So let us temper the wildest fancies with the thought that we probably shall have the steam locomotive with us for some time yet, say for one or two hundred years more. We shall have to put up with him. And having to put up with him, what shall we do with him? How shall we make him most effective for the future necessities of our American railroad structure? There are more than 67,000 of him upon our railroads to-day. He is a factor in their progress that cannot be ignored. They can ill afford to have him remain a laggard, no matter how brisk may be the inroads of his competitor, the electric locomotive.
The steam railroad of the United States seemingly came to the pinnacle of its efficiency about twelve years ago. The steam locomotive about twelve years ago also reached its apparent ultimate size for any sort of practical operation--120 feet in length and a little over 800,000 pounds in weight. The width and height for many years past have been held by tunnel and other clearances pretty rigidly at ten and fifteen feet respectively. Finally at about 120 feet the practical limit of length also was reached; even then there had been created an engine that not only could not be handled upon the longest of turntables at the terminals, but even upon curves of fairly easy radius. Also the limit of the human fireman, the shoveling of from fifteen to eighteen tons of coal in from four to six continuous hours, had been reached.
These 120-foot locomotives were available only for long and almost straight stretches of track and for use without being turned, while a weight of 400 tons not only represented a real strain upon the bridges but a constant and a fearful pounding upon the very best of track. So here then in 1910 was the seeming height of the development of the American locomotive; a pinnacle scaled in a long endeavor to cut down operating costs to the utmost.
A seeming height it was. Was it in fact the real height of efficiency?
The 400-ton locomotive was in the main the same locomotive that George Stephenson had first built and operated away back in 1827; it was but an enlargement of the _Stourbridge Lion_ that first had dug his heels into the iron at Honesdale, Pennsylvania, in 1829, and so proclaimed a new era in American civilization. A few things had been added, but they were very few. An engineer out in Sandusky, Ohio, put a bell upon the boiler, George Westinghouse came along about half a century ago with the air-brake, some one else devised the injector, there were some other very minor improvements--and that was all. Aside from these and a few very slight rearrangements of its working parts the American locomotive of 1910 was very much the same, even in appearance, as its ancestor, let us say, of about 1840. Eighty years is a long time. It ought to afford a large opportunity for development. Apparently it has not.