Railway Speed

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIII, Issue 25, 22 June 1905, Page 1

Railway Speed

A cable message from New York in last week's daily, papers rah as follows .— ' The New York-Chicago express covered 912 miles in 17h 37min. including stops. The highest speed was three miles in 2min B|sec.' This works out at an average of a mile in just less than one minute and nine and a half seconds. It looks like the speed of the man with the seven-league 'boots when, compared with the twenty-five miles an hour .(stopsi included) attained by the Dunedin-Christchurch express. It is^ perhaps, the highest long-distance speed attained since (to use Artemus Ward's expression) • the iron hoss was foalod.' It is not, in point of time, a long hark-back to the days when the pack-horse was in almost universal use for the carriage of travellers and freight over the villainous roads that prevailed in Europe generally, and in England in particular. It is on record that the first carriage seen in England was built for Queen Elizabeth in 1568 ; that the first to ply for hire in ' famous London town ' was in 1625 ; and that the first stage coach did not begin to lumber its bumpy way through England till 1659.

There are men still living who might remember the opening of England's first railways— the Stockton-Dar-lington line in 1825, and the Liverpool-Manchester five years Tate<r. Hood's rustic— like many of his supposed ' betters ' — rose in mental revolt against this innovation, ' a-turniin' cloches into smoaky kettls.' Tihe yellow ptostchaise, with its gaudy postilion, and the four-horse mailcoach of the time seemed ' the last word ' in travelling comfort to many who felt that ' the world went very well then.' But things have moved fast and far since Stephenson discovered that there was sufficient cohesion between a smooth wheel and an edgerail. A modern express engine would soare out of their seven senses the good souls who saw Stephenson's engine Srag a thirtyton load at four miles an hour ; the betting-fraternity who saw Cooper's locomotive easily beaten by a horse on the Baltimore-Ohio road in 1830 : and the scared Dons of an English University who protested against the danger of ' hurling ' people' through space at the rate of twenty miles an hout. Only thirty years later, the

noted engineer, Professor Rankine, of the University of Glasgow, was able, in a poem, to apostrophise the 1 North Countrie ' express of his day : ' Dash along, crash along, sixty miles an hour ! ' 1 Put forth your force, my iron horse, with limbs that never tire ! The best of oil shall feed your joints, and the best of coal your fire ; Like a train of ghosts, the telegraph posts go wißdly trooping by, While one by one the milestones run, and off behind us fly ! ' Professor Rariloine's sixty miles an hour have long been left behind. German experiments with electric traction on specially constructed lines give promise that in the not distant by-and-by people, that are 'so Sispoged ' will be afforded opportunities of being ' hurled through space ' at the rate of a hundred and twenty miles an hour,.