Putting Railroad Wheels on Automobiles 



How the automobile "gets there" when roads are bad 

 and the railroads are the only means of locomotion 



OWING to the high price of steel, a 

 railroad in Montana decided to salvage 

 the rails of an abandoned lumber and 

 tie road connecting the station of Nahant, 

 Montana, with the great forests thirty-five 

 miles to the west, now protected by the 

 Forest Reserve Act. The transfer com- 

 pany, which handled the salvage work, 

 found that the problem of power was the 

 chief obstacle. The track was in poor 

 condition. ^ It could not stand the weight 



of a locomotive, without repairs, and in 

 places it was almost hidden in brush. 



A standard two-ton truck was purchased 

 and equipped with a set of steel wheels 

 with flanges for operating on rails, and then 

 put to work. In the first month, the truck 

 covered about three thousand three hun- 

 dred miles. By the use of a flat car as a 

 trailer, the truck was able to haul twelve 

 tons of rails into Nahant each trip, making 

 two a day. It climbed several grades as 

 steep as seven per cent and registered an 

 economy in operation of more than ten 

 miles to a gallon of gasoline. 



An experiment of the kind was suc- 

 cessfully made by the 

 private owners of 

 forest land between 

 Hartford and the old 

 mining town of Monte 

 Cristo, in the northern 

 part of the state of 

 Washington. Their 

 automobile -railroad 

 traverses great areas 

 of forest land for fully 

 fifty miles. 



Steel wheels of standard 

 gage to operate over 

 railroad tracks solve the 

 problem of bad roads 

 in unimproved territory 



In the first picture above the automobile pas- 

 senger truck on railroad wheels is shown. The 

 wheels are of the standard railroad -track gage 



By the use of a flat car as a trailer the auto- 

 mobile truck was enabled to haul twelve tons 

 of rails on one trip. It made two trips daily 



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