by side with heavy passenger traffic, as in the 350-mile stretch of the Pennsylvania Railroad from New York City to Washington, the advantages of overall electrification are apparent. For a picture of trunk-line electric railroading on this important route, as to both equipment and economy, the reader is referred to Morris Markey’s keen piece in the New Yorker of June 20, 1936, entitled ‘Down the Main Line.’

Railroad trackage may also be electrified for one of several compelling physical reasons. Chief of these is the need to put the mighty force of electricity at work on grades so stiff that fast schedules cannot be maintained by steam, as on the Rocky Mountain and Coast divisions of the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific. In descending steep grades on this line, regenerative electric braking becomes at once a safety factor and a source of power. Another compelling reason is the growing resistance of cities to the smoke nuisance; community spirit is a firm ally of electricity. But wherever conditions justify large investment, electric railroading pays by decreasing costs and increasing traffic.

III

Under other conditions the dieselelectric locomotive or train appeals to railroads seeking a substitute for steam. With the electric transmission in delicate control of its great power, the diesel-electric train develops high speed at low fuel cost and also great dependability with low upkeep cost. Since it is capable of quick starting and most efficient braking, its flexibility and economy recommend diesel-electric equipment especially to railroads serving communities which lie far enough apart to permit high speed between stations. Under these conditions the specific need is for a few high-speed trains a day. In streamlined trains of the lighter metals — duralumin or stainless steel alloys — diesel-electric power has already astonished and delighted the public with spectacular records for high-speed rail travel, at costs low enough to reassure the operating companies.

Union Pacific pioneered high-speed streamlined operation with a three-car train of aluminum alloy, with a 600horsepower distillate-burning engine and electric transmission. This train is still doing its daily round trip of 374 miles between Salina, Kansas, and Kansas City, Missouri, equivalent to 11,400 miles per month or 137,000 per year.

Chicago, Burlington & Quincy then stepped into the ring with its ‘ Zephyr’ of stainless steel, powered with a 660horsepower engine. With a maximum speed of 117 miles per hour, it became the first diesel-electric high-speed train in America. From Denver to Chicago the Zephyr made a record non-stop dawn-to-dusk run — 1015 miles in thirteen hours and five minutes at an average speed of 77.5 miles per hour. The West, hungry for speed to conquer its vast open spaces, acclaimed the feat thunderously, and railroad men realized the diesel-electric was here to stay when it was announced that fuel for the record run cost only $16. The original Zephyr continues in revenue service, making a daily round trip of 502 miles.

Burlington’s profitable experience with the Zephyr brought additions to its diesel-electric rolling stock — twin three-car Zephyrs for the ChicagoMinneapolis run, and the four-car ‘Mark Twain’ for service between Burlington, Iowa, and St. Louis. Today the Burlington has on order four larger diesel-electric trains. Two of these — six-car trains each with two 900-horsepower engines — will replace the three-car ‘Twin Zephyrs’ on the popular run from Chicago to the Twin Cities. Two ten-car trains, the Denver Zephyrs, will each be handled by a 3000horsepower diesel-electric locomotive.

Union Pacific made the most spectacular transcontinental run of modern railroad history when it sent its sevencar diesel-electric train, now the ‘City of Portland,’ from Los Angeles to New York in the record time of 56 hours and 55 minutes, clipping nearly fifteen hours from the previous record. This train averaged better than 57 miles an hour for 3250 miles and reached a maximum speed of 120 miles per hour. It made history, too, in being the first streamlined train to offer Pullman accommodations.

The trend toward more power, greater length, and more complete accommodations in diesel-electric trains is revealed in the specifications of the four new trains which Union Pacific has placed in service. All four will have ten cars each. They will be hauled by locomotives of 2400-horsepower each. With complete Pullman accommodations, these trains, operating between Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle, will cut present schedules by many hours. Chicago and Los Angeles, for instance, will be brought approximately twelve hours nearer by rail.

The Santa Fe, Baltimore & Ohio, Boston & Maine, New York, New Haven & Hartford, and the Gulf, Mobile & Northern are other roads with diesel-electric equipment in operation or on order. Fifteen railroads in the United States and Canada have sixty-seven diesel-electric locomotives in service or on order, as passenger equipment. All but three of the dieselelectric trains now in service are G. E. equipped.

Meantime the most successful dieselelectric field is one of which the public hears little — switching. While many old railroaders have their doubts of diesel-electric performance on main tracks, all agree that diesel-electrics (or oil-electrics, as they are called by some operators) are unbeatable for that work. They are always ready for action and fit neatly into the touch-and-go of yard usage. While steam has to be kept up in a steam engine on duty, whether it is moving cars or standing idle, the diesel-electric uses no fuel between tasks. These switchers can be used twenty-four hours a day with three shifts for a week at a time, while steam locomotives require daily servicing.

The reader may wonder why the diesel advantages in railroading failed to materialize until more than thirty years after the invention of the engine itself. The answer reflects credit on American adaptiveness. When our railroad men first began to investigate the diesel in its native Germany ten years ago, they found the Germans still experimenting with hydraulic, pneumatic, and mechanical forms of transmission, none entirely satisfactory. By substituting electric transmission, General Electric made the diesel of large capacity practicable for railroad use. Present fair assumption of efficiency is better than 85 per cent for the transmission, including generators and motors.

Indicative of the fast pace modern railroading is setting for itself, however, is the announcement that General Electric will celebrate the new year by placing on its test tracks at Erie an entirely new type of locomotive — the steam-electric. Inheriting each of the advantages listed above as peculiar to the diesel-electric, it will carry a condensing steam turbine-generating plant which will feed electric power to traction motors. Streamlined, practically smokeless because of an accurately controlled fuel-oil combustion system, the new locomotive will haul crack trains of the Union Pacific between Los Angeles and Omaha, showing its heels at 110 miles per hour in a territory that only a few months ago seemed to have capitulated to diesel operation. The water tower, long a feature of the railroad landscape, will no longer be vital to steam operations, for the turbine-locomotive will use the same distilled water over and over again, permitting long runs without boiler repairs. Gone, too, will be the venerable side-rod drive, for electric power, with its finely graduated control, will propel traction motors. Thus transportation men who want steam will get steam — tailor-made for today’s task.

IV

Short-haul transportation on city lines is now receiving specialized vehicles from the electrical industry. With tracks being torn up, overhead wires hauled down, and electric service companies losing dependable business, electric street transport stood in need of this relief. It found a new, efficient, and popular vehicle in the trolley coach — which boasts all of the advantageous features of both the electric trolley car and the automobile bus.

The trolley coach draws current from overhead wires, but instead of being confined to steel rails it can move anywhere between curb and curb, because the overhead current collectors are extremely flexible. Able to pass other vehicles, it expedites traffic wherever substituted for the old-style trolley confined to the centre of the street. No longer need motorists stop while trolley passengers enter and alight, for the new coach accommodates passengers at the curb. Traveling on rubber tires, it is quieter than any other public vehicle and its occupants are not troubled by the fumes and jolts so often experienced on gasoline buses. With unlimited electricity available, heating, lighting, and ventilating reach new standards of excellence.

The earliest trolley coaches received scant attention as they paraded the fringes of New York and Philadelphia. First models were awkward to operate and rather amusing to behold. But engineers soon smoothed out both design and operation, and the trolley coach straightway took hold as a popular street vehicle. By 1934, trolley coaches were using 36,000,000 kilowatthours of electric current in twenty-one cities. Now they have run the score up to thirty cities, with more coming.

Although installed at first as an economy measure, the new vehicles found such public favor that routes are being extended in many places. Trolley coaches now serve routes never before electrified for transportation. Revenues stop shrinking when they are installed; in many cities they have brought up to 30 per cent more cash into the coin registers. The public likes these quiet and flexible vehicles which combine high speed with easy, odorless riding; while operators rejoice at riddance of heavy street paving and repair charges, which frequently spelled the difference between profit and loss.

General Electric had to popularize the trolley-coach idea before it could sell trolley coaches, which is true of many of its well-matured ideas in transportation. In this case it began by thoroughly studying local traffic conditions, a wise practice not always followed in urban transport, where many misfit vehicles are in need of replacement.

So complicated is city traffic that not even as flexible a vehicle as the trolley coach can serve all areas. On some streets overhead wires are prohibited; on others there is too little traffic to justify the expense of change. The transportation engineer proceeds on the theory that the correct vehicle for any given run is that which gives utmost satisfaction and at the same time provides a satisfactory profit for the operator. He must take into account not only traffic density and hourly flow, but also riding habits and prejudices. New York accepts the subway, on which more than a million passengers a day can be moved on a four-track route. Other cities are inveterate trolley riders, and each trolley car in a heavy-traffic period will carry as many passengers as occupy thirty to sixty automobiles. In spite of track abandonment and the shift to gasoline buses and other new-type vehicles, trolleys still account for 60 per cent of commercial urban passenger traffic and are the best solution for extreme street congestion. Consequently it seemed definitely in order to develop a better trolley car.

The industry, at last aroused, concentrated on a coöperative effort to produce a rail vehicle which would provide speed and comfort equal to those of the private automobile — a trolley car with so many improvements that it would be faster, quieter, and more economical to operate than any other means of transportation. To this street car — known as the Presidents’ Conference Car from the meetings at which it was matured — General Electric contributed newly designed motors, brakes, controls, and other equipment.

Seeking to lure urban passengers from private automobiles, designers of the new street car drew on automotive technique to gain quick getaway, high speed, and passenger comfort. They used rubber to absorb vibration and prevent squeaks. They provided modern lighting of high intensity but easy on the eyes, plenty of clean air by means of indirect ventilation, and brakes which, through a combination of compressed air, dynamic and magnetic track control, permit quick stopping without jar. These cars can be accelerated from standstill to a speed of forty miles per hour in the brief space of eight seconds. Attractively streamlined bodies help to attract more passengers.

After more than five years in preparation, with the entire industry backing its idea-car, this new street car is now making its bow to the public. Brooklyn and Baltimore led off with large orders, and Chicago began placing eighty of the new models in operation last summer. With this ultramodern vehicle the street-car industry confidently expects to halt its decline and go forward.

In 1925 General Electric adapted the electric transmission to the gasoline bus for elimination of shocks, driver abuse, wear by clutch slipping, and fatigue. This vehicle has been adopted in many cities, particularly in New Jersey, where Public Service Coördinated Transport now has hundreds in operation. Public Service has lately led off in the operation of two other new-type vehicles, the diesel-electric bus and the all-service vehicle. The latter, which is likely to acquire wide favor, operates as a trolley coach in the city, but beyond the trolley wires it operates as a gas-electric bus. This dual utility sets a new pace in vehicle specialization.

Thus has still greater flexibility become a characteristic of urban transport. Somewhere among subway and elevated cars, improved surface cars, trolley coaches, all-service vehicles, and gas-electric buses any operating company can find what it needs.

V

This account of General Electric’s place in the transportation picture is necessarily restricted to the land phase. Also highly important are its activities in the air and on water. In equipping aircraft with the supercharger, General Electric scored a great technical and commercial success, the proceeds of which have gone largely into perfecting navigating instruments in a wide range and pushing the development of radio telegraphy for aircraft. As a result, communication between aircraft and land stations, and between airplanes in flight, is now everyday procedure, and radio control has increased the safety of air travel.

In water transport, General Electric pioneered the turbine-electric drive. This equipment has been extensively used by the Navy, all the way from small craft to battleships. Hundreds of commercial vessels, including the Normandie and ships of the United Fruit, Dollar, Grace, and Panama-Pacific lines, are electrically driven, reflecting General Electric’s many years of activity in this field.

Broad as General Electric’s transport activities are, they represent only one aspect of the Company’s vast business in electrical investigation and manufacturing. Producing everything in electric equipment from home appliances and the most delicate instruments and tubes up to massive motor and turbine installations, and ranging the whole field of electrical research with unequaled diligence and skill, General Electric Company plays a large part, directly or indirectly, in advancing transportation in every field.

Copyright 1937, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass. All rights reserved.