When the engine emerges from the paint-shop it is gorgeous and refulgent--brilliantly new. Unless it is going to foreign lands, when it must be partly dismantled and crated, it will ride its own wheels to the road which has purchased it. A string of new locomotives may be sprinkled through a freight train--never coupled together--in charge of an inspector from the locomotive company, who will bunk in one of the cabs and never leave his charges until they have been receipted for. After that the locomotive begins to bend to the work for which he was created. Unless he is of a very unusual sort or was built for some very especial purpose, he soon loses his identity. The days are gone when locomotives were christened after the fashion of ships. There are too many of them. Each is given the cold informality of a number, marshalled for service in a mighty company.
Cars came as corollary to the locomotive. In the beginning the passenger coaches were nothing more or less than old-time stage-coaches which had been set upon wheels so flanged as to enable them to stay upon the rail. So it was that the first cars built for the railroad followed stage-coach models. It was a practical necessity from the first to draw more than one small coach at a time, so the couplings and the bumper devices came as a matter of development. Then came the day when an aspiring inventor grouped several stage-coaches together on a single rigid frame and he had really developed a form of railroad coach--a form which our English and continental cousins still cling fondly to, in despite of its most apparent disadvantages.
Four wheels quickly gave way to eight. In the early thirties, Ross Winans developed a double-truck car for use on the Baltimore & Ohio. Compared with anything that had gone before it was certainly a pretentious vehicle. It was thirty feet in length, four-wheel trucks being attached at the ends, very much after the present fashion. There were seats on the flat roof, which were reached by a ladder in the corner, and the car itself was divided into three compartments. A little later Winans tore out the cross partitions in the car and introduced the end doors and the centre aisle, thus establishing the American passenger coach of to-day. The Baltimore & Ohio manufactured a number of these coaches at its famous Mount Clare shops. They were known for years as the "Washington cars," probably because they were the first run on the Washington branch.