study of a steam versus Dieselized operation of another locomotive run, and had been surprised to learn that there was no terminal expense connected with one of these light-weight Dieselized trains. But when I got down to the Kansas City Terminal, I found, in order to turn these trains around, they had to route them on an irregular elipse over three miles in the Kansas City yards, but in order to hold the expense of that down as far as possible, they did not put a yard crew on the train. Of course, that is one way of holding down terminal expense; but obviously it has not much to do with the Diesel motor in the front, or the stream lining of the train or the weight of the cars.
And then I was interested in looking at the schedule. Naturally, in common with most other members of the public, I had an idea that this first Zephyr was splitting the ozone out West there. Imagine my surprise to learn its scheduled speed for the 251-mile run was 45.6 miles an hour!
When I got back to my hotel in Kansas City I found a telegram asking me to be in Portland, Maine, at the earliest possible moment. So I hurried back to St. Louis and had just half an hour to catch the poor old Southwestern Limited out on the New York Central. I hope my Pennsylvania friends will not take any notice of this fact. So here I got on this poor old train that nobody talks about. It was hauled by a dumb steam locomotive that one day takes ten cars, another day twelve or thirteen cars,
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and provides through service from St. Louis to Boston, New York, Washington and Cincinnati. And this poor train did not know any better than to make a schedule of 51.5 miles an hour, and on the New York Central time table I did not notice any caption reading:
"This train is limited in its equipment and passengers can be accommodated only to the extent of its seating capacity."
Nevertheless, not only as a locomotive builder but as a railroad investor and one who has served the railroads to the best of his ability in times gone by, I feel that the railroad and equipment industries both will owe a debt of gratitude to developers of Diesel power and light-weight trains, not because these are going to supersede steam and standard equipment, but because they are stimulating constructive thought and effort. At the same time, I refer to the dangers of conveying false impressions to the public mind, and at the present time a false impression is certainly being created with regard to the improvement of passenger schedules. The truth is that this new Twentieth Century development of Dieselized lightweight trains has not yet touched Nineteenth Century performance with steam, and hardly more than parallels the daily performance of many modern steam trains of today. With this in mind I proceeded to make up a very short list of schedule trains moving today in the United States.
But first look at this picture of a little Atlantic type compound locomotive built by Baldwin in 1896 for the Reading Railroad.
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