646 TRANSACTIONS OF THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE. 



.lar assembly, that ignores all improvement but that which its 

 own eyes have seen ; but in a meeting of scientijSc men, who can 

 gee with their brains, I may be allowed to consider whether 

 genius, taste and liberality may not, at a cost not exceeding the 

 good of it, develop another means of removing snow, and of other- 

 wise increasing the facility and comfort of locomotion in streets. 



There is a new means already in some measure introduced. The 

 dummies or noiseless locomotives, which for the last ten years 

 have at times worked on the Hudson River railway, have proved 

 that steam is in all respects better than horses for moving cars 

 in streets. I am well informed as to what has been done in steam 

 rail cars, steam carriages and locomotive engines, and I have no 

 ^oubt that all classes of railroad vehicles can be worked by steam 

 more cheaply and safely than by horses ; and even on common 

 pavements and common roads, carriages of all kinds can be 

 worked at less cost than horses, and Avill injure pavements and 

 roads less than horses will injure them. As evidence of this I 

 refer to the published statements of cost, from which it appears 

 that a train of seven cars is drawn at thirty miles per hour by 

 a locomotive, at a cost ranging from twelve to twenty-two cents 

 per mile, according to the price of fuel and the quality of the 

 engines; and the cost of drawing a single carat six miles per 

 hour by four horses, is more that twenty-four cents per mile. 



I compute that a street rail car will require four pounds of 

 coke per mile. On the best railways the consumption of coke is 

 about a third of a pound per ton per mile. If we could attain 

 «qual economy in street cars, less than two pounds per mile 

 would suffice ; but the wheels of street cars are smaller than 

 those of steam rail cars ; the rails are clogged with dirt ; there 

 are frequent stops and other causes of waste, all of which indicate 

 that four pounds per mile is a moderate computation. This fuel 

 will melt about four hundred pounds of snow, if it be effectively 

 applied. We may, therefore, expect that each steam car will 

 melt four hundred pounds per mile run ; and as a car is started 

 from each station every second minute, on a fully worked street 

 railway, we have sixty cars per hour traversing each mile of 

 double track, and twenty-four thousand pounds of snow may be 

 melted per hour on each mile. 



The weight of snow, as it falls, is about eight pounds per cubic 

 foot. The width of track, which the companies have to clean, is 

 fifteen feet ; hence if the snow is a foot deep, there is 120 pounds 



