How it can be given is not as easy a problem to the big engineers. The Pennsylvania can and has planned still more low-grade relief-lines across and through the Alleghany Mountains, but Pittsburg still remains its bottle-neck--in there between the high hills and all but defying the railroad engineers. The New York Central needs more main-line trackage, but far more does it need relief of its own bottle-necks--at Albany and again at Buffalo. It is the problem of the cities that counts--not merely Albany or Buffalo or Pittsburg, but New York and Boston and Philadelphia and Baltimore and Cleveland and Cincinnati and St. Louis and Chicago. There is no use in laying down additional main tracks when the terminals in the hearts of these great cities are so sadly congested as to take a freight-car as long to move through a single one of them as from three hundred to five hundred miles on open line.
The smooth and shiny steel rails that slip through each of these congested traffic-hubs are their Fifth Avenues and their Michigan Avenues too. We do not permit the gasolene locomotive to park and obstruct these highways of asphaltum. But the laggard steam locomotive is permitted to loaf in great roundhouses along the steel highway. He is to-day not merely a laggard but an actual obstructionist. I hinted but a moment ago at the time he must spend between runs resting and being more or less overhauled--fires cleaned, machinery overhauled, flues calked and the like, twelve hours out of each twenty-four. Moreover he requires water each seventy-five miles and a fresh supply of coal each 150.
On the other hand, take the electric locomotive. Not only does he save weight by carrying no coal or water and so put that weight into motive machinery--his strength to-day is 7000 horse-power as against but about 3000 of our largest steam locomotives--but he actually goes 5000 miles without having to receive the inspection attention that his old-fashioned steam brother apparently has to have at the end of 150. Which means that for days at a time--and even a week or a fortnight, if the necessity arises--he can remain in steady service, going from one train to another, and only changing crews. The locomotive is always ready.