PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION H. 363 
was an improvement. This want of definite information is not 
to be wondered at, as the balanced engines constituted but a 
small proportion of those traversing the lines. 
The date of this letter is December, 1897, and the locomo- 
tives then dealt with were powerful six-coupled engines, about 
46 tons total weight, excluding tender, and having “wheels only 
4 ft. 6 in. in diameters Sinta then the work has continued, 
and engines of other classes been dealt with with equally 
satisfactory results. 
This, then, is the brief history of a reform, the money value 
of which on any reasonable computation must be very great 
indeed. Assuming the locomotive charges to average Is. per 
mile, and each engine to travel 20,000 miles per annum, figures 
certainly within or below the truth, the cost of each locomotive 
will be £1000 per annum. Assuming then that the value of 
each engine is improved owing to greater speed and capability, 
and reduced maintenance of only 5 per cent., or £50 per 
annum (surely a very low estimate of the value of the advan- 
tages detailed in Mr. Woodroffe’s statement), we have for the 
200 engines the sum of £10,000 per annum, capable at ordi- 
nary rates of paying interest on a quarter of a million of money. 
There is therefore no need to go into elaborate figures to show 
the enormous money value of a proper system of “balancing, or 
the serious loss due to its absence. But it may be asked has 
not all this been threshed out long ago? Surely there is no- 
thing new to be discovered about so trite and well-known a 
subject as locomotive design. Well, strange to say, there seems 
to have been for the past half-century a good deal of know- 
ledge, but very irregularly distributed. In D. K. Clark’s 
“ Railway Machinery,” a work published more than forty years 
ago, accounts are given of the successful balancing of engines 
by Heaton and Fernihough, in England, and by Nollau and Le 
Chatelier, on the Continent of Europe, the reported results being 
strikingly similar to those obtained here, and a careful examina- 
tion of actual locomotives in various parts of Australia, and also 
of a large collection of photographs of locomotives by various 
English and American makers shows that, while many of them 
are balanced in a rational and intelligible way, others are either 
quite devoid of balance weights, or possess balance weights 
the magnitude and position of which cannot be reconciled with 
the principles of dynamics. In fact, we have well-balanced, 
wrongly-balanced, and unbalanced engines, and of these the 
two latter classes are undoubtedly wasting fuel and damaging 
themselves and the roads they travel over to a greater or “less 
extent. As, then, there has been, and apparently still is, InN some 
quarters a Jack of information on this very important subject 
it appeared desirable to place on record the method adopted 
with such satisfactory results in Victoria. 
