HOW TO TRAVEL LIKE LIGHTNING.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3055, 11 April 1881, Page 4

HOW TO TRAVEL LIKE LIGHTNING.

An imaginative man, who subscribes himself " A Common Sense Engineer," proposes the following plan by which he holds ifc possible to transport freight and passengers by rail from New York o San Francisco in ten hours. What the freight and passengers would be good for when delivered he does nofc pretend to say. The plan is this :" A fair rate of speed for a railway train is forty miles an hour. The distance from New York to San Francisco is, roughly, 3000 miles. I would divide this distance into 30 parts, with •stations at every 100 miles. First a track, not differing greatly from the ordinary railroad track, should be laid for a hundred miles, and ifc ia only necessary to study rapid transit according to my plan over this section of the road to understand how the whole system would work. Over the first track of 100 miles, and running over cannon balls upon that track, is another, say 90 miles long, on which, in turn is another, 80 miles long, and so on till on the whole r sysfcem the freight and passenger train runs, ifc being of any desired and practicable length. Suppose ifc is required to go from A to P>, a distance of 100 miles, the stable track over which all the others run is, of course, 100 miles long, and the first movable track upon it is 90 miles long. Let the first movable track be drawn by a stationary engine the 10 remaining 10 miles, whereby one of its extremities will reach B, and let us say that ifc takes fifteen minutes for it to move through the ten miles. In the meantime the track eighty miles long which runs on the track ninety miles long will have been advanced ten mile 3 by the motion of the ninety mile track, and will itself (either by means of a stationary engine or a locomotive) have advanced ten miles on its own hook, so fchafc in all ifc will have gone twenty miles in the fifteen minutes, and its extremity will reach B afc the same time that B is reached by the ninety mile track. So with the seventy, the sixty, the fifty tracks, and up to the passenger and freight; trains, which will reach B as soon the ninety mile track reaches B —that is to say, in fifteen minutes, at the end of which ifc will have travelled about 100 miles. Perhaps the following statement will make the matter clearer. Let us call the ninety mile track A, the eighty mile track B, and so on. Ais drawn ten miles, carrying with ifc B for the same distance. But B has a motion of its own and travels over ten miles on its own account. It has therefore gone twenty miles. C, with a ten mile motion of its own over B, which draws it along, lias gone thirty miles ; D, 40 ;E.SO;F, 60 ; Gr, 70 ;H,BO ; 1,90 ; J (which is the passenger and freight train), 100 miles, and all in fifteen minutes. The whole system of tracks need nofc be more than four or five feet in height. With sufficient power the scheme is practicable, and with motors at present afc our command ifc would work for short distances." —Scientific American.