Читать книгу Locomotive Engine Running and Management онлайн

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The experiment of raising locomotive engineers from machinists and mechanical empirics was the uncertain groping in the dark for the right man to fill the right place. When the search for pretentious men proved unsatisfactory, the right men were found at hand, accumulating the necessary experience on the fireman’s side of the engine. Then it became a recognized fact, that, to take hold and run an engine to advantage, a man must learn the business by working as fireman. There have been frequent cases of men becoming successful locomotive engineers without any previous training as firemen, but they were the exceptions that proved the rule.

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In the matter of speed alone, there is much to learn before a man can safely run a locomotive. During daylight a novice will generally be half out in estimating speed; and his judgment is merely wild guess-work, regulated more by the condition of the track than by the velocity his train is reaching. On a smooth piece of track, he thinks he is making twenty-five miles an hour, when forty miles is about the correct speed: then he strikes a rough portion of the road-bed, and concludes he is tearing along at thirty miles an hour, when he is scarcely reaching twenty miles; since the first lurchy spot made him shut off twenty per cent of the steam. At night the case is much worse, especially when the weather proves unfavorable. On a wild, stormy night, the accumulated experience of years on the footboard, which trains a man to judge of speed by sound of the revolving-wheels, and to locate his position between stations from a tree, a shrub, a protruding bank, or any other trifling object that would pass unnoticed by a less cultivated eye, is all needed to aid an engineer in working along with unvaried speed without jolt or tumult. On such a night, a man strange to the business can not work a locomotive, and exercise proper control over its movements. He may place the reverse lever-latch in a certain notch, and keep the steam on; he can regulate the pump after a fashion, and watch that the water shall not get too low in the boiler; he can shut off in good season while approaching stations, and blunder into each depot by repeatedly applying steam; but he exerts no control over the train, knows nothing of what the engine is doing, and is constantly liable to break the train in two. A diagram of his speed would fluctuate as irregularly as the profile lines of a bluffy country. This is where a machinist’s skill does not apply to locomotive-running until it is supplemented by an intimate knowledge of speed, of facility at handling a train, and keeping the couplings intact, and of insight into the best methods of economizing steam.