The Berlin-Zossen Electric Railway Tests of 1903: A Report of the Test Runs Made on the Berlin-Zossen Railroad in the Months of September to November 1903 (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The Berlin-Zossen Electric Railway Tests of 1903: A Report of the Test Runs Made on the Berlin-Zossen Railroad in the Months of September to November 1903The tests on the Berlin-Zossen line recorded in this volume occupy a unique place in the history of modern engineering. They represent a deliberate, thoroughly organized and highly successful effort, on the part of a syndicate for research, at solving the greatest problem of twentieth-century transportation; that is, the application of electric traction to very greatly increased railway speeds. The subject has been in the air for more than a decade, and has stayed there, mainly on account of the lack of sufficient experimental data to justify the large investments necessary to such operations. More than a dozen years ago the projected fast line between St. Louis and Chicago brought the subject before the public eye, and had not the ensuing period of extreme commercial depression forced it into the background that line would very probably have become a successful reality. The writer was one of the group of engineers that investigated the project, and the concurrent opinion even at that early day was decidedly in favor of its feasibility. The general features of the equipment as proposed were along the same lines followed by the German experimenters, and the success reached by the latter confirms to-day the auguries of Dr. Adams and his associates. But Fate was against the American enterprise, and the glory of the achievement rests with our German confrères.Moreover, they attacked the task in the right spirit and by the right methods, deliberately expending time and money without hesitation in obtaining on a practical scale full experimental data on the subject before undertaking a commercial equipment. There was little in the prior art of electric railroading to give an adequate standing-ground, for the traction work of ten years past has been assiduously devoted to work with direct-current motors at low voltage and to speeds which, while high compared to the tramway speeds of bygone years, were yet far too low to furnish valuable guidance in the premises. In fact the data from ordinary interurban lines have been for the most part not only of small value, but positively misleading.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis 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.