Excerpt from Self-Contained Railway Motor Cars and Locomotives: Prepared Especially for the Instruction and Training of Students of the American School

Long Period of Development. Since the advent of the steam locomotive, inventors and designers have turned their attention toward the production of railway cars in which the power plant is self-contained. All forms of motive power have been tried in many and various combinations: steam, with the flash boiler and high pressure - coal and oil fired; electric motors driven by storage batteries; compressed air; and the internal-combustion engine, with combination drives of every sort. These drives may consist of electric generators and motors, mechanical transmissions with spur gearing and clutches, electro-mechanical combinations, and friction drives. The hydraulic transmission has also been tried, but little has been done with it, owing, no doubt, to the fact that designers of self-contained cars are for the most part unfamiliar with hydraulic principles and their application to power transmission.

The self-contained cars of the past favored the steam engine design, with the engine mounted on the trucks and the boiler within the car body. This, of course, was an adaptation of the steam locomotive in smaller units to individual cars and was used before the internal-combustion engine was developed. This feature is still found in practically all the modern steam self-contained cars and takes 'from 10 to 15 feet of valuable space within the car body for engine room and does not permit a passage between cars when two or more motor cars are coupled together in a train. European countries have a number of these cars still in use and have been rather successful with them but are, how ever, rapidly adopting those using the internal-combustion engine, owing to its larger radius of Operation and economies.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.