After which will you wonder when I say that no steam locomotive in the United States to-day represents anything like the ultimate possibilities of the machine itself? That is not true of the electric locomotive, where the last unit turned out from the shops is almost sure to be the best ever built. Let me illustrate.
It is now a good ten years since a most efficient passenger-locomotive was finished in this country--to turn out one cylinder-horse-power per hour from 16.5 pounds of water and 2.12 pounds of coal and weighing but 121 pounds per cylinder-horse-power. A few years later an equally efficient freight-puller was made, creating one cylinder-horse-power per hour from 15.4 pounds of water and 2.00 pounds of coal and yet weighing but 88.9 pounds per cylinder-horse-power. This was several years ago, please remember. Since then many, many locomotives have been built that were not nearly so good. Some of these have been retired to light service already. Why?
Why are not these engines of 1910 not only being equaled but bettered by the engines of 1922? Why does it ever become necessary to scrap locomotives, within half a century of their construction at any rate? There is not one of their bearing parts that is not capable of infinite replacements, after which, it is a question of mere lubrication.
I saw not many months ago under the train-shed of the passenger-station at Tours, France, a copper-boilered locomotive of the Paris-Orleans railway which bore the date of her construction, 1857, proudly upon her neat sides. She still was an efficient little locomotive, handling a small job fit for her small size and handling it very well indeed. The oldest locomotive that I personally have known to be in constant service in the United States was an engine belonging to a paper company near Potsdam, New York, which had been built by the Taunton Locomotive Works for the Union Pacific railroad in 1860, and sold to the Central Vermont in the following year. Rebuilt several times, it still was in service in 1919. This engine is very much of an exception. A twenty-year-old engine in this country to-day is a veteran. The famous "999" of the New York Central, which in 1893 was exhibited at the Chicago Fair as the fastest locomotive in the world, in 1903 was handling a "plug" milk-train up in northern New York. It now has been retired as a sort of museum-piece.