[...] This VerLeonimising A ponderous power of steam and steel,
taking a treasure store of New England merchandise into the night.
The night freight calls our attention to an element of time, the bright time of
day, and here is the dark time of night.
Railroading is on a 24-hour schedule.
Despite the elements and never mind the weather, be it fair or stormy, hail,
sleet or snow, the night freight must go through.
The conductor in the caboose keeps a record of all the cars.
And the night freight seems to sing a song of work, a song with the refrain,
every day 24 hours a day.
The Yankee Clipper meanwhile arrives at New Haven, and this brings a
transformation from steam to electricity.
From coal and fire to boats and amperes, the steam locomotive leaves the train.
From Boston and from Springfield to New Haven, the motive power is provided
by superheated steam.
Then for the remainder of the run, the energy to drive the wheels
is provided by dynamos.
The electric locomotive is a thing of streamlined efficiency,
a monarch of high tension.
Electricity has been a comparatively recent story in American railroading.
It began in 1895 on the New Haven Railroad, which pioneered in
overhead high tension lines.
Now the Clipper goes
speeding under electrical power.
We're in a new world of railroading, a realm where a hundred thunderbolts of
Jupiter are harnessed to turn the wheels of trains.
The sources of electric power are coal and steam, and at this railroad-owned
powerhouse, the boilers are 60 feet high.
The heat meters register 2,000 degrees, generating steam with a pressure of
300 pounds to the square inch.
Powdered coal blown into the furnace and burning in suspension in the air.
The turbo generators hum at 1,500 revolutions per minute to produce in a single
year over 100 million kilowatts of electricity.
The nerve center of the powerhouse, the main
control room with its elaborate equipment.
Here watch the lies check the surge of power through the overhead
lines, railroad power.
A masterpiece of road bed construction and maintenance is this four-track
electrified right-of-way.
Over it passed between six and seven hundred trains a day.