The Road-Rail and Its New Truck 



our highways 



A LARGE part of the cost of maintain- 

 ing improved roads is due to heavy 

 motor traffic. Motor trucks and 

 motor omnibuses carrying loads of five to 

 ten tons at speeds reaching fifteen to twenty 

 miles per hour now run over roads improved 

 at large expense, and cause great damage. 

 State highway authorities all over the 

 country recognize this as a most serious 

 threat to the permanence of their highways. 



To meet the situation, in part at least, 

 Mr. Charles Whiting Baker, a well-known 

 New York engineer, has designed a trans- 

 portation system which carries its load on a 

 smooth steel rail and which furnishes at the 

 same time a permanent and durable auto- 

 mobile highway at low cost. 



The roadway consists of smooth Portland 

 cement concrete. In the center of the road- 

 way th^re is embedded a single line of steel 

 rail, the head of the rail flush with the sur- 

 face of the road, so that it does not inter- 

 fere at all with the use of the road by auto- 

 mobiles or horse-drawn vehicles. 



The cars which run on this rail have 

 double-flanged wheels running on the rail 

 and they are kept balanced over the rail 

 by ordinary vehicle wheels which run on 

 the concrete roadway on either side. The 

 cars are built with a low floor, only a few 

 inches above the road surface, and the 

 weight of the car and its load is thus 



A section of the economical roadway. It is of 

 smooth Portland cement with a single rail em- 

 bedded in the center and flush with the road 

 surface. About ninety per cent of the 

 weight of heavy trucks is carried on this rail 



brought down so low that the load on the 



balancing wheels to keep the car steady 

 is very small. Not more than ten per 

 cent of the car's weight is carried on the 

 balancing wheels, so that even if the car 

 with its load weighed as much as fifteen 

 tons, the weight carried by the balancing 

 wheels would be no greater than that 

 carried by the wheels of an ordinary 

 light touring automobile. 



To propel the car there is at one end a 

 gasoline engine, about the size of that used 

 on an ordinary touring car, direct connected 

 to an electric generator. On the trucks 

 of the car are electric motors, which, by a 

 sprocket-chain transmission, drive the car 

 wheels on the rail. Suitable controllers 

 distribute the current generated on the car 

 to the motors on the trucks. The whole 

 equipment is, in fact, similar to (but of 

 smaller size than) that used on railway 

 gasoline-electric cars, a large number of 

 which are in successful operation in various 

 sections of the country. 



As the car is very light compared with 

 an ordinary railway car and is designed for 

 low speed operation, the power required 

 to drive it is small. The cost of building 

 this kind of a roadway may be varied within 

 wide limits according to the character and 

 volume of the traffic carried. A concrete 

 road suffers practically no wear from the 

 traffic of pneumatic-tired vehicles. What 

 causes the wear is the grinding action of 

 steel tires of heavy wagons. The monorail 

 in the concrete roadway is designed to 

 relieve the road of the burden of such trucks 

 and thus lengthen the life of the highway 

 and recluce the cost of its maintenance. 



