When my attention was first called to this matter, I had supposed, as
most people do who are outside of the railway profession, that there
was something subtile and mysterious about railway engineering that
none but those brought up to the business could understand. Possibly
it is so, and I am merely making suggestions for what they are worth,
but I think the position I have taken in this matter was established
by some experiments of three weeks' duration, which I conducted
between Milan and Como, in Italy, for the Italian government, in
pulling freight trains up grades of 100 feet to the mile. The
experiments were made with an engine built by the Reading Railroad.
We competed with English, French, Belgian, and Austrian engines. These
machines required the best of fuel to perform the mountain service,
and could use coal dust only when it was pressed into brick. We used
in the Reading Railroad machine different fuels upon different days,
making the road trip of 120 miles each day with one kind of fuel. We
used coal dust scraped up in the yards, also the best Cardiff coal,
anthracite, and five kinds of Italian lignite, the best of which
possesses about half the combustible value of coal.
The results in drawing heavy freight trains were equally good with
each fuel, the engine having at all times an abundance of steam on
heavy grades, no smoke nor cinders, and no collection of cinders in
the forward part of the engine.
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