Show TiE QUESTION OF STOPPING THE HERALD has lately discussed some phases of rapid railroad traveling suggested sug-gested by the portelectric mal transportation transporta-tion project However fast may De the method locomotion it seems there always will be a desire to go still faster It maybe may-be unreasonable as well as impatient but wcl Impntent it is irrepressible The age is One of economies econ-omies of moneymaking and moneysaving moneysav-ing and the thrifty truth tbat time is money was never so ccurly felt and ap preciated ss noW A Salt Lake businessman I business-man with u weeks leisure wants to spend two or three days of it in Washington or New York in both of which he has interests inter-ests that need looking after and it is a matter of no small concern to him whether he can get there in forty hours or four days Dizzy a are the promises of speeding by rail at the rate of 150 miles an hour there are few who do not wish to see them verified veri-fied Going to Now York in one day and beck in the same time would save four or live days over tho present schedule and this consideration alone is enough to make an active business man quiver all over with delightful expectations But all railroad experts and other experimenters experi-menters in the problems of locomotion recognize re-cognize that there is one difficulty in the way of very fast traveling which at pres ont they see no way of overcoming No ono doubts that vehicles or missiles will bo invented at no distant day to move 100 miles an hour or oven twice that rate They may be drawn or they may be driven it makes no difference which Railroad men toll us that engines with trains attached at-tached can be driven 100 miles an hour now and electricians as Tin HERALD has said in a previous article predict pre-dict a speed even greater than that of the portelectric mail carrier But it is the stopping part of the business that presents the difficulty Bringing to a halt a train traveling at this rate of speed would be something like slowing up a cannon ball The faster a train runs thi greater distance and time it requires for stopping and i it take fifteen or twenty seconds to bring a fast limited express running fifty miles an hour to a halt it would take twice as long to bring a train moving one hundred miles an hour to a halt Indeed the chief part o the problem would be not to make the run in the given time but to stop at the end of it A singletrack road could not be used for traveling at the rate of one hundred hun-dred miles an hour Tho fast train once started would need to have a monopoly mo-nopoly of tho road from end to end and as to the engineer he might as well bo a blind man since his eyes would bo of little or no use even if he should see another train or a danger light a mile ahead he would be on it before he could reverse his engine I may be that the fast traveling vehicle wo are dreaming of will be an airship indeed in-deed it must be The earth is too firm and unyielding and presents too many obstructions obstruc-tions to invest ono hundred and fifty miles an hour with that degree of safety necessary neces-sary to make us comfortable but the atmos phere above our heads is both elastic and I bounding aud better therefore for fast moving and fast stopping Certainly in the early period of such going to and fro there would be few collisions and little massing up of the right of way |